Superpowers

I wish I had a true superpower. Like Simone Biles or Joni Mitchell or Olivia Coleman do. Instead, I seem to have a notable lack of them. Take athletic prowess. I was once while in grade school forced to enroll in remedial gym class. Really. It was intended for kids who were then referred to without shame or retribution as spazzes and who were easy prey during wall dodgeball, an even more sadistic version of the classic game played on rainy days in the cafeteria that consisted of beating kids pinned to the wall like moths with rubber balls the color of stew meat. I and Scot Fugger and a few other kids who wished they could just read books sitting cross-legged on the playground were sent to the cafeteria once a week to meet with Mr. Corcoran and learn how to catch balls and jump rope and otherwise stop metaphorically wetting our pants during gym class.

The Opposite of Superpowers

This may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I scored a legendary one inch in the long jump competition in first grade. To be fair, it took place on-stage in the school auditorium and, when Miss Dallas commanded me to jump, she startled me so that the resulting flinch was considered my attempt, which was then broadcast by Miss Dallas—"one inch!"—who wore navy blue double-knit shorts and was gasping with laughter, to the assembled crowd, at which point the gasps became a roar. I knew that day I would never be an Olympian. Though I sometimes still longed to be grey-eyed Athena.

I also learned, after taking something that was then called the Kuder Aptitude Test, that I would never be a surgeon, an architect or a clock repairer. That was actually a career option when I was growing up: clock repairer. Luckily, my heart was not broken like an old hairspring in a gold watchcase by the news. I now take the teal-faced Nixon I bought as a memento when Barney's closed and my father's Bulova given to him on the occasion of his high-school graduation and worn by my son at his high-school graduation 100 years after my father's birth to David's Watch Repair on Hudson St. David is a Jew from Uzbekistan, where I'm sure there was no Kuder Ability Test, but where clearly he was taught to follow his bliss or at least his marketable skills. A lid for every pot.

Pseudo-powers

In lieu of superpowers and non-powers like watch repair, I have party tricks. For instance, I have what I describe to people as a phonographic memory. I can hear any melody once and sing it back to you years later. This is not particularly useful except when you want to Impress someone by Identifying the movie Sophie's Choice simply by its incidental music. I suppose I might be able to recognize a criminal's ringtone and direct the police to him if his phone inadvertently went off in my presence. Officer Krupke, the guy with the phone playing Mmm Bop just held up the bank on the corner.

I wish that writing were my superpower, but the truth is that I have to try very hard at it and I'll still never be a Simone Biles or even de Beauvoir. In some ways I'm a better editor than I am a writer, but again, I must try very hard, which mostly involves sitting on my hands that are clutching my blue pencil. That's the trick to being a good editor. Or a good gardener (or so I hear--I am as skilled a gardener as I am a gymnast). Or a good parent. Standing back and letting whatever crumb of natural beauty is entrusted to you shine with merely an outstretched hand offered should things start to hit the crapper. But most editors tend to yank and shove and rip the pansies up by roots.

My friend Liz, whose superpower is discovering amazing writers the way Abruzzese boars find truffles, and I agree that very few people are good editors simply because they see editing as taking someone else's writing to use as raw material for their own. Like confusing the car in the parking lot for theirs, I suppose, except in this case they get in and drive it away.

Delusion as a superpower

I worked for someone who did this recently, at a time when my ego had atrophied much like my triceps, but nevertheless, her behavior annoyed me. Mostly because her overhauls were stiff and chilly and oily like frozen bluefish fillets, but she paraded them with her strike-throughs and condescending comments attached as if she were waving around George Eliot. She rushed through manuscripts triumphantly like a goggled groundskeeper with a weed whacker, missing the sense and the nuance because she couldn't wait to prove how much better she was at this than the person who'd created what she was gleefully destroying.

I always tried as an editor, perhaps not always successfully, to let writers express themselves in ways I or anyone reading their work wouldn't necessarily. That's the fun of reading, right? To discover something completely new and unlike anything you've ever either paged through or are capable of putting on paper yourself. Writing is different from a performing a Simone Biles Yurchenko Double Pike. There's no right or wrong, no points deducted if your sentence wanders like Proust instead of swaggers like Hemingway. There's just heart-thrumming and heart-numbing. My former editor brandished a syringe of Lidocaine rather than a twinkly wand filled with fairy dust in that regard. I try my best to do the opposite.

Super bad

But a few months ago, none of this was an issue. I'd been fired from my job as a writer and editor for speaking my mind about Palestine online, and the only superpower that mattered was survival. Which, I suppose, is a basic instinct and not a superpower at all. But it was an instinct I nearly lost. There were times I wanted to die. I feel ashamed to say that now, knowing that there are people truly suffering, like the children of Gaza whose legs are being sawed off with steak knives without even a drop of Lidocaine to ease the pain. But the psyche is a wild and sobering thing.

My phonographic memory would not help me then, though music, especially what my son the music technology major shared with me, did. His joy about what he heard as much as the music itself made me see there was joy ahead for me, too.

Hanging in

Still, I needed something else. That time when I jumped one inch? When Miss Dallas then burst Into laughter and announced my failure to the assembled crowd of class-holes? That actually wasn't the highlight of my athletic career. A few years later, after remedial gym at Garden City Elementary School with Mr. Corcoran, I had to participate in the Monroeville Junior High obstacle course. This was an annual school-wide competition that I anticipated with the sort of dread I did trips to the barber for my annual bowl cut. The entire gym was transformed into what could only be viewed as a torture chamber for someone as uncoordinated as I was. Thick ropes we were intended to shimmy up, parallel bars we were expected to swing through, hip to hands.

The event included a President's Fitness Test that I was also guaranteed to fail miserably. And something called a "Swedish Box" that you had to perform a somersault on top of. The whole thing was timed and the winners, whose names were announced during morning assembly over the PA system, were the students from each grade, a boy and a girl, who posted the best times. I was not one of them. In fact, I would stand, staring up at the hairy plait of rope while the gym teacher held his stop watch in anticipation until he finally muttered, Jesus, just move on. Presumably to the Swedish Box. I had not, by this point, figured out how to slip out as I did when forced to play volleyball in high-school gym class. I would rotate to the service line and then float right out the fire door into the parking lot. Did I mention I nearly didn't graduate due to the number of gym classes I cut and thus had to endure the misry of running hundreds of laps around the track after school for weeks leading up to the ceremony?

Anyhow, I think my time was something like 2 hours and 44 minutes versus the winning time of 9 nanoseconds for my age group. But something unexpected then happened. One of the President's Fitness Test tests involved hanging from the rungs of a horizontal ladder suspended over the floor for as long as you possibly could. My arms were then the circumference of drinking straws rather than the carpet rolls they are now, and I weighed all of about 78 pounds. I assumed I would slip off in abject humiliation in a matter of seconds. Instead, I hung from my flimsy fingertips for minute after minute to the disbelief of the rest of the kids gathered around me prepared to laugh. The second hand ticked, my hands gripped. When I finally dropped to my feet, I'd scored the highest of anyone, thus avoiding what had until that stopwatched second looked like my inevitable fate of being sent back to remedial gym class.

It's the only athletic achievement I've ever managed, although, weirdly, I can lift a surprising amount of weight with a calf machine. Something to do with my insanely high arches that act as levers, I think, arches you could drive a mini Cooper under. But this was the only public achievement that garnered looks of astonishment and some sort of badge from the President, who I think at that time was Jimmy Carter and who I still hope to make proud once more before he dies, which will be in about as long as I can currently hang from a ladder hovering above the floor.

But other than literally (now, at least), that's my true superpower, I realize. I can, when it's so much more important than winning the President's Fitness Test, hang in there longer than anyone can, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the jeers and naysayers. I can hang on and hang on and hang on for longer than the haters can. Because I have always been able to even when I didn't know I could and I'll keep at it even if I don't get a badge that tells everyone I'm the fucking GOAT of hanging on. I pray, and I hope you will, too, that If there's a God up there above the climbing rope that He will help the children of Gaza do the same.

Update: I wrote this before the amazing Stephen Nedoroscik unleashed his quirky superpower, mad skillz on the pommel horse, to give the US gymnastics team the bronze medal at the 2024 Summer Olympics. He's nerdy, he wears glasses and he hangs in there against all odds. His pupils are permanently dilated. More light shines in. I adore him.