Morning In The Park

As I lie on my back alone in the park listening to one of the local magpies warbling “Good morning!” or more likely singing “Fuck off from my wonderful territory filled with yummy worms and bugs and with water laid on from the burbler that has the steel dish for dogs to drink from and for birds to bathe in”, I feel the pain radiating from my chest down my left arm and wonder whether I’ve pissed myself when I passed out or is this just a sensation of honest exercise sweat going cold.

I try to move and nothing happens. Looks like it won’t be happening anytime soon, maybe never, judging by the lack of breath in my lungs, fading vision and heaviness in my limbs. It is just after 5.00 am, no one else is around and now I know why boot camp is best performed with company. Someone with first aid qualifications would be there, hopefully remember what they had to learn to get their trainer accreditation and therefore save my fucking life. Of course we are all social distancing now, no gyms, no pool, no boot camps. So I have been getting up super early and exercising alone.

A light drizzle begins to fall on my face and even though my vision is getting darker some still functioning rational part of my brain knows that over there the sun is actually rising behind the row of renovated houses backing onto the park. It is just an early morning shower but it will probably be enough to stop any early morning dog walkers and possible lifesavers. Softcocks!  

I am suddenly struck by the irony that thanks to isolating I won’t die from some virus with a preference for the elderly but from an average everyday heart attack.

Of course I should have my mobile with me, everyone else in the world carries a phone twenty-four hours a day. Not me though, I sneer at this relentless connectivity. Seriously 45 minutes without it, won’t fucking kill you. I don’t need to play shit dance music really loud while doing sit ups but right now I have to admit a mobile that I might be able to drag myself over to would be nice. Have no wallet with me either; after all I had no plans to buy anything.

It’s possible it might take hours to identify my dead body. Once someone comes along and finds me here beside the picnic bench under the open sided wooden shelter. A shelter perfect for children’s birthday parties, early morning, one person, self created boot camp workouts and later during the night, a quiet drink or a joint and a bit of graffiti. Not by me of course, I am drawing conclusions from the occasional left behind beer bottles, butts and tags with no artistic merit.

I am rambling. How did it come to this? Vanity, endorphins, the inclination to early rising, deadly virus; take your pick. It was all fun and games till puffing hard after my second last set of exercises for the day featuring everybody’s favourite, soul destroying burpees, that I began to feel faint and then BAM! The pain dropped me to my knees. I rolled to my side groaning and then blacked out for a few minutes.

Now I’m here staring at a sky growing lighter as the low cloud moves on to precipitate on the next suburb over. I think I am stabilising but maybe I look more terminal than I think or maybe birds are prescient because the magpie is hopping towards me. Actually there are three of them, Mum, Dad and last year’s chick are slowly coming towards me. In sync they actually do the bird head cock as if they are, all at once and together, identifying me as an enormously large and exposed lawn grub. I don’t know what they are thinking, I might have lost weight through careful diet and my one-man boot camp but these guys are not Pterodactyls. One of them is hardly going to pick me up in its beak, fly me up to a branch, bash me against the bark a few times and then with a head toss slurp me down the gullet. With effort I shift my leg, which stops their forward motion. I slowly turn my head and look around the park; still not another soul in sight and another rain shower is coming over. I open my mouth and tentatively yell, “Help!”

I feel embarrassed and silly and it comes out soft so I try to draw some more air into my lungs but they feel non-existent. I imagine my large chest cavity, an aid to good aerobic fitness, even more cavernous as my lungs hang suspended inside, now tiny in the space, looking like two pink prunes in a big, soft sports bag. I smile at this although I don’t know why because not breathing is not funny. Then another wave of pain comes out of the ground and swallows me. I pass out again and when I wake I can feel someone rearranging my shirt and I think at last someone has seen me and got help. The paramedics are here and all will be good. I will be home in a few days suitably chastised by the event as I will call it and I will let myself go and eat shit and lay in bed for a good month as a reward for staying alive. 

And then, thanks to a recovery based in no small part on my superior fitness to 95% of the over 55 cohort of which I belong, I will amaze the doctors by being ready, willing and able to hit my routine again, skipping, pushups, pull ups, squats, burpees, all the favourites and I open my mouth to say thanks and that’s when one of the magpies, from its perch on my chest, drives that icepick of a beak into my tongue.