Rage, But Tragedy Avoided

I think I'm able to write about this now. I wasn't ready yesterday when the whole sad thing took place. I was so angry last night that I told Marty he'd better not come over. I'm still mad about it, and not thinking too straight, so there might be a misspelling or a sentence that doesn't make sense. Anyway...

My father has had a sore Achilles tendon. He quit playing basketball because of it a few months ago. My father is 62 years old and he had played basketball forever. Anyway, apparently its begun feeling better because he has talked about doing some light treadmill work and working on an elliptical. Right now he lifts weights and rides an exercise bike, but he says that the bike isn’t enough. My dad is old school and I think he gauges the quality of his workouts by how much he sweats. Anyway, I asked him if he would like to visit my fitness center as a guest. I thought that he could test his Achilles on the treadmill, and try out an elliptical to see how he likes that kind of equipment. He agreed.

So yesterday I drove my father with me to my fitness center. I could get him a guest pass and the only thing he would be obliged to do would be listen to a brief sales pitch. It seemed easy enough. Unfortunately it did not work out quite that way.

As we were leaving the center we ran into Justin, this guy who works out there. I think I have mentioned him in this blog a couple of months ago. Justin is a guy I went out with once. He was kind of hyper and not my kind of guy, hence, we went out only once. The last time he called me I turned him down as gently as I could and he still got rude and surly before abruptly hanging up. I have seen him from time to time at the fitness center but he goes beyond ignoring me, if that’s possible. Anyway, when I was just leaving the fitness center with my father yesterday, Justin was about to walk into it, and it was at that moment when he decided that at least for the moment he did not want to ignore me anymore. He mumbled some sly, vulgar comment implying my father and I were sexually involved, and that’s putting it politely. I think the basis of the ugly comment came from my making the mistake of once telling Justin that I tend to like older men. Justin did not know the man was my father - not that that matters.

Well, Dad heard the comment. He stopped dead in his tracks, turned and hotly asked Justin to repeat what he had just said. I don’t think Justin expected a confrontation from, in Justin’s words; “the old man”, and some of his brazenness quickly evaporated. Fortunately I happened to be between them and while I stood in front of Dad, blocking him, I barked at Justin to get away, which he wisely did. Still, my father was on the verge of following him into the fitness center.

For the rest of the day I was pretty upset, not to mention angry. In fact, I barely slept at all last night. Of course my father remained furious for hours.

Dad is thirty years older than Justin and probably twenty pounds lighter, but there is some gristle in my father who is a combat veteran. If I had been walking on the other side of my father and had been unable to get between them, it is very possible that my father would right now be in a jail cell and Justin would be lying in a hospital bed. Tomorrow I start looking at other fitness centers.