East is East, and West is West, and I'm all tuckered out

When I was a boy growing up near Fort Worth, Texas, that city billed itself as "Where The West Begins". In my young and slightly quirky mind it naturally followed as the night the day that Dallas, 30 miles to the east, must be the place "Where The East Peters Out". In those days there were almost 30 miles of open country between the two, separated only by the tiny towns of Handley, Arlington, and Grand Prairie. Today it is one huge metroplex -- that's what it's called, the metroplex -- of 7.5 million people all smushed together.

I was a true easterner by birth, a "Yankee's Yankee" from east of the Connecticut River in the New England states. My family moved when I was six from the city of Pawtucket in the smallest state of all, the one with the longest name, the State Of Rhode Island And Providence Plantations, to the then-largest of the then-48 states (it was demoted to second-largest after Alaska became the 49th state in 1959).

Because my parents were from elsewhere, I did not act like many of my southwestern friends whose families had lived in Texas for generations. I never wanted to drive a tractor or play football or hunt squirrels with a .22-caliber rifle or ride a bull or bucking bronco at the local rodeo to impress the girls. I was more interested in sitting in a comfortable chair and reading, or playing the piano (which I began doing at the age of seven), or watching one of the three channels on our new-fangled contraption known as television. I was, as our family doctor told my mother during my teenaged years, sedentary.

I still am.

The most strenuous activity I have done in recent years my entire life was cardiac rehab sessions that involved walking on a treadmill for 30 to 45 minutes three days a week, riding a stationary bicycle, and doing upper and lower body exercises while holding light weights like dumbbells or medicine balls.

Not all at the same time, of course. That would be (a) silly and (b) next to impossible.

My insurance paid for three months of the rehab. I paid 50 dollars a month to the hospital to keep going until I had completed 18 months in all. Then it was time to stop.

I didn't keep track, but I have often wondered just how many trips between downtown Fort Worth and downtown Dallas I must have made walking on that treadmill and pedaling that dadblamed bike during those 18 months.

I might even have made it all the way back to Rhode Island. I just remembered there was also a rowing machine that would have helped me make it across the Connecticut River.

To say I am out of shape is a huge understatement.

Does anyone know who this out-of-shape fellow is?