The Thoughtful Bodybuilder- Personal Prose

Nila Horner

Personal Memoir and Essay

4 February 2016

The Thoughtful Bodybuilder

Joe Viviano looked absolutely nothing like his personality, and I don’t really think he realized that. Joe is the kind of person that will help anyone out to the best of his ability. Okay, well not everyone. If you were cruel to animals, mean to women, lied to his face, or caught in a public scandal, I doubt Joe would help you with anything. However, if Joe liked you, he would most definitely offer to take care of anyone who gave you a problem. Believe me-Joe definitely would have been able to take care of them.

Anyways, Joe woke up on that windy and bitter Wednesday morning in February looking forward to what he was going to do that day. Joe looked forward to most days, and is the only person I know who regularly wakes up with a smile on his face. He flung the covers out from under his twisted sheets, and put his feet down on the plush, 70s era carpet his mom had kept in his room since, well, as long as he could remember. He didn’t much notice the carpet, but what he did notice was the big wooden cross on his bedroom wall. This wasn’t one of those pretty, sterling silver crosses or painted decorations with a cute quote you can get at the Family Christian store. Joe liked the realism of the too-big wooden cross with the wounded body of Jesus nailed graphically to the post, although I doubt he would ever use the term “realism”. He kissed his fingers and touched the mini Jesus’ feet on the way out of his room before practically running down the hall to eat more raw protein than most humans consume in a week.

After eating as many eggs as there were students in his morning art class, Joe ran back into his room to get dressed. He never really noticed what he wore, as long as it showed off his arms. By cutting off the sleeves of his t-shirts, he had accumulated many piles of scrap fabric to donate to his mom’s crafting addition over the years. He spent a few minutes stretching in front of the full-length mirror over his closet, and flexed a few times before getting down to business. He slid the heavy closet door to the right, down the metal track on the floor, and went for the tiny drawer in the back. It was a fairly inconspicuous and dark resting place, lined with that red, velvety material common in drawers of all kinds.

Joe took the delicate object from the tiny drawstring bag and inspected it before placing it back in the bag, and shoving the bag and its contents in the side pocket of his over-the-shoulder book bag.

After driving to school and parking in the yellow lot on the hilltop, Joe got out of his beat up car and headed to class, oblivious to the strange looks judgmental young eyes gave him on campus. He was 54 years old, but people were usually shocked to hear that. His face was a little worn, and he definitely had a few grey streaks in his stringy ponytail, but his body was in peak physical condition. Like I said, the staring didn’t faze Joe at all. He was proud, in fact, to be the first man in the Viviano family to attempt college at all, even after all of these years. However, because he was an extremely buff older gentleman walking across campus at an institution built for eighteen year olds, people tended to stare. They also stared because he was wearing a cut-off tank top outside on a February morning.

Flinging open the building door, he wanted to make sure that his cargo had arrived safely. He threw his book bag on the indoor bench and pulled out the drawstring bag. He had an incredible intuition when it came to other people’s sadness, and he knew that his treasured belonging would cheer up the young woman down the hall. That’s all he wanted to do, to make people happy. People often initially cast Joe as creepy or strange, but he truly just wanted to help out the good people in the world.

As he entered the studio classroom and saw the sadness in her smile, he knew his grandfather’s possession would be just the thing to bring her some good luck for once this semester. He pulled out the delicate silver cross from the bag, and placed in on top of the girl’s many papers.

It’s the third week of class, and all of a sudden this extremely large man that my professor has placed me next to is confusing me by placing a really beautiful little necklace on my notebook. Is he hinting at something? What is the male version of a cougar? Did he seriously go out and buy me a cross necklace after I had casually told him about the one I’d misplaced last week?

I looked at the necklace he had set on my notebook, and listened with hesitance as he told me about the bullies he had endured as a child and how his grandfather had given him this necklace more than 40 years ago to remind him of God’s blessings. While he loved the necklace, he knew I would need it in the coming weeks before my surgery. Plus, the chain definitely wouldn’t fit around his insanely large neck.