Lisa Motollo
The No Excuse Exercise Guide

There was a book published in the 70’s called the No Excuse Exercise Guide. It was pink and purple and there was a copy on my grandma’s liquor shelf. I read it a few times, as I didn’t find my grandpa’s Tom Clancy novels appealing. My grandma told me feeling fat is the worst feeling in the world. She was once a person buying, and carrying home, and flipping through that book. She spent years preparing her body to ultimately be viewed in a coffin, only for there to not be a service. And who knows why? Money? Distance? What matters is that it didn’t happen. She did crossword puzzles every morning on newspapers that are no longer in circulation and had piles of reading material on preventing Alzheimer’s. She didn’t want to end up like her mother. But of course, she did, and I think the advice offered to prevent Alzheimer’s is just there to take up space in media and act as another page on which to insert an advertisement. But that seems to be virtually everything – a person thinking “what will fill space?” and there was my grandma, saying “filling space is the worst feeling in the world.”