THE MOST FUN WE'RE EVER GOING TO HAVE TODAY

Sometimes I think it'd be cool to have kids just so you could say emotionally abusive things to them and see how they respond. Often they are very inventive. Like this little girl at the grocery store yesterday. She was 3 or 4, and she was being pushed around in the cart by her very irritable mother, who looked to be in her early 20s. Cutoffs, dirty-blonde ponytail, pink bra straps hanging out of her tank top. We were all in the pickle aisle, and the girl was saying something — I couldn't make it out — that was really getting on her mom's nerves. So the mom jerks the cart to a halt, shocking the crap out of the kid. She points her finger threateningly in the kid's face and loudly says, "You need to shut it! Zip it! Lock it! Throw away the damn key!" I was expecting the kid to start bawling or something. I almost started bawling myself. But instead there was a moment of silence, followed by the kid saying very gently, "Look, I shut it." Then, seconds later, "It's all zipped." Then, "It's locked now." The mom had lost interest, though, and was engrossed in the label on a jar of olives. To no one in particular, the kid says, "I'm not going to throw away the key. I'm going to keep it in my pocket, so we can find it later."

Later, downtown, a tiny kid is walking hand in hand with his parents. He looks bored and hot, his bangs plastered to his forehead with kid sweat. His parents are window shopping intently and don't hear him ask: "Is this the most fun we're ever going to have today?"

WALLS WITH MIRRORS

I am really stupid. I thought all those frickin' mirrors at the gym were for vanity. But they actually have a purpose far beyond self-admiration.

Sorry, beefcakes, I misjudged you.

I realized this today when I was doing a squatting and extension exercise with a medicine ball. My trainer kept telling me to keep my back straight and to let my weight move through my heels, not through my toes. He told me to keep my chin up and look directly into the mirror. I found this very hard to do at first — to gaze at myself in a mirror with someone watching me. I have always found this hard to do. When I'm in a public restroom and feel the need to mess with my hair or check out my teeth, I can't do it if someone is standing right next to me, even if she is all-out primping and dabbing lipstick and practically saying out loud, "Damn, I look good." Even in the presence of a totally vain person, I can't stand appearing vain, which I'll grant is an even more pathetic kind of vanity.

But I did what my trainer said and looked directly into the mirror. I watched myself, and I saw instantly what I was doing wrong, and by continuing to watch I could keep my form true. What a revelation. With visual aid, versus mere concentration, it's so much easier. I could focus on myself, which is the whole point of this exercise stuff in the first place.

My muscles are sore as heck, but it's a good soreness. It's nice to have such a visceral awareness of your body, to feel not just that you inhabit it but that it's you. It's nice to feel a sheer exhaustion in the limbs that lately I've been feeling only in the brain, from overthinking and worrying and stressing. Today, looking into that mirror, I decided that I'm going to give my mind and all its silly doings a rest — just let it go inert and flabby and take a little break. It's time, I think, for this body to start pulling its weight.

SUPER DAVE!

Today I woke at the crack of dawn, shaved my legs, hunted up a pair of gym shorts and made my way to the rec center — all on a single cup of coffee. I was not terribly enthused. My calves still felt like pudding from the prior workout and my whole torso felt stiff and achey. Still. I had an appointment with my personal trainer, and I couldn't let him down. His name is David and he's in his early 20s. He spent three years in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now going to college on some Army scholarship. He broke an assortment of bones, including both ankles, when his parachute didn't open during a training drill. He works three jobs, including two at the rec center and one at a restaurant. It would not be easy to tell him, "I can't come in today because I'm sore." It would just be wrong. Despite my disdain for the War Machine as a whole, I am in awe of the sense of duty and discipline its individuals have — the shit they learn to go through without complaining. David was in a war zone in Afghanistan when he was 18, with people depending on him in real life-and-death matters. I was shopping for dorm furniture. And, 20-odd years later, I'm not doing anything much more significant. Canceling the workout was out of the question. Discipline! Can't look bad in front of David. I would go, and I would simply grin and bear it when he said "10 more lunges."

So I stroll — OK, trudge — into the rec center at 7:50 a.m., mentally primed for physical pain. And David's not there.

"Are you looking for Dave?" some kid at the desk asks. "He left this number."

So I call the number and David explains that he's "stuck in traffic." I think this is a bit odd since we don't live in a high-traffic city, but maybe there was a wreck somewhere. I tell him it's OK, I'll wait. Then he says that he's stuck in traffic in Kansas City. Well, that's different. As he apologizes for breaking our appointment, I wonder why he's in Kansas City at 7:50 a.m. I wonder what traffic he's stuck in, exactly. I wonder why I don't hear any traffic. You know how you can usually tell that someone is calling from their car? That in-the-car sound? I didn't hear that sound. And "stuck in traffic" started to seem like the cliche excuse it normally is — just a notch above "the dog ate it." David, I thought, is probably stuck in his girlfriend's bed (an excellent excuse, in my book, but people are too unimaginative to actually use it). Or stuck somewhere with a hangover. I'm not calling him an all-out liar. I believe he was stuck. We all get stuck. But I doubt it was in traffic.

While my brain worked through his excuse, my body rejoiced. No workout today! No Pain! Woo-hoo! I could go home. But then something kicked in. Wait a minute. I'm already here. The gym equipment is already here. Who needs lazy, undisciplined David? So I stayed. And stayed longer and worked harder, believe it or not, than I would have if he were there. It's funny how people letting you down can sometimes really pick you up.

SHAKESPEARE UPDATE

I'm about two-thirds of the way through my Shakespeare expedition — 26 of 38 plays. I kind of thought I'd be done by now, but reading more than three dozen Shakespeare plays in a row is a little more challenging than I expected. I had to take in some secondary materials along the way: biographies, notes on British history, stuff for context, plus several non-Shakespeare-related books just for variety, most notably a fat and amazing bio of Oscar Wilde (incidentally, a Shakespeare devotee).

I started this in March, maybe late February, so I've averaged more than a play a week, which I think is a decent pace. Shakespeare can be slow-going. You run into hurdle-words like "bullyrook" (jolly comrade) and "hodge-pudding" (sausage) and "cockshut" (evening twilight). I've been reading Folger editions because they are so nicely annotated (notes on left page, play on right); they usually anticipate a modern reader's curiosity with a helpful explanation, but occasionally they're aggravatingly silent, like we should just be able to figure out some obscure 16th century expression from context. I'm proud to say, though, that I am relying less and less on the notes because of familiarity through repetition — like I no longer have to stop and look up "welkin." It means "sky." And any and every "horn" reference, either direct or oblique, has either the primary or double meaning of "cuckold." I'm also becoming familiar with Shakespeare's staple mythological references (Diana, Phoebus and Hercules are quite common) and the cadence of his phrasing.

One thing I've noticed about the Folger editions is that they tend to be prudish. Shakespeare is full of sexual puns and homoeroticism, and Folger is usually content to note only that a "bawdy" meaning is intended; it doesn't normally detail the bawdiness. So you have to find another source or be satisfied with vagueness or just guess and, in all cases, feel a little stupid.

So here's the rundown. The ones in bold I have read in the last few months. The unbolded ones are on deck. The plays appear in the rough order that some scholars think they were written, although no one really knows for sure.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Taming of the Shrew

Titus Andronicus

Henry VI Part 1

Henry VI Part 2

Henry VI Part 3

Richard III

The Comedy of Errors

Love's Labour's Lost

Romeo and Juliet

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Richard II

King John

The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV Part 1

Henry IV Part 2

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Much Ado About Nothing

Henry V

Julius Caesar

As You Like It

Hamlet

Twelfth Night

Troilus and Cressida

Measure for Measure

Othello

All's Well That Ends Well

Timon of Athens

King Lear

Macbeth

Antony and Cleopatra

Pericles

Coriolanus

Cymbeline

The Winter's Tale

The Tempest

Henry VIII (All Is True)

The Two Noble Kinsmen

A MAN OF HONOR

Just as I was heading back to work after lunch, Conrad pulled up in his sparkling white truck.

I paused at my front door, waiting for him to go wherever he was going. He owns the rental houses on each side of me. And he wanted to own mine, but he thought the lady I bought it from wanted too much money for all the work that had to be done. It would not have been a "good investment," a noun phrase that apparently gives his life meaning.

I didn't want to cross paths because I have not generally enjoyed conversations with Conrad. He is completely "property" minded and rather petty and seems like the kind of middle-aged white man who finds unparalleled wisdom in conservative talk radio. He thinks a good conversation starter is asking how much something cost. What did you pay those carpenters? How much did that countertop cost? Followed by a low whistle that suggests you've been robbed blind. And when my ex-girlfriend lived here with me, I always felt that he was scrutinizing us, disapprovingly and kind of creepily, for proof positive that we were "more" than roommates.

He has talked to my mom many times, but my mom has a gift for indulging annoying men and making them feel that they are terribly interesting. This talent has served her well in life, I will grant, but I have never found a use for it myself.

Conrad wasn't budging. He was planted there with his prematurely white Phil Donahue hair and his small, icy blue eyes in his sparkling white truck. "This guy," I thought, "likes to polish things that are already shiny." So be it. I had no more time to kill, so I took a deep breath and walked hurriedly to my car, head down, tightly focused, determined not to come up for air until I reached the safety of my car's interior. Which — what relief! — I did. Only to have him step nimbly from his pickup and give me that "roll-down-your-window" finger twirl that, just then, I associated with bad cops. I did as he asked because, while I'm willing to appear a tad unsocial or shy, I don't think it would be a "good investment" to appear hostile to a neighbor. Granted, he's not an actual neighbor because he doesn't — and wouldn't — live on this side of town, but he owns the neighboring properties, which is neighbor enough.

The first thing he said was, "This is their last day," referring to my bad-boy neighbors , whom he had recently evicted.

"Oh yeah?" I asked. "I think they've already left. I haven't seen anyone over there for a long time."

"Yeah," he said, with scorn. "They're gone. Didn't say where. Didn't pay the rent. Didn't clean. They just walked."

I didn't tell him of my fondness for the boys. I just acknowledged that things were a lot quieter now.

"The unbelievable thing," he said, "is I knew them. I knew their family. Their parents. Friends of their parents. Their grandparents. Their uncles. Their cousins." He searched his mind for more relations to count on his fingers. "I knew them," he repeated, and his scorn became suffused with sadness and disbelief.

I was touched.

This was not his usual carping. He seemed beside himself that the bond of friendship did not exact better behavior from his tenants. This, I suddenly thought, is not just a jilted landlord but a man of honor, a man who believes in honor, who has a sense of how people ought to behave, of the loyalty they owe, of the family dignity they should uphold.

"They just walked." The words were meant to convey incredible irresponsibility, but they had an unintended note of unbridled freedom, too. Imagine walking away from an obligation.

Yes, imagine that.

I knew that his coming over to my car was his way of apologizing for bringing these bad boys into my orbit. He wanted to assure me that he was a good neighbor and a good judge of character — "I've only had to evict people three times in 30 years of doing this" — and that he was thrown this one time by the family association that he mistakenly thought would ensure best behavior. "You just can't trust people to be decent."

I have been unusually sentimental lately — maybe I'm just aging softly; maybe, after all, I'm more tears than guts — which is perhaps why I had an urge to get out of my car and sit on the pavement with Conrad and share sad tales, Richard II-like, of people who have disappointed us. I imagined us sobbing with disbelief and one-upping each other with tales of how various people had misused us. I imagined us bonding in a pool of woe and a shared sense of poetic injustice. I imagined, as an olive branch, telling him how much everything in my house cost and him, instead of acting like I'd been robbed, affirming that I had gotten a damn good deal.

But instead I just smiled in sympathy — that thin, ephemeral, upturned curve that substitutes so often for actual human connection. I started my engine and said, "Good luck with the next tenants."

"Maybe they'll be librarians," he said.

"That'd be nice," I said. "Librarians would be nice."

And then, halfway down the block, to myself: "bad-boy librarians."