April | 2020 | Eye-Dancers

School memories are enduring. Regardless of how many years have elapsed, the events and experiences from adolescence and young adulthood stay with us, forever fresh and seemingly tailgating us in our own personal rearview mirror. And for me, some of the clearest and most vivid memories are of high school physical education. Gym class.

Now, I have to say . . . most of the time, I dreaded gym class. When I was a teenager, back in the antiquity of the late 1980s, I was an introvert who often worried for days on end what our phys ed instructor would have in store for us. I was actually very good at sports, but not in that environment. I preferred neighborhood games with friends, matches with my brothers, where I could be myself and feel comfortable. But in the dog-eat-dog world of high school gym class? With the ruthlessness of the locker room, the specter of square dance sessions, the mile run? Back then, these were my school Waterloos, the things I most loathed about high school.

But through it all, regardless of what activities we were pursuing in gym class (soccer and football in the fall; basketball, swimming, and square dance in winter; baseball and track in spring–not to mention other odd assortments thrown in, like dodge ball–a personal favorite!–or rope climbing), one thing remained constant, especially when Mr. DeVos was the instructor. Calisthenics. Or, as Mr. DeVos liked to call them, “Cals.”

Let me back up. By the time I had him as a phys ed instructor, Mr. DeVos was a veteran coach and teacher of two decades. He was a former Marine, who enjoyed nothing more than putting his charges through the ringer. I wasn’t on the high school track team–which Mr. DeVos coached–but those who were would regularly share with classmates the horror stories of practice under Mr. DeVos. He would run his track team ragged, and, famously, when they needed a drink, would offer up cups of warm water.

He was a stickler for regular old gym class, too, and he began every class, rain or shine, come what may, without fail, with his beloved cals.

“We need to warm you up,” he’d say. A few times, he would tack on “men” at the end, even though the class was always co-ed. “Get the blood pump-pump-pumping!” he’d shout. And he’d make us run laps around the gymnasium, do a set of sit-ups and push-ups, perform a series of sprints between cones.

But the one exercise he religiously made us do, every class, was jumping jacks.

“Get ready! Jumping jacks!” he’d say, and some in the throng would utter a groan, as if they, somehow, had hoped the jumping jacks might not be on the agenda that day. I always felt like asking them which Mr. DeVos they thought was teaching the class. Jumping jacks were an automatic, a given. Every time. Expecting anything less was ludicrous.

Mr. DeVos would have us assemble in a long straight line, and he’d stand in front of us, whistle around his neck. Then he’d say, “Okay. Ready, Aaaaaaannnnd . . .”

And then he’d blow his whistle and say, “Give me thirty!” And he’d do the set of jumping jacks right along with us. He’d not only do them; he’d count aloud, so we all knew where we stood in the progression.

The thing was, thirty jumping jacks for Mr. DeVos wasn’t really what it sounded like. Officially it was thirty. In reality, it was several times that. Why? Because of the way he counted . . .

“And a one-two-tree-tree,” he’d begin. (He pronounced “three” as “tree.”) Keep in mind, this represented one jumping jack. In the duration it took him to utter all this, we’d all probably completed three jumping jacks, maybe four if his cadence was especially slow. And on and on he’d continue, in this way, all the way up to thirty . . .

” . . . one-two-tree-tree; two-two-tree-tree; tree-two-tree-tree; . . . eighteen-two-tree-tree; nineteen-two-tree-tree; . . . twenty-nine-two-tree-tree; and tirty-two-tree-tree. Alley-oop!” That was the signal that we were done. And when we were, many of the students in the long line were panting. A hundred (officially thirty) jumping jacks could do that! Not to Mr. DeVos, though. The old ex-Marine wasn’t breathing hard at all. He never did.

The thing I remember the most about all of this was the feeling of duration, of no end in sight. While the set of jumping jacks probably lasted no more than a couple of minutes, it always seemed like hours. “And a one-two-tree-tree; two-two-tree-tree . . .” We all knew it was going to be a long road ahead until Mr. DeVos finally got around to thirty and blowing that whistle.

He was a man who took his time, particularly when it came to exercising his gym-class pupils. He wasn’t rushed. He wasn’t looking to finish the regimen too soon.

A few times, he’d surprise us, mid-jacks, and announce that we’d push onward to forty or even fifty jumping jacks.

Endless.

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Endless can also describe what it feels like to finish your work-in-progress. True, there are times when you’re struck by a bolt of pure inspiration, and, especially for a shorter work such as a short story or poem, you may be able to ride that current of creative electricity to its necessary and satisfying conclusion within a single day. More often, though, and particularly for a novel-length manuscript, that initial surge of optimism and energy is replaced by a grueling marathon of stops and starts. A novel is a maze, and what begins so promising in chapter one can ultimately turn into a literary quagmire by chapter twelve.

Where is the story going? Why did I introduce that tangent in the previous chapter? What should I do with it? Is Character X really going to do that? I never thought she would! What changed her mind? (As we all know, characters tell you, the writer, what to do much more than the other way around.) The questions seem endless; the decisions and consequences, daunting. And then, then! Even when you are able to key in those magical words, “The End,” having navigated the twists and turns of the first draft . . . the work has only just begun. Because now, you have entered the revisions stage.

Flipping back to page one, you painstakingly go through everything you’ve written. For me, this is the hardest part because I see, with clarity, that wide swaths of my first draft were awful. Character and story arcs that weren’t followed up; needless repetition and wordiness; entire scenes that can and should be sliced off. It is always humbling, and whatever sense of accomplishment, of completeness I may have had upon finishing the first draft, vanishes like vapor. The race has just begun.

Of course, editing and revising the manuscript is rewarding, in the end. Taking a rough draft and polishing it, rubbing away the hard edges, the plot abnormalities, the padding that weighs the story down is gratifying. It’s a long, often tortuous process–but when you finally finish this stage, that sense of completeness, this time, is genuine. Perhaps one last proofread is in order–but the heavy lifting and the hard yards have now been accomplished.

Now is the time to celebrate. But only now. There are no shortcuts.

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I certainly thought of old Mr. DeVos as I was going through the revision stage of both The Eye-Dancers and The Singularity Wheel. I even mimicked his cadence at times, doing a series of internal jumping jacks. Heck–sometimes I did actual jumping jacks, to try to get myself going. And as I did, I realized that the very thing I dreaded in gym class long ago was now something I appreciated, and called on, to help get me through.