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Show High Time Productive Loafing By FLORENCE BITTNER Of late the world has become filled with exercise enthusiasts. It's impossible to have a conversation of any length with anyone without running into their own personal per-sonal physical exercise program. IF THEY don't skate, they raquetball, and if they don't do something with balls, they run, and if they don't run, thy bike. Or swim. Or hike. One evening last week, I . watched a 19-41 movie, and not one sequence showed people doing anything more vigorous than dodging verbal bricks. The ultimate in fun was lying on a beach, writing sweet nothings in the sand, and that's the generation from which 1 derived my ethics. LEISURE WAS the ultimate ul-timate luxury. Only the rich could afford to do nothing. The rest of us were off running run-ning to catch things like buses and horses and paychecks or lobs, and when we caught them, they were also involved with other fairly strenuous kinds of activity. If you could afford to lie on beaches and get suntanned and eat expensive expen-sive foods, you had it made. A generation later, we've found that all that luxury clogs corpuscles, so here we go running again. MY KIDS caught the spirit of the jogging 70's and chipped in to buy me a stationery sta-tionery bicycle exercise machine which is placed strategically near my bed so 1 either mount the thing and ride vigorously off to nowhere, or I bump my shins on it when I try to ignore it. 1 really do think it reaches out to grab me when I don't do my allotted minutes on it daily. I've got several fairly sedentary years behind me, and it isn't all that easy to work atrophied muscles. During the years when I chased kids and bargains in grocery stores and PTA activities, ac-tivities, I had little time to worry about plugged corpuscles. cor-puscles. But of late, 1 admit various pieces of the machinery have showed signs of shifting into low gear. MR PROBLEM is a low speed body and a high speed mind which any mechanic can- tell you is going to lead to malfunction of the pulleys and burned out transmission. So. There it sits like my conscience. If I'm not pedaling away on it, it lurks. It snags me when 1 walk past. Its little springs and cogs make strange noises in the still of the night. I'M NOT one of these anti-exercise anti-exercise people who dare anyone to interest them in doing something vigorous and healthful. What I am is reasonably lazy. I think my favorite kind of evening is one in which I have absolutely nothing to do more strenuous than read a whodonit. ' It isn't that I don't enjoy sports of several different kinds. It's just that I am so rotten at doing them that I wouldn't dream of trying them in public. They'd sell admission tickets and I'm not ready to be the star attraction in a sideshow. SO WHAT I needed was something that I could do in private where no one could watch, the first thing in the morning and the last thing at nigl thereby avoiding spoiling the rest of the day, and preferably something both painless and inexpensive. inexpen-sive. Also something which doesn't ruin the hairdo. Also something I can do while watching television or reading read-ing a book, so I don't have to ihink about it And there it sits. Available, patient, private and waiting. Oh, my how it waits. No matter mat-ter what else I am doing, il is still waiting. ANOTHER conscience 1 didn't need. I already have several what with my own and ihose of my children. Somewhere along the past few years we have switched roles. j no longer nag (hem about duties and health and habits; ihev nan me. "Mother, you're not getting enough exercise." "Mother, don't you think you're putting 0n too much weight?" Mother, you need more fresh air." So now I have my very own health machine. It may not make me young and lovely, but perhaps it will rearrange some of the sags. I just hope the rearrangement is an improvement. |