Monday, January 30, 2006

the embiggening

Last year some of Kel’s students gave her a massage as a thank-you gift when they left the school.  The masseur was a former student of hers, a professional massage therapist.  But Kel figured he might come back sometime for a brushup at the school and she didn’t want to complicate their pedagogic relationship with any taint of carnal overfamiliarity.  It just makes for a less effective teaching relationship when your student asks you in the middle of traffic testing, “so are you still clenching your left shoulder?  Did you do those exercises I gave you?”

I could understand her position.  I was especially understanding because it meant that I got the massage instead, and I really needed it.  All the yoga had made me hyper-aware of muscles that didn’t move, fists and knots that never unclenched.  I had craved bodywork for months with flesh-taunting specificity.  This was one re-gift that was right on target.  And if it helped Kel preserve the teacher-student relationship I was willing to jump on that grenade for her.  I’m all about respecting the bounds of tutelage. 

So I wound up with a certificate for a 90 minute massage from some guy I had never heard of, who works out of his home in San Rafael.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a brooding Zatoichi premonition.  This was not borne out by reality, which followed more the mold of a charming retired baker (with commensurately powerful forearms), severely visually impaired since early childhood, who lives in a cozy victorian and performs a special rare form of massage therapy called integration or gerrymandering or some damn thing.  I really don’t know what it was.  All I now for sure was that he worked me over but good and I was noticeable taller when he was done. 

And those knots and fists buried deep in my muscles, and the deep-seated misalignments of sinew and bone, he found and explained for me, even when they were not amenable to his ministrations within the short time we had.  He considers me a candidate for long-term treatment, which makes me inexplicably proud of myself.  But the thing I found most noteworthy was the embiggening.

At one point he was working on my calves.  He’d spent some time on one and then moved to the other, but expressed immediate surprise at the difference in their size.  His hand wrapped around the new calf but barely covered the back of the first one.  The calf he had yet to massage was about one-third smaller than the one he’d worked on.  We wasted a few minutes wondering how I’d accomplished such an unbalanced physique and then he just stopped fretting about it and laid into the second, atrophied calf. 

When he was ready to move on to massage me somewhere else, I asked him to re-check and confirm that my left calf was still so much bigger than my right.  It wasn’t.  The right side had swollen up to match the left.  I was bilaterally symmetrical again, and anyone who knows me well knows how much that means to me.

I was relieved that my body parts had evened out, and even the therapist said he’d never encountered anyone who expanded quite like I had on his table.  I wasn’t sure what it meant or what, if anything, it indicated about me.  I just thought that it was probably a good thing that I’d gotten myself enbiggened.  It’s strange how you can just shrivel up sometimes, but I’m glad that it’s possible to reverse the process too.