Big Legs: A Last Look

Several of you outside my family have asked, “what’s up with the legs?” You must remember that I’m a small fellow—5’ 5” resting on a sparrow-like rack.  How much muscle-meat can Mother Nature and a room full of weights stack on such fragile scaffolding?

You’ve figured out that I am a child of the 40s and 50s.  While I hefted iron for hours each afternoon at Sammy’s “gym,” a converted WW2 barracks, I gazed fondly at Steve Reeves’ glossy photo, the star of "Hercules," the 1956 movie.  And those giant 18-inch calves!  Be patient, friends.  This was before energy supplements and steroids and exercise equipment designed by the same fellas who build space shuttles. Today most high school tackles have 18-inch calves and probably weigh 260 pounds.  But I kept working, knowing, as that wise old Irishman William Butler Yeats said, that “we must labor to be beautiful.”

Now I’ve found that women know when they have beautiful legs—or even pretty good legs.  So, they show them; walk consciously on them; swing them while they sit in the dentist office; and occasionally make a half-turn in the Walmart parking lot and “check them” [while we boys and old men also check them].

But men, on the other hand, are not conscious of their--pardon me--exquisite legs—unless they live at Muscle Beach in Venice, California. But I’m talking about Austin, Texas, or even Rexburg, Idaho, where it takes either guts or stupidity to show your legs in such climate. Or great legs.  Yet even there, I still found that inexplicable masculine unconsciousness of raw leg power.

Case in point:  When Steve Allen came by my house with a piece of cake and a note, I ---yes, you know, looked at his calves.  He had been running.  A piano professor, blessed with the fingers of a fine cardiologist, he did not “seem” to be a man with Steve Reeves’ calves. But there they were.  I gasped, “great legs, Steve; I mean really thick calves.”  Smiling and sweet, as usual, he guilelessly replied, “Oh, yeah, all of us guys in the family have, ahh, large legs.”

And then there’s another friend—Steve Oakey. I home taught him and Sharon for years before I actually saw his legs—which is a good thing, you’re thinking.  Then a couple of years ago at Rexburg's Whoopie Day parade, there he was, whistle in mouth, drill team employees in synchronized step obediently dancing their march behind him. Big calves and not a word about his legs for three years of home teaching.  He didn’t even consciously or unconsciously pull up a pant leg.  And Sharon never even threw herself on his left calf and said, “see, see what I have here?!”  She’s kind, so I think she saw one of my pant legs slide up.  “All heart,” she probably thought, “but no legs.”  Henry VIII had no heart but is said to have had a “great leg.”

One more example.  Yesterday, sitting in the pharmacy, A hulk of a specimen sat down next to me.  My eyes quickly checked out. . . . his calves; huge, rippled, strips of striated muscle embossed on a slab of calf the size of the prime rib at Texas Land and Cattle [local restaurant].  I bravely leaned forward, looked him square in the eye and then scoped out his calves, risking death by gun shot [they pack heat here in Texas] or a broken jaw.

“Pardon me, sir, may I just say in all innocence and honesty that when the Good Lord handed out legs, you were first in line; and I was obviously lost, off reading a book or something.”  He smiled, Texas style, and said, “Hell, man, I never give notice.  Growin’ up I was a lanky kid, built like a bean-pole.  After I up and married and started gettin’ three squares a day and a little lovin’ at night and playin’ golf with the boys, they just kinda puffed up.”

And there you are.  Humming “The Impossible Dream” to myself, my mind drifted to the Mormon resurrection.  “Let me see, if I can help build a world, could I slip off for a few minutes and build myself a pair of Steve Reeves?