James A. McClure

I joined a new gym this week, and worked out there for the first time today. It passed my test: fairly clean, uncrowded and five minutes from home. There’s no juice bar, personal trainers or pulsating music and that’s fine with me. Most important, TV hookups on each machine enable me to plug in my earphones for a session of cardio and cable news.

I’m not what you’d call a gym rat and certainly am no athlete. In school I was the kid with glasses who was the last to be picked for the team. But I concluded years ago that exercise is my last defense against age and gravity, and enables me to enjoy great food without feeling guilty.

So hitting the gym and the bicycle trail several times a week is part of my lifestyle. I enjoy bicycling, but working out at the gym is something I feel obligated to do because it’s good for me, like flossing. Some people claim vigorous exercise makes them feel euphoric. I have never experienced this and feel good when I stop exercising.

I credit the Navy with getting me into the fitness habit. Every year I was required to pass a physical fitness test that included pushups, sit-ups and running. That forced me to visit the gym regularly to stay in shape.

After I retired from the reserves I was not about to do pushups, sit-ups and running voluntarily. So I signed up for aerobics classes at the local YMCA. That worked for me because classes do not require motivation or discipline beyond showing up.

Most of the aerobics instructors were terminally perky young women who would shout inane encouragements like: “How do you feel?” I would shout back: “Old!” Another favorite was: “Listen to your body!” My body kept telling me to stop jumping around and have a beer. I developed a tolerance for bad music, learned to wear earplugs when they cranked up the volume and would pop a Mozart tape into the player when I got back to my car.

The gym is a great place to people-watch, especially if you frequent low-budget clubs as I do. In Chicago I went to a chain health club on the edge of the city that attracted a multicultural crowd. English was the third most popular language and there were a lot of tough-looking characters with exotic tattoos. The men, too.

The fitness chain always had a big Christmas sale to attract new members and I learned to avoid the place right after New Year’s. The parking lot was full, the locker room was nastier than usual and the first few aerobics classes were a sweaty demolition derby of random flailing limbs. Happily, the New Year’s resolution crowd thinned out after a couple of weeks.

That health club was close to Sam’s Club, and it was convenient to stop there on my way home. Grocery shopping after a workout is a bad idea, especially at Sam’s Club. 20 pounds of ribs! A cubic yard of Cheetos!

I no longer attend classes because the step aerobics I used to do has fallen out of fashion, but the habit of regular exercise has become ingrained. My retired-military status enables me to use the fitness center at an Air Force base in Albuquerque. It’s a 20-minute drive, but I can shop at the exchange, pick up prescriptions, etc. while I’m there. The facility is well equipped, scrupulously clean, free of charge and includes such perks as a senior officers’ locker room. I wear a Navy t-shirt to maintain my identity.

The Air Force fitness center remains my workout of choice, but the neighborhood gym will keep me active on those days when it’s too cold to bicycle and I don’t feel like driving across town. I can’t say I’m looking forward to going there, but it will feel good to get my workout over with close to home.

I renewed my love/hate relationship with New York City last weekend when I flew in for a two-day nonprofit board meeting. Even though I spent about as much time on American Airlines’ flying cattle cars as in the meeting, I enjoyed getting back to the Big Apple.

I’m familiar with the city because my corporate career brought me there on business several times a year through the 1970s and 80s. I learned to navigate the subway system and enjoyed prowling around Manhattan. It’s a great place to visit on an expense account.

Arriving in New York would be exciting if I could be teleported directly to, say, Fifth Avenue. Instead, I’m greeted by a scruffy LaGuardia airport and a cab ride through crumbling neighborhoods in gridlock traffic as the meter burns through my wallet.  New York’s quaint custom of piling garbage bags into Les Miz sidewalk barricades adds to the overall impression of a city strangling itself. The construction scaffolds obstructing traffic on virtually every block prompt me to wonder what New York will be like if they ever finish renovating it.

I see New York through the lens of a passionate city kid. I grew up in an apartment in Chicago, took the subway to college and worked in the Loop for most of my career. I get back there regularly to see friends and family, get a Michigan Avenue fix and go through my checklist of ethnic restaurants – even though the traffic and weather remind me why I retired to Albuquerque.

Working in a big city means that you play in the major leagues and can compete with anybody. I felt this in Chicago, and even more so when I went to New York on business.

New York is a city on steroids in which both the good and bad aspects of urban life are carried to extremes. Yes, traffic is impossible and much of the place is a mess. But there’s more to do, see and eat than practically anyplace. Last weekend’s visit included a great dinner in an old-school Italian restaurant and a pint in an older-school Irish pub with actual Irish servers. A deli near my hotel had sandwiches, panini, Mexican food, Asian food and pizza.

The pulse of street life never stops, so much so that on my first few visits I was reluctant to go back to my hotel room at night for fear that I’d miss something exciting. The urban-anthill press of humanity makes New York a people-watchers paradise and agoraphobe’s nightmare.

I don’t see how anyone can feel self-conscious on the streets of New York. No matter what you do or wear, you probably will not be the most bizarre person within view and passersby won’t bat an eyelash. On one visit to New York a guy walked up to me on the street and screamed incoherently. I screamed back and it felt good.

Times Square is bigger, brighter and more crowded than ever, but when I visited a few summers ago it had been taken over by tourists. Everybody in Times Square appeared to be visiting from either Iowa or China. They were snapping pictures of the buildings, their friends, the cops, their friends with the cops. The place had more character when it was dominated by pimps and hookers in the 70s.

New York is a wonderful place to live if you’re wealthy. A corporate executive and his wife, friends of my parents, moved there in the 70s and loved the city. They lived in a fashionable apartment, did all the cultural stuff, went to restaurants where the maître d’ recognized them and never once rode the subway. For the rest of us, moving to New York to expand your horizons requires downsizing your lifestyle. Most of the people I’ve visited in New York live in apartments the size of my family room.

I really enjoy visiting New York and certainly can appreciate why people live there. But I was happy to get back to Albuquerque Sunday night.

I’ve been writing for money since I was 19 but officially became an author last year when my neighbor and I published a book. Always thought it would be cool to be an author… I smoke a pipe and everything.

Don Jose, An American Soldier’s Courage and Faith in Japanese Captivity, is the story of a local World War II veteran who survived Japanese POW camps. You can read more about the book on our website.

Writing the book was the easy part. My co-author and I were blissfully unaware that somewhere between 600,000 and 1 million books are published each year in the U.S., thanks to the explosion of self-publishing and e-books. Most nonfiction books sell fewer than 250 copies a year and have about a one percent chance of getting space on bookstore shelves.

We soon learned that our publisher, a small publishing house in Santa Fe, could get the book online at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble but was unable to get it into bookstores. So, like most authors, we’ve done our own marketing. We’ve done book signings in every bookstore in town, promoted the book on local radio stations and sent an email to every public library in New Mexico. I got publicity in an alumni magazine and my Navy group’s newsletter. My co-author sold a copy to every member of the Knights of Columbus.

We have had some success selling books in the lobby of the exchange store at the local Air Force base, and one local bookstore has been very supportive in stocking the book and hosting book signings. We sold very few books at the veterans’ hospital, though we had some interesting conversations with a couple of guys from the psych ward. We did very well at a convention of descendants of Bataan-Corregidor veterans and at a Filipino-American National Historical Society convention.

Crowd control at the book fiesta

Recently we participated in the first Southwest Book Fiesta at the Albuquerque Convention Center. The event was a spectacular failure, so poorly attended that we thought they’d dropped the neutron bomb. Everybody except the promoters lost money, especially the authors who traveled from outside the area. We had a good time hanging out with other authors and publishers, though.

My co-author is good at the meeting-and-greeting thing and I’m getting better at it. We may have a future as greeters at Walmart. Sometimes we sell more than a dozen books in an afternoon and that makes us feel prosperous – until we subtract the cost of the books and other expenses and find that we’re working for less than minimum wage.

We’ve learned that some kinds of books sell better than others. Cookbooks sell in New Mexico, along with anything about Georgia O’Keefe. Veteran biographies not so much, though the Navajo Code Talkers are big. Every time we have a book signing someone asks if our guy was a Code Talker and is disappointed when we explain that Don Jose was Hispanic. If we had written a book about a war hero who was a Native American artist they’d be all over it in Santa Fe.

Still, our book has done well in its category. Unlike many veteran memoirs and biographies, our story is well documented and fact-checked. We’ve had some good reviews and recently won first prize for biography in the New Mexico Press Women’s annual competition.

One of the experts at the Book Fiesta told me that a book can be considered a best seller if it’s sold more than 500 copies. By that standard we’ve beaten the odds, though our publisher will not give us a straight answer on total sales. We’ve sold a couple of hundred copies online and in bookstores, but most of our sales have been in person, one copy at a time. We’re pleased with ourselves but grateful we don’t have to do this for a living.

My co-author and I sometimes talk about writing another book. I’m thinking about it.

I spent Easter listening to Handel’s Messiah, eating marshmallow Peeps and watching the world celebrate the Resurrection (except for the folks at Google who resurrected Cesar Chavez instead). I wound up scratching my head about the way religion keeps popping up in public issues.

We pride ourselves on religious tolerance in the United States but I’m not sure it’s really in our DNA. The early colonists fled England to avoid religious persecution, but set up little theocracies as soon as they landed and started burning witches.

Meanwhile, the Spanish were propagating the faith in the Southwest. Hi there, Indians! You’re all Catholic now because we have guns. 

We have Thomas Jefferson to thank for the inclusion of freedom of religion in the First Amendment and the concept of “a wall of separation” between church and state. Whether Americans embrace that principle today is anybody’s guess. Rick Santorum never got the memo.

The latest church-state issue is same-sex marriage. I’ve supported same-sex marriage for decades but can’t help wondering: If we’re serious about the separation of church and state, why do we let the government perform marriages?

All the state should care about is a legal contract that confers spousal rights. The moment we call that contract a marriage, people think the state is their church and try to impose their religious beliefs on everyone. Outsourcing the sacrament of marriage to the government makes it a civil right, and that’s the conflict.

This would be a non-issue if the state issued a spousal contract and left it at that. Any two people (perhaps more in Utah) could register at City Hall and then get married, or not, in the church of their choice. Churches would be in charge of marriage and could deny their sacrament to anyone they choose. The divorce lawyers would get even more business.

If the churches backed such a proposal I’ll bet most state legislatures would quickly approve it. Unless, of course, church people really don’t want to separate church and state and would rather impose their beliefs on everyone through government force.

Theocracy has been part of political debate since the evangelical folks hijacked the Republican Party several decades ago. I’ve always found it odd that Republicans stand for economic freedom but some of them want to impose a kind of Christian Sharia law on personal freedom. The Democrats wisely exploited social issues in the last election to divert attention from their dismal economic record.

What’s more puzzling is the growing antipathy toward religion: a sort of reverse theocracy. Atheists have been filing frivolous lawsuits for years but now are being taken seriously: a few municipal governments and school districts have gone to ridiculous lengths to banish any mention of Christmas or Easter from holiday celebrations in a kind of atheist Sharia law. How can so few atheists — about 5 percent of the population — afford so many lawyers? Perhaps they tithe. As a lapsed Unitarian, I’m practically an atheist myself but do not feel at all insulted that “In God We Trust” is printed on our money.

Fox News tut-tuts about a war on religion and may have a point. An increasingly non-religious population re-elected a government that forces Catholic institutions to provide free birth control and is unconcerned about the Arab Spring’s open season on Christians.

Time magazine has declared that the same-sex marriage debate is over and religious objections are irrelevant. Even the news media coverage of the new Pope was a little snarky at times. A few commentators sounded disappointed that the cardinals elected a Catholic. And one of the most popular musicals on Broadway makes fun of Mormons.

It’s ironic that nobody dares ridicule the Muslims, some of whom want to impose Sharia law for real. That’s probably because radical Islamists kill people when their feelings are hurt. I guess it’s prudent, but a little cowardly, to disparage only those religions that turn the other cheek.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It’s refreshing to see the evangelical theocrats in retreat but stamping out religion, as the Communists tried to do, is no improvement. So far, Handel’s Messiah appears to be safe and nobody is messing with my marshmallow Peeps.