We have a first kyu at our dojo who will be testing for shodan next Saturday at the Midwest Aikido Center in Chicago. He has worked incredibly hard to get ready for this test. He began at our dojo about eight years ago, although I don't know what his rank was at the time. He also has a solid background in Iwama style Aikido. As a dojo, we have worked hard to get him ready for his test. For at least the last two months every Saturday after our regular class, we take time to run a practice test. Those of us at the dojo do our best to help him out. Aside from our chief instructor and our dojo cho, he is the highest ranking member. We have two new members who are female brown belts - probably second kyu - then I come next. We have a three or four third kyus, a few fourth kyus, then a few fifth, sixth, and newbies.

One brown belt was at class today, but she didn't stay for test practice. That left me and three others to work with our first kyu. We took turns as uke, until we practiced randori, when we all attacked him at the same time. As highest ranking student I was the first to go, we started in suwari-waza. Our dojo cho instructed him to go through Ikkyo, Nikkyo, Sankyo, Yonkyo, and Gokyo, omote and ura. I attacked shomen-uchi again, and again. The moment he let go of his pin, I got up as quickly as I could and attacked again. Twenty attacks, twenty pins. I also did ukemi for bo-waza and bo-tori, and, as I wrote before, randori. By the time I got to randori, I was pretty fried.

When it was all over, and we were changing, the Aikidoka who ranks directly below me gave me a terrific compliment. He told me that he thought my ukemi was excellent. Especially the first bit I did. What struck me as funny, was that when he first started talking, he actually asked me if it would be okay if he told me something about my ukemi. I really thought he was going to give me some constructive criticism by the way he asked. He said something like, "I'm really not one to say anything," again, as though he was going to criticize. It was almost a shock that he turned that into such a compliment. Maybe it's because he's so in tune to Japanese culture, especially as it relates to life in the dojo. Maybe lower ranks aren't supposed to compliment higher ranks, but I can't be sure. What makes me feel even better, is that his ukemi is really terrific, and he's also at lest 20 years younger than me. Maybe 25 years younger.

Regular class went from 10:00 until about 11:15. We did our shodan practice test from 11:20 or so, until noon. After, I picked up my older daughter from an Earth Day puppet show/presentation at the local technical college. My daughter helped little kids make sock puppets. She's terrific with a glue gun. My younger daughter came to practice with me, like she does almost every Saturday. I know she'll want to be the first to sign up for kids classes when we start those at our new dojo.

So now I'm exhausted. I'm walking around the house like someone my age.