Reading between the lines

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

“You need to take vitamins,” a friend told me on the phone the other day.

“Thanks. And how are you?” I asked her.

“Seriously. You’re writing about being sick all the time these days.”

“Not all the time …”

“Come on, Chris. This is me. I read all your stuff … well, not the sports stuff. Anyway … You need to take a good multivitamin. Stat.”

For the record, this friend is not a doctor – nor does she play one on TV.

“You had migraine headaches a few weeks ago,” another friend listed for me, “then the flu. Then I think you said you thought you had SARS. Are you getting enough sleep?”
I’d say so.

I’m not much of a sleeper, for those who care to know these nuggets of information about me.

I can get by on five hours a night for months.

But lately, I’ve been getting right at eight per.

“You actually keep up with this, don’t you?” another friend who knows me well enough to guess this fact correctly asked me.

Yes, I do.

I keep records on how much I sleep.

Every week.

Every night, to tell the truth.

“Had a big zero there on July 2, 2002. What was significant about that day?” I was asked recently.

(Night one of The Augusta Free Press era. Thanks. –Chris.)

“Don’t stop lifting weights,” I was advised at a fund-raising gala not too long ago – after another column that I wrote about how I’d just invented the newest workout craze to sweep America, Chris-Bo.

“You’re in great shape. You don’t want to lose what you built up there,” my friend/trainer-wannabe said to me.

“Your hair is … blond,” another friend remarked at yet-another fund-raising gala last weekend.

(Coming up next … The Augusta Free Press fund-raising gala. You’ve got venture capital? We’ve got ways to spend it. –Ed.)

“I read about it … Your column didn’t do it justice,” she said.

“Hey, you don’t look well,” she hastened to add.

“You know, chicken soup. That’s what you need. Chicken soup, a good multivitamin, more rest … and you need to get in the gym every once in a while.

“Are you writing this down?’

 

(Published 05-15-03)