The Sultan of Celery

Tomorrow marks the one week anniversary of my diet. It's the same diet practiced by the OT and one of the nurse's where I work and with whose fluctuating bulges I've become acquainted, as they have with mine. Actually mine weren't fluctuating, just billowing. They didn't think I'd do it and frankly, neither did I. Such a goal fell into the category of "long intended" as in "the road to a heart attack is paved with good intentions."

The tipping point came three days before Christmas when I had a near fainting spell at the holiday crowded, muzak infested supermarket. I paid the cashier in a daze and using my shopping cart as a walker, trembled to my car. I felt pretty bad. And there, standing by the open trunk, not even bothering to transfer the bags of groceries into the car and out of the falling snow, I dug frantically for the Newman's Limeade and shamelessly guzzled a good quarter of it straight out of the pour spout, the sugar fix and bracing freeze bringing me back to life. I found some Frito's in there too (I don't usually buy them but it's Christmas and I must have my traditional garlic dip which can only be scooped with Frito's). And as I stood there, amidst the detritus of snack food in the fallen snow, I realized that there were some far reaching health consequences on the near horizon which were not acceptable to me, extreme discomfort whenever I tried to tied my shoes notwithstanding.

For me, being on a diet is definitely miserable and practically psychedelic. Without the snacks which I use to measure and mark each movement of the sun, the granola bars, the chips, the bowls of cereal, I'm adrift. Without those ducks to guide my trek through each day I frequently come up short at thousand foot drops and roaring streams. Without my carbs to guide me I'm a husk of a man. I guess becoming a husk is the goal here so I must be doing something right. My refrigerator, which for the first couple of days was reluctant to relinquish items which I longed to swallow but was no longer allowed, has bit by rotting bit begun to hack up each spoiled nutritional deficit and is beginning to take on the look of a refrigerator belonging to a person who I don't know. It's the feng shui of health and hunger.

All routines built around carbs and sugars have been dismantled and stacked outside in the snow, alongside this year's Christmas tree, recently dragged off the third floor in a murder of dried needles. Half and half in coffee; gone. Granola bar eaten on the way to work; gone. Each delectable snack, tender ministries to the tensions of the work day; gone. At lunch, my customary home made burrito has been replaced by a Great Dane sized tupperware container full of lettuce and baked chicken breasts. Oh lord! Last night as I walked thru the grocery store I almost fell to my knees in the shadow of the valley of bread and ice cream. My prayers for a cup of sweet juice mocked as another shopper edged around me, slightly annoyed at my reverent pause while she piled her shopping cart high with cakes and calamities.

I'm told that one day I will walk satiated thru each hour of my life, at peace with my last meal, and genuinely looking forward to my next. That one day I will rightfully wear the crown of the Prince of Protein; the Sultan of Celery. But for now I'm mocked by my own grumbling belly and cruelly taunted by Faustian visions of sugars and carbohydrates which promise me a moments peace, for piece of my moments.

Smudge Pots

Not to start off on a negative note, but during Monday’s snow storm a friend of mine slipped on an icy sidewalk and fractured his skull. He spent a couple of days in the hospital but he’s OK. Plus on that same day my daughter and ex-wife slid down a hill, the car turning sideways and ending up in a snow bank just short of coasting out into the middle of busy Route 138. On that morning just to get into my car I had to pull myself along the edge of the driveway by grabbing hold of bushes. Once I was got into the car there was no way I was going to get out and scrape the windshield so I backed blind into the street where I could “safely” get out and chop the ice. On the way into work that day I watched one guy slip coming off the curb and fall on his butt. It looked like it hurt. New Englanders seem to take a certain amount of pride in their ability to endure such conditions, and at the moments when I detect a minuscule glint of that boast I feel very far away; 3000 miles to be exact. Back with my homies where the coldest it ever got was when there was a little frost on the ground for a few hours in the early morning. To keep the oranges from freezing the citrus farmers used to light smudge pots, oil burning chimneys which burned with an open flame and cast a nasty black smoke which hovered over the orange groves, acting as a blanket to keep the frost from settling. By mid morning the cold was generally over and by afternoon you could go outside in a flannel shirt and throw around a foot ball.

No one was throwing around a football in China Town this morning as I picked my way over the deadly slick sidewalk on my way into work. I finally gave up on the side walk and climbed over the snow plow ridge and back into the street, preferring the risk of getting picked off by a moving car to the one of slipping and breaking my arm again. Plodding thru the briny slush it was startling to see one or two young people hurrying over the same treacherous sidewalk I’d just abandoned. What the hell is that about? Maybe it’s the tension I carry around in my posture and gait. All the friction’s in my head leaving less for my soles. 

So its my fault that I slipped and broke my arm? Actually there was a bit of stupidity involved. Note to self: never wear tennis shoes in an ice storm. But that’s frozen water never passing under the bridge. Actually, bridges freeze over faster than other surfaces because they’re exposed on two sides to the cold. These are bits of information I had never aspired to commit to memory.

A phalanx of trucks came toward me on the street and I was forced back up onto the side walk. At that moment the wind started to rip and I was buffeted from behind and for a second was actually skidding on the ice under wind power.  As the absurdity of the situation came upon me I was reminded of a camping trip I took in the Sierra’s during a late summer in the mid Seventies. It had looked like it might rain the night before so we slipped our sleeping bags into the plastic encasements, euphemistically called “tube tents”, which we brought on all such trips. I guess you could legitimately call them tubes, but as tents they were worse than useless and when you didn’t bother to string them up and actually make a tent out of them with a rope spine and anchored corners, they just sat inches above your body and created a miniature rainstorm out of the condensed moisture from your breathing. That bit of practical knowledge notwithstanding we had gone to sleep that night encased in tube tents in picturesque perfection next to an alpine lake. I remember shivering all night long, the goose down in my sleeping bag transformed into clumps leaving nothing to warm but its nylon casing and my unspeakably dirty long underwear. I remember that at around the break of dawn I was aware of a certain heaviness. As I loosed the bonds of my sleeping bag I could see that I had become part of a snow bank and that our entire campsite was blanketed in snow. Fortunately, that was the last day of our trip.

Did I mention I hate the cold? Actually it's not the cold. It's the ice. That's what I hate. I love the cold. Clears the head. Why the hell am I here? It’s too late to move! I live here in the icy cold with my friends and family. It’s often warm. But it’s often cold.

Feet Feat

Me and Siobhan took Schwartz for a walk in the woods next to Walden Pond yesterday. It was just before sunset and the forest was full of snow. I was wearing tennis shoes, the only shoes I'd brought to her house that weekend, so I had to step carefully and aim for boot packed snow spots lest our hike end prematurely due to freezing feet. I squeaked down the initial slope to where the trail skirted an iced over marshy pond and then branched back up the adjacent rise. We were en route to a loop that we often hike in these woods, a trail marked every few hundred feet with minimal metal sculptures, each with a Thoreau quotation insinuated on its perimeter. Readers who at this point anticipate that I may have memorized one or two of these lines for quotation in this blog entry are readers who clearly don’t know me that well. For their sake, allow me to say that although there is not a snow ball's chance in hell of me performing such a memory feat, there were nonetheless, the makings of hundreds of such balls all around us as we trudged up the hill through the snow. The woods were dazzling, late afternoon lit and with crimson edges of coming sunset.

At the top of the hollow Siobhan grabbed a pine tuft and, tucking it conspicuously between three oak saplings, marked the turn we’d need to find on our way back. She unleashed Schwartz and he hurtled at break neck speed into the forest, spraying snow like a skier on the down woods turn. Hundreds of steps into our hike I had defied all odds in having not yet stepped deeply enough into snow to soak my socks. There was powder all over the tongues and laces, but none had violated the chewy foot filled center. As long as I paid attention and kept moving I’d stay dry and warm. In the crunching silence of the woods I was able to do both with ease. Thoreau’s words now began to appear at regular intervals; thought-stopping common sense, set so unobtrusively that each quotation seemed to have grown out of the forest like literate birch or pine. I grabbed each line by the last word and swung to the next like a boreal Tarzan, unbeknowst to my Cheetah and Jane.

The light was now fading noticeably and we decided it was time to head back to the car. We reversed directions and at the first fork in the road I persuaded Siobhan to take the one less traveled. After hiking just a minute in that direction she concluded that we'd taken the wrong fork, discreetly called it to my attention, and initiated a retracing of our steps. I took the correction well, I might say, and summoned up a sled dog load of Robert Frost as we bounced, “whoopsy-daisy thank-you mom” back to rights and over the rise. Soon afterwards we came upon the bread crumb pine tuft and it was downhill from there to the frozen pond.

Siobhan later voiced concern that we “could have gotten lost in the woods at dark”, but I wasn’t worried because it’s a known fact that even after the sun has gone down, deciduous trees hold light in their branches for just long enough to give wayward trampers a second chance if need be. I liken it to the sliver of air between a lake and its frozen ice surface, oxygen once utilized by Houdini in the greatest trick of his career (later recounted in the great Bob Holmes song). Each of us took a deep breath as we emerged from the woods, unscathed. We climbed back into the car, and drove off to buy artichokes and salmon for dinner. My feet were warm and dry.