Robbin L Marcus
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Slow Forward, Day 11 - Zero Hour, part 2

2/20/2023

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Photo credit: The Boneflake Collection by Phillip Wiecherm
​I awoke in a velvet cloud. I felt absolutely nothing when I expected to feel excruciating pain. I thought about how lovely this liminal place was, how I wanted to stay right here. It was dark, and warm, and 
 
“Mrs. Marcus? Mrs. Marcus? Are you with us?” 
 
I opened my eyes, groggily. Yeah, I’m here, I thought. The light was blinding. I closed my eyes again.
 
“You’re in the recovery room, you came through just fine. The anesthesiologist is coming to see you in a couple of minutes, so try to wake up.”
 
F*** you.  
 
(I don’t think I said that aloud. My friend Judie the surgical nurse tells me people say the most awful things in these moments.)
 
Ok… ok.. 
 
I sat up a little. The nurse handed me ice chips. That was nice.
 
I couldn’t feel my feet.  Oh, right, epidural. I gingerly tapped the side of my knee. Wood. Great! I wondered how long that was going to last. 
 
The anesthesiologist breezed in, accompanied by a young woman. He introduced her and said she was studying with him and if I didn’t mind, he’d be teaching her the nerve blocking procedure. I asked him to explain in clear enough English for me, too.  
 
For the next 10 minutes the 2 of them, using an ultrasound screen I also got to watch and a wand, found the main nerve over my knee, injected the fascia with saline to get it out of the way, and then inserted a needle for my nerve block. The nerve block was about to be my best friend for the next 4 days. Having it there and working allowed me to walk around, climb stairs and move, move, move my leg at least once an hour. I found the whole process fascinating. He was a good teacher!
 
Once that was inserted, it wasn’t long before the feeling slowly came back from my toes up. I still didn’t feel knee pain due to the additional surgical block, which was perfect. They moved me to a room, fed me, and then it was time to work with the PT/OT. It was really kind of funny – she asked to see me get out of bed, which I did by rolling on my side and pushing up. That was great by her. She asked me to walk to the bathroom and sit down/get up from the john by myself. No problem. We walked down the hall to her office to practice on a short flight of stairs. No issues there, either. I passed with flying colors. I expected at least a tip or two but got nada. Dave and I were laughing by the end each time we caught each other’s eyes. I guess it pays to teach people to do this stuff for a living.
 
It was a very long day. Eventually they let me go home. I was shocked to see it was 6 pm when we got in the door. We’d left at dawn. 
 
I was exhausted. Pain was nibbling at my knee. Where was that ice wrap machine?




 TRIGGER WARNING -

​Clicking Read More below will take you to a photo of my knee less than a week after surgery. 

Read More
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Slow Forward, Day 10 - Zero Hour, part 1

2/17/2023

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Arriving at the orthopedic hospital for my knee replacement surgery, I was the calmest I’ve ever been in a surgical situation. My blood pressure clocked in at 134/90. “Hmm,” said the nurse, “that’s pretty great.” You have no idea, I thought. Generally, in a hospital situation, my BP is in the vicinity of 150+/120+. The results that morning were a credit to my cardiologist as well as an indicator of how ready I was to be there.
 
Ready. So Ready. My copy of the hospital surgical guide was worn, dogeared, scribbled on, underlined. I knew exactly what was going to happen in each step of this procedure. Afterward, waiting at home were an ice-chilled leg cuff machine and our newly purchased adjustable bed frame. Meals were arriving for the next three weeks, so Dave just had to take care of me. I had a long list of things to watch. The furniture was re-arranged and scatter rugs picked up out of the way. I had a cool designer cane. My walker was here at the hospital with me. PT was set up for the next month. The only things left on the list were picking up the drugs (Dave’s job) and passing the PT/OT test at the hospital so I could go home. 
 
It was a long wait back in the prep area for the OR. There was apparently a delay in cleaning the room (one does not ask why) after the last surgery. Dave came to sit with me for a few minutes until they made him leave. I meditated when I could and they mostly left me alone. Finally a chatty surgical nurse came in. She wanted to make sure I knew exactly what to do for the epidural they were about to give me when we got to the OR, so she made me practice hugging a pillow. Not exactly rocket science, but, ok. We bonded over past surgeries. She wished me luck and wheeled me in.
 
I liked the anesthesiologist immediately. He said they were going to put something in my IV to relax me, and then numb me up to ßgive me the epidural. I sat on the side of the table, as instructed, and bent over the pillow. At that moment, what flashed through my mind was “Holy Shit! I wouldn’t let them give me one of these when I was in the delivery room. Why am I doing this now?”, but before my monkey mind could take that one and run with it, the whole team burst into applause. Say what? 
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(Not me)

Suddenly there was a chorus of
“That’s beautiful!”
“Textbook position!”  
“Wow!”
One person even asked, “Can we use you if we make a training film of how people are supposed to do this for us?” 
 
My nose still in the pillow, I said a muffled “sure….” And then I remember picking up my head and saying, “Hypermobility for the win!”

​FADE TO BLACK...
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Slow Forward - Day 9 - Stage 3, Bargaining

2/17/2023

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The week prior to my knee replacement surgery, my knee stopped hurting. Completely. What was going on? Apparently, all the pre-PT I’d done was working. My legs were strong, my muscles toned. And now, no pain? 
 
The question hung heavily in the air. Am I doing the right thing? Why am I having surgery?
 
Fortunately, I’d experienced this questioning before with more minor surgeries. My body was bargaining with my mind. 
 
“See, Robbin, I can be just fine for you. You don’t need to do anything to get this fixed.”
 
The only way I can think to describe this is to compare it to putting down a loving pet. You make all the hard decisions – you set up the appointment with the vet. And that morning, the pet rallies. Deep inside, you know that ending your pet’s pain is the best thing, but it’s so hard to keep that appointment. Vets say they see this all the time. 
 
I thought about putting my beloved dog down a few years ago. I realized that I needed a little private goodbye ceremony, just for me and my knee, the way I had done with my dog, to let it go.
 
I intentionally worked up until the day before my surgery. I know better than to give myself too much time to think. I spent several days stroking my knee gently from time to time and thanking it, getting ready for just what I wanted to say and do.
 
It was a beautiful fall evening. I went out on the back porch and lit a candle. I cradled my knee lovingly in my hands, sent it Reiki like a thousand times before, and began.
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“Knee, thank you. Thank you for 63 good years together. We’ve seen and done a lot. Do you remember when we kneeled on the potholder loom? There’s your scar! But you got better. And over the years, no matter what has happened, you’ve been there for me. I’m going to miss you, terribly.”
 
“Robbin, I don’t want to go. I’m scared.”
 
“I’m scared too.”
 
“I can try, really, I can.”
 
“Knee, it’s time. It’s time to let you go before we can’t walk at all. I have a lot of life to live, and we can’t do it together anymore.”
 
“Oh… I’ve failed you.”
 
There it was. 
 
“NO, no you haven’t. You’ve done everything I’ve asked, and more.”
 
“But what will become of me? Can you bring me home and bury me?”
 
(Serious question – we inquired.) “No, I’m afraid you’ll be headed to a bucket of medical waste. They won’t let me have you. So, this is really goodbye, now.”
 
“Oh. I see. But kneecap is coming back, right?”
 
“Yes, she’s getting a new surface and coming right back where she belongs.”
 
Long silence.
 
“… Robbin, I love you. I hope I’ve served you well.”
 
“Knee, you’ve gone over and above what knees are asked to do. I love you too, very much.”
 
We sat quietly then and watched the candle burn low. 
 

The morning would soon be here. I was ready.
 
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Slow Forward Day 8 - Forced Slowdown

2/15/2023

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I consider myself a creative educator. Every facet of my career as a music classroom teacher, piano teacher, Alexander Technique teacher, musician or dance leader has been based on creative and artistic ways to lead people to knowledge. 
 
I’m not a businessperson. Have never been. In my little world, people hire me because they want something I can offer them. It pays me money, that’s wonderful. Build it and they will come. 
 
That worked for my entire career until I launched out on my own to teach Alexander Technique. After a very short amount of time I realized I had no skills, zero, in marketing myself. I was in a new city. How in the world was I to reach people? 
 
I hated shameless self-promotion. What do you mean people won’t just come find me? I thought the studio I hired on to would market for me. No. Not at all. At a loss, I tried all the standard marketing ploys that I saw in ads that came to me. Nothing appealed to me, and my business was stalling. I added piano teaching to my roster and realized that that steady income would pay my studio rent, taking some of the pressure of the Alexander Technique side of the business.
 
In 2016, I heard about Megan Macedo, who was talking about new ways to sell your business creatively and authentically through writing. I did several workshops with Megan, stopped worrying about building my business and started blog writing instead.
 
2019 was the best year my business has ever had. I was often working four weekdays a week instead of my stated 3. My regular AT class for actors at lunchtime was pulling people in and I had a waiting list. I had between 3-4 AT private clients a week in addition to my piano students. I was moving steadily forward. The heck with slow! 
 
I turned 60 that year, and there was a part of me who was thinking “now or never.” I said “yes” to way too much. Dave was retiring and he started saying “yes” to a lot more music gigs on top of all the other things I had going on, and my calendar looked like this:
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In celebration of Dave’s retirement, we took off January 2020 and went to India for two weeks. It was a memorable and wonderful trip. I came home thinking “I’ve got to get back to work!” By mid-February I had a new class series starting, I was handing out recital music for May to my students, people were cashing in Christmas gift certificates for AT lessons. 
 
Then came March 2020. The world came to a crashing halt. My in person, hands-on business effectively collapsed. There was no “forward” for a while, there was only “slow.” There was only go outside and be in nature. Hang with the birds and squirrels. Find mushrooms. Identify trees. Vibrate with the boulders.
 
The whole world seemed to be in collective shock. 
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Arabia Mountain, our "backyard." Photo credit, Dave Marcus
Suddenly my calendar was empty, for the foreseeable future. 
 
During the next two years, I spent a lot of time evaluating where I was and what I wanted. I wrote a blog series about it to try to process what was happening inside and outside during lockdown. Working online from home made me realize how many hours a week I spent in the car. Maybe slowing down would not be that bad. I let go of running the summer Kodaly program I founded in Virginia. I made an exit plan. 
 
I moved my office to a smaller location, fully reopening in 2022. I have more piano students and less Alexander students, and I’m firm about those 3 days a week now. I don’t advertise, I let my website and blogs do it for me. I’m as busy as I want to be. I taught 3 university workshops for musicians this school year. Life is good. I may never earn what I did in 2019 again, but that’s ok. 
 
Retirement is in view. I’ve said for years I’d never do it, but after my knee surgery I realize I can enjoy going forward even more slowly than I am now. 
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Slow Forward Day 7 - Wild Heart

2/14/2023

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Every Monday I receive a reading from Jenny Heston, a lovely Tarot reader up in British Columbia. Jenny posts 3 cards from one of her many decks. She includes an intention to consider for the week along with a guided meditation to help you choose the card that most resonates with you. Then she turns them all over and you see what you’ve picked. The analysis that follows comes from her spiritual guides and is always related to her theme. There’s something about Jenny’s work of empowering the divine feminine that resonates with me week after week. 
 
My choice this week was a card called “Wild and Free.” 
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Here’s an excerpt from the analysis:
“Some may be afraid of the wild freedom of the heart. You are not one of those people. 
 
Give yourself the time and space that you need, away from the noise and the demands of the world and other people, so that the quiet voice of your heart can be heard.  Then take courage and act on what you feel.  
 
Your heart is wise and worthy of your trust.  
 
Your heart was never meant to be tamed.  It is always truthful.  
 
When you allow yourself to be true to your heart, it will show you how to create a beautiful contribution to this world that fills you up with joy and peace.
 
You are a wild child of the Universe, and your heart is showing you the way to fulfil your divine destiny.”
The first sentence stopped me in my tracks for a minute. Wild heart...wild heart… of course, Brené Brown! 

“Strong back, soft front, wild heart.”  What was it that Brené added to Roshi Joan Halifax’s saying about back and front that resonated so deeply with me? I pulled out my worn copy of Braving the Wilderness to find out.
“The mark of a wild heart is living out the paradox of love in our lives. It's the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid -- all in the same moment. It's showing up in our vulnerability and our courage, being both fierce and kind.”
Paradox indeed. Somewhat like slow, and forward. The ability to both slow down and go forward at the same time, always leading from the place of vulnerability and courage in my heart.  
 
I had to stop and think about this for a while. 
 
I’ve written tens of thousands of words about my personal history; I realize that it wasn’t until I allowed myself to be vulnerable – to ask for help – that I had the courage to go steadily forward. Going forward in my life is never fast, although there were many years when I wanted it to be. I tried to push the river, and we know how that turns out. It was only when I slowed down, acknowledged my community with a grateful heart, and asked for help that I have made meaningful progress in my life. I’ve learned to listen to the quiet voice of the heart to find my courage, while my friends hold my vulnerable hand at the same time. 
 
 Brené Brown also says “The key to joy is practicing gratitude.”
Let me say now, if I have never said it to you personally, “thank you.” Thank you for reading my words, for listening to my heart, for feeding me a meal, for being there, for being a friend. I wouldn’t have learned these lessons without you. 
 
We all go into the wilderness of pain now and again. It’s meeting our true friends there that brings us back.
 
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Slow Forward Day 6 - The Joy of Dance

2/13/2023

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I love dancing like I love my life. I love music, too – but that’s my career. Dance has always been what I’ve done for the sheer joy of it.  Dance makes me feel alive. When I dance, the world is in total sync. When I dance, I get a huge smile on my face that doesn’t stop until I do. 
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I first learned the joy of dance as a toddler, standing on my grandfather’s feet in front of the television, doing the box step to Lawrence Welk. I loved studying ballet – I took classes until I was 12, just at the time I’d be going on point, when class hours and demands went way up. My parents made me choose between dance and music lessons. They might as well have asked me to cut off one of my arms. After a lot of tears and sleepless nights I chose music. A career in music was predictable, inevitable. I told myself I didn’t have what it took for a career in dance.
 
Dance continued as a hobby in every form I could find – Swing, Lindy, International, Modern.  In graduate school I learned about play-parties, which were essentially square dance moves done to singing instead of instruments. I happily discovered that this kind of dance would become a regular part of my folk-based music classes. Interviewing for my music teaching job in Baltimore, the school chaplain asked me if I’d heard of Morris, Contra, or English Country Dance. When I got one out of 3, he said “Take this job and stick with me.” I did. A lifetime of joy in traditional dance and music was born. 
 
In my twenties, I made a firm decision to never let anyone in the traditional dance world know I played the piano. I didn’t want to be on stage, I wanted to dance.  In the early days, I was out dancing 3-4 nights a week in my regional area. I met my first husband at a contradance. 
 
I was also doing Morris, an English ritual dance which involves bells, hankies and sticks and waking up the earth for fertility in the spring. We mostly did this outside, often on concrete. There was a lot of leaping in the air and landing hard on one leg. High impact aerobics classes completed my activities.
 
All in all, I was not particularly nice to my knees. I didn’t care. I was in great shape aerobically, my legs were long and lean, life was good.
 
Morris and aerobics came to a crashing halt when I got pregnant and started dislocating virtually everything. (Thanks, EDHS.) The ache in my knees from all that jumping came in my thirties, and I never returned to either of those, turning to bicycling instead. 
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At that point I learned to call contra and square dances, and into my forties and fifties I became in demand as a dance leader, putting me on stage more than I was on the floor. After I met Dave (also at a dance) I gave in and finally started playing piano for dances. Oddly enough, the world of dance slowly evolved into a career after all. 
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I told myself for years that this was ok, that I could give up more and more forms of dance to take care of my knees. It’s not ok. Not at all. I am really looking forward to the end of April, when I can get back on the floor in the gentlest form of dance, English Country. We’re the band for a full weekend, but we’re sharing the stage which means we also get some dance time. 
 
It’s the big test of my new knee. Slow forward - I’m ready for some joy. 
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Slow Forward Day 5 - Pinewoods Family Week 2006

2/10/2023

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Family Week at Pinewoods 2006
Camp Director’s Report
 
What do you get when you add together record-breaking hot temperatures, low camp attendance, a downpour in the middle of the Friday parade and a camp director on crutches? Besides an appropriately lurid potential National Enquirer headline, an amazingly successful Pinewoods Family week 2006, of course! Despite Murphy’s Law working overtime to spoil the fun, our capable and flexible staff rose to the dual challenges of scaling back dance and children’s classes to combat the heat and filling in all the holes created by a camp director who spent most of the time with her leg up in the air and an ice pack for company.  In fact, they did such a good job that most campers had no idea how serious my injury was, and I got asked to dance every day. I know they wondered why I sat on the sidelines all week – I did, too!
 
As I sit here now, recuperating from well-deserved knee surgery and reflecting on the camp that was, I am gratified to read the glowing evaluations from campers and staff.  What criticisms there were were well deserved and diplomatically presented, and camp can only get better next year because of them. 
Despite my lighthearted report to the Country Dance and Song Society staff, running that Family week was administrative and physical hell for me. I’ve literally blocked a lot of it from my mind. Record-breaking heat? Huh. Not telling the campers what was going on? Wow.

What I will never forget is that two days before camp began, my left knee, which Bonnie the PT and I had been nursing along for months, finally dislocated. I ended up in the ER, where they gave me an immobilizer brace and said, “don’t do anything until you can meet with your surgeon.” I burst into tears. The car was packed, and we were leaving for a 10-hour drive to camp the next day. In those days when it was easier to get good painkillers, the hospital loaded me up, wished me well and sent me on my way.

At the time I felt I had no choice other than to go. It was my first year as Program Director, many people were counting on me. I was driven around the bumpy paths in a golf cart. I was high as a kite. I had a great staff to support me. They covered. I survived. We all came back the next year for a much better time.

A couple of years after that left arthroscopy to repair the dislocation, I started to feel the same sensations in my right knee. I wasn’t waiting for that kind of pain again to get something done. The surgeon I saw in Atlanta said, “I see it, let’s get in there.” The bad news on the right knee was that unlike the left, it was also full of arthritis. They scraped off the nasty bits while they were fixing the dislocation, giving me relief for many years. I was just 48.

What we know now that we didn’t know then is that arthroscopic surgery can make arthritis deterioration worse down the road.
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Last November, I replaced my right knee.
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Slow Forward Day 4 - Trusting Recovery

2/9/2023

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When my daughter was little, she walked on her toes. Every time she’d grow, up she’d go. ​
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Anne pausing to kiss Grandpa while serving as a flower girl at her other Grandad's wedding.
​I started asking questions of physicians, and we ended up having horrendous neurological needle testing to rule out anything serious. Thankfully, it just had to do with growth spurts and short Achilles tendons. We were advised to make sure that Anne wore boot-like braces at night to keep her Achilles tendons stretched (no pointing those toes in her sleep) and to get some physical therapy to help her tendons grow.
 
Thirty years ago, it was hard to find a Physiotherapist who worked with children. We saw a couple of awful ones who wanted her to stand on a step and drop her heels – which is amazingly uncomfortable, even for grownups without short Achilles tendons. Try it sometime. Try making a five-year-old do that! I knew I had to find someone who could make the exercises fun, because we were never going to get them done if there was nothing involved but pain.
 
One day I mentioned this to my massage therapist. She connected me to Bonnie, a former kid’s ballet and elementary classroom teacher who became a PT as a second career. Bonnie was terrific. She was fun, she knew how to be around children, and she was so kind to Anne. Later, when I needed a PT, she became mine as well. 
 
Bonnie nursed Anne through her growing pains and me through my increasing knee issues over the next 10 years. She taught me to stop pronating my knees when I stood, and to rotate more to the outside of my foot instead of collapsing my arches. Bonnie taught me a lot about standing, strengthening, and being present to what my body was doing. I thank her for keeping me out of knee dislocation surgery for a while longer and for introducing me to the wonders of kinesiotape.
 
My PT sessions were happening in conjunction with my Alexander Technique training, and one day Bonnie offered me the chance to come into her office after school was over and intern with her.  I jumped at the chance since I wanted to learn more about anatomy. I had already seen places where what I could do complimented PT so perfectly. I knew it would be a great fit. 
 
For the next year I went as often as I could to learn from Bonnie. She helped me to understand the ins and outs of recovery, how different people’s habitual patterns affect their length of time to get back to normal. She put me to work with some of her patients who returned often - who seemed to hold onto their pain rather than want to recover from it. It was an incredible learning experience for me. In the meantime, she had an assistant. I learned to listen to clients, to allow their recovery to take the time it needed to happen. I helped the persistent patients to soften, to learn to let go of their habitual patterns, to start to let go of the fear to trust their recovery. 
 
That slow regaining of trust was the most valuable of all the things I learned from AT and from Bonnie. I saw it work for my daughter, I felt it work for myself, I was able to deliver it through hands-on to her patients and later to my students. To this day, the trust work is the most important work I do in my practice. 
 
Everyone’s recovery is some kind of “slow forward.” Sensing what that process is for each person is the art of Alexander Technique. 
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Slow Forward Day 3 - You Can Have It All!

2/8/2023

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It was a heady time to be a young woman. The Equal Rights Amendment was in play, and all the work our feminist aunts and older sisters had done to get women into the men’s workplace was ours for the taking. All we had to do was get out there and ask. 
 
Madison Avenue was more than happy to oblige, bombarding us with iconic images of what women were now expected to be:
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You’ve come a long way, baby. 

I think I saw that slogan in one form or another at least 5 times a week. I remember attending a free concert in Central Park where sexy women in Jordache jeans handed us free packs of Virginia Slims. Heaven help us all.
 
Even my traditionalist mother, who had never worked a day outside the home, was caught up in it. “What an amazing time to be a young woman,” she’d say. “You can be anything you want.”
 
I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. More. More. Add on more. Give me a full-time job, hobbies, aerobic exercise classes, marriage, babies. I can do it all!
 
Until one day, I looked like this.
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Slow forward did not exist in my world. Everything was fast and faster. The term “Self-Care” had not been invented yet.
 
It wasn’t until about 5 years after my mother died, after Anne was born, that I started realizing some important things:


 - I’d been deluded.
 - There was a reason my mother went into the garden and   dug in the dirt for her sanity.
 - I could find her there.
 - Doing less might just be more. 

Slowly, slowly, I learned to say “no.” No more committees. No more workshops. “I can’t do that for you right now.” It took me over a decade, and even then, Dave will tell you that I still do too much twenty years later.   
 
I hope that our daughters are finding a better work-life balance than we were able to have. They certainly have role models from those of us who wised up. As my contemporary, Oprah Winfrey now says:
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Slow Forward Day 2 - The Eastern Shore of Maryland

2/7/2023

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PictureOn this map of Maryland, the shores of the Chesapeake Bay are the Eastern and Western shores. Baltimore and and Annapolis are on the Western Shore. 
​
The Eastern Shore of Maryland is one of the most deceptively cruel places to ride a bike in the United States. Lovely back roads wind their way through sun-baked farms. Large trees near the road are few and far between, although you can see the shade they provide as wind breaks at the edges of the fields. The topography is completely flat, zero hills. 
 
As you see this out of a car, it looks perfect. Until you step out and feel the wind. No matter where you ride on the Eastern Shore, there’s a headwind. If you ride out into one in the morning, you will not being coming home to a tailwind in the afternoon due to the changing tides on the Chesapeake Bay. Riding 30 miles on the Eastern Shore is like riding 60 miles almost anywhere else. You can never stop pedaling. 
 
I know this landscape intimately, because for over 20 years my ex-laws ran the Baltimore Bicycling Club Memorial Day weekend at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. I married into an incredibly serious cycling family. Our wedding gift from them was a custom-built tandem bike. We were all expected, en-masse, at this weekend every year. 
 
In the beginning, when it was Ed and I on the tandem, we owned the place. I never had a bike that fit me like that tandem. So comfortable, so wide, so steady and secure. We rode that bike in Maine, England, and Holland. Its seat was like a second home. I rode in the back, so I had the least of the winds and all of the view – the captain, in the front, mostly had his head down and his eyes on the road. Besides pedaling, I oversaw the disc brake in the back that stopped us in case of emergencies. We could get up to 50 mph on a downhill.
 
Once Anne came along, we had her in a seat on the back until she outgrew it.
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Then, we purchased a kid-back tandem with raised pedals so that Anne could ride with her dad. I got my own road bike – a beautiful little women’s Trek. That bike was fast, and she needed to be to keep up with those two. In my late 30s, my legs were in better shape than I can ever remember – it was a big deal in our cyclist’s world to see the definition between the two parts of the quad muscles, and I finally could. 
 
Soon, I started to have twinges in my right knee every time I went for a long bike ride. All that slow forward on the Eastern Shore exacerbated the problem, and I wound up at a Physical Therapist. I learned that I was pronating in my toe clips – rotating my foot inward so that I was wearing the cartilage off on my knee. No matter how much time I gave myself to heal, riding that bike became increasingly painful. I tried multiple adjustments, but nothing really worked. Guys in bike shops shook their heads because I looked perfectly seated on it. 
 
Over the years my knee issues just got worse, until I finally had to stop riding on the Eastern Shore. I’d go down and call a community dance for the group, stay over and head back home. It seemed a natural evolution of my crumbling marriage. 

That weekend in Chesterstown is still going on – my ex-laws retired many years ago and it’s much reduced in size, but I have a couple of friends who tell me they still go every year. Why not? The beautiful cruelty of the scenery is enough to bring you back.

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    Robbin Marcus

    A new 21 weekday blog series on Slow Forward - gentleness with myself -  will begin on Monday, February 5, 2023
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    An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

    2023 blog series:
    Slow Forward 
    2020 blog series:
    1) Processing - Experience, Thought, Action
    ​2) Diving for Light - Shedding     light on a dark time

    2019 blog series: 
    Exploring the Power of Habit 

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