J. P.'s cardio box class is over and I approach our esteemed teacher with a tidbit of information relating to seeing her the previous weekend as a fellow spectator at a Muay Thai event less then a mile from where I live. She has told us she's a practitioner.

"You know, two doors down from [the gym in which the MT event took place], "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was recorded." I can't say I'm a Nirvana fan but, well, it's just fun to babble these things. I wasn't ready for the fact J.P. could have been up in Washington where some people would assume Teen Spirit was recorded; her face was a blank that turned my enthusiasm back on me sans any heat it carried before.

"What are you talking about?" she kept returning as a basic reply. She practically asked what I meant by "recording studio"! Well, I remember her telling me she was dating a recording engineer, and the list of musicians she'd met. One, a terrific bass player, is the member of the live band of an alleged saxophone player who otherwise, considering the frontier of names in my file, is somewhere between the Hubble Telescope and conjecture down my list. To wrap me up and toss me, she's in the [technical side of the] motion picture business, again my statement meant nothing to her, and now she's dating someone else.

Acquaintances from group fitness are a special part of my life, and a long time ago J.P and I could bounce stories off each other about instructors, students who could wreak bona fide mayhem over a position on the floor---front right, usually, for my students of social geography---and all kinds of health club sights and sounds. It was a thing I loved to reflect on when some things in life went "bump".

After a J.P. class in 2006 I sighed to her about the onset of "the parent troubles", as an Irish way of putting things. The constant church Saturdays, appointments, and mental issues.

I got a lecture about duties to one's parents and the unseemliness of complaining. J. P. is a church goer, by the way. I've taken classes of hers over the years and we get along, but I have felt a stair stepping down since then.

A relationship that once was a feather in a valued piece of headgear today felt like the dropping of a bird superficially not concerned with being earth bound, dropped on a nondescript ball cap worn to keep out melanoma and, well, droppings.

So many believe in a deity, so many believe in the family. And yet the count of divisions and privations has long passed into infinity.

Head up, eye on target.