My youngest son says the cure for everything is exercise.

Each time he visits a doctor with any kind of ailment, he says the doctor’s cure is “exercise.”

According to his doctors, if you’re diagnosed with high blood pressure — exercise. You have aching  joints — exercise. Overweight — exercise. Brain tumor — exercise.

My cousin’s husband, a retired Navy commander, for most of his life has been big on exercise. He is now fighting the big ALZ. Three times a week, Harry goes to the gym, and for three hours each session, he exercises. My cousin tells me it is saving his life.

See there??

Enter Dr. Sydney Cochran.

“You need to lose some weight,” as he has told me many times when he came into the bookstore. “You need to exercise,” has been his advice.

See, Dr. Cochran is big on exercise, going almost daily for sessions on the treadmill. He passes the time by reading a book while on the treadmill. So, I would see him regularly at the bookstore, exchanging books he had read on the treadmill, for those he had not read.

I had a regular Sydney Cochran shelf set aside in the store. As I would get in books, if I thought it was one he would read on the treadmill, I would set it aside.

If I read a story that I thought he would like, I passed it on. “I really enjoyed that,” he would always say, except when he ordered War and Peace, and couldn’t keep up with all those characters with strange-sounding names. That was not on my recommended list.

No doubt as Sydney witnessed my expanding waistline, he was concerned that I didn’t exercise. And he was right, I didn’t.

“Do you do any exercise,” he would ask my spouse most times when she visited his office.

Even my cardiologist got onto me. I told him my urologist suggested I was tired and sluggish because he said my testosterone levels were low. He suggested a medical ingested program of recovery — $650 a shot.

My cardiologist didn’t approve. “Walk one hour a day,” he said. “That should bring up your testosterone level.” That’s $650 saved.

So now there’s no bookstore to take up my time; in fact, there is little else to take up my time anymore except reading. I am taking Dr. Cochran’s advice and reading on a treadmill. I have been at this thing for three weeks now, every day, almost up to an hour a day, nearly two miles a day.

The time goes fast. I take my Kindle, and read and speed walk.

Kindles are great to use on the treadmill. They sit easily on the dashboard. I had tried reading on the treadmill with real books, but pages were hard to turn while walking, and the book kept slipping off the board, crashing to the floor and losing my place in the story.

All this emphasis on exercise reminds me of all those drug commercials on television. The ones which say, ask your doctor about so and so. Then they launch on a 10-minute cycle of warnings, that if you take this drug you might possibly be at risk for 1,276 harmful side effects.

Why bother??

You got health problems, Bunko? Get off your butt and exercise.

My biggest problem now is memory. Little things snag me. Got to think and think for someone’s name I have known for years.

The other day, I was telling someone I had started workouts on a ……..

Jim Smith writes a weekly column for The Post-Searchlight. He can be reached through his email at: bainbooknook@yahoo.com, or by cell phone at (229) 254-2753.