Day Seven: Bible Stories (a.k.a. Where I Find My Strength?)

I imagine the downtown Lawrence Community Building weight room as the place Rocky Balboa would train for his next boxing match, if "Rock" ever decided to venture out of Philapelphia. A hole-in-the-wall sized weight room with equipment that likely predates any of the Rocky movies (or movies in general, for that matter), it would be the perfect spot for a humble boxer from the streets to begin a run to the world title...were it not for the complete lack of actual boxing equipment.

In lieu of punching bags, the gym (which is open freely to the public) offers not much beyond the basics. Fortunately I'm a pretty basic kind of guy, so I'm not complaining...Especially when the KU Rec Center (my other gym) is full of New Year's Resolutioners lining up behind nautilus machines ready to make this year the year.

"The year" typically only lasts two to three weeks, but until then this future world title holder is punching in at the Community Building.

Being a basic weight room, people come there for basically one reason, to lift weights. That might seem like an obvious statement. But just like this gym doesn't come with a juice bar, sauna, or big screen TV (or any TV for that matter), let alone any extraneous piece of furniture upon which someone might sit to watch said TV if it existed, so too its inhabitants don't come with a lot of extras.

Here you'll see no laptops brought in "just to get a little extra work done." You won't find anybody reading the latest Stephanie Meyer novel. Even a ringing cell phone seems out of place in this environment. In fact, it's hard to get a glimpse - beyond the dimension of "weight lifter" - into anybody's life here. The only accessories that can be readily found are mp3 players, used to drown out the stale sound of silence spotted with intermittent clanks of metal on metal.

The headphones only serve to isolate everybody even further.

So, when something out of the ordinary finds its way into the tiny one-purpose room, it tends to stand out. And that is the subject of today's picture.I don't know who the owner of the Bible was, or why it ended up perched on this ledge, but I imagine that this particular (well worn) book went hand-in-hand with at least a few interesting stories.

Did it belong to the older gentleman who spent a peculiarly long amount of time stretching in the corner? Or was it left there by the young (and highly curious) boy who was obviously in a weight room for the first time in his life? If so, was it passed on to him by his nervous mother, who kept peering through the pane of glass in the gym door every 5 minutes to make sure nothing disastrous had happened yet?

I probably wouldn't judge this as one of my better photographs. But sometimes it's the story behind the scene that paints the real picture...even if we can only guess what that story is.