I almost got into a fight at the gym the other day.

Well, I mean the other week. The gym has been closed for sometime now. Again. You know the drill. The thing is, since the pandemic started, I’ve never missed any gym time. That’s not true of my contemporaries. Usually I’m the oldest guy in there by, oh, at least three decades. I get snide looks like some are thinking Father Time lost his way to the geriatric floor and stumbled into the maternity ward by mistake.

I had just finished my two minutes on the rope pull. And of course now you have to sanitize everything your contaminated hands have touched just as much as a brain surgeon before he cuts into someone’s cranium.

There was a young guy on a bench about five feet over. Doing bicep curls or something, and giving himself loving glances in the mirror.

Anyway, I didn’t like the looks of him. I can’t always explain what goes on in my sixty-five year old, probably mildewed mind. I’m sure there’s a lot of tissue up there that doesn’t get enough blood flow. And , to be candid about my few weaknesses, I’m sometimes a little careless about what I say and do. So I took the water bottle and squirted it in the general direction of the rope. What I always do before wiping it down with a paper towel. I must have squirted it at the guy’s handsome visage.

“Hey, fuck you.” I guess I had upset him a little.

“No, fuck you.” In times like this my reptilian brain takes over. Also, after a lifetime of hockey fights, I’ve learned that one never apologizes, even if one has just delivered a slash to the back of an opponent’s legs. The spiritual homilies I use to advise others didn’t seem to be on the tip of my tongue.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Neither of us probably never made it to the school’s debating team.

I decided to see if a little levity would soothe the wild beast. “You seemed to need a little cooling off,” I told him. I didn’t think a full-on fistfight between two guys forty-five years apart in age would do much to enhance our prospects of still being allowed in the gym. Besides, we were beginning to attract the attention of some of the bemused inmates.

We both rose to our full height. He had me beat there.

To tell you the truth I was beginning to enjoy this. “You gonna fight me?” I said, probably in a manner a little too snarly for my sixty-five years.

“No…old man.”

Okay. That’s it. But cooler heads prevailed, and I’m not referring to the two unlikely combatants.. A psychotherapist would have a field day with me. And if this had been the American Wild West of the mid -18th century and I had been packing a Smith and Wesson revolver instead of a water bottle my only defence would have been, “I just didn’t like the looks of the filthy varmint.”

A couple of weeks later I told the story to my wife. I don’t know why, I must have had one glass of red wine too many and I was trying to fill a lull in the conversation. As usual, she had no sympathy. No surprise there. If she and I had been in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, the Fall of Man would have been my fault. Adam, Eve and the snake would have been blameless.

“You know, those bottles are full of disinfectant. You probably stung the guy’s eyes.”

Uh… I never thought of that.

The gym’s still closed. But like the Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

But water bottles, and the disinfectant, will be more carefully deployed.