M N E M O N I C S ? Mantras? Memorials? Mathematical mazes? So many ways to remember and remind ourselves about tasks, (tareas), to-do’s. No, this STRIP TEASE® won’t be a lesson on alliterative haikus. Twenty years ago today, my father passed away in Buenos Aires at age 85. I decided to celebrate this anniversary with a personal challenge. Here is the scoop.
I interrupted —like many people during social lock-down— the one-on-one home training sessions with Mauro, my personal trainer. He is Argentinean but lives with his family in New York. I met him at the YMCA’s locker room one day when I was changing to a blue and yellow soccer jersey. Those are the brand colors of Boca Juniors, a quintessential Argentinean team based in the La Boca neighborhood. He initiated a conversation in Spanish. Then and there he realized I was a porteño, as the Buenos Aires natives are called. The jersey, the colors, and my accent gave me away (Mauro is marplatense, born in the seaside town of Mar del Plata, 260 miles south of the capital) .
After I quit the YMCA, he became my trainer at home on a weekly basis. I took copious notes and sketches of all the exercises he taught me during those sessions in my own private codex. Now I make an effort to reconstruct the postures and comply with the expert’s suggested repetitions. But besides triceps and biceps exercises, today I’m adding a new routine: a set of 20 push ups every day during 20 consecutive days. My father, a porteño himself, the son of Spanish immigrants, will help me with this challenge. Won’t it be easy to remember? 20 X 20 in 2020.
— New York City, 7/28/2020