Grandma's Ninja Training Diary: The Anniversary That Lives in Muscle Memory
Today would have been our 56th anniversary. We never got to celebrate our 50th — COVID locked the world down, and then 2021 took Carl with it. The grand plans we had for that golden milestone evaporated into hospital protocols and masked goodbyes. Life doesn’t always give you the ceremony you earned. But ninjas adapt. Ninjas restructure, reorganize, recalibrate. Ninjas keep moving. And this anniversary belongs in the Grandma Ninja series because Carl was part of the training long before I ever called myself a ninja. He went to every single one of my sessions with trainer Brittany. Every one. He’d sit there like my personal cheering section, amused, supportive, and absolutely determined not to be recruited into anything that looked like effort. If Brittany tried to rope him in, he’d grin and say, “You must stay up late at night thinking up the next marvelous torture.” Meanwhile, I was sweating through hours of drills — because it does take hours to go from flabby government wor...