Never did I expect something like this, though. A vitamin deficiency, I thought, or maybe a virus. As I sat in the exam room while Katie was in the back being X-rayed and ultrasounded, I kept going over what the vet had said about the mass she’d felt: “It could also be a foreign object, like a button!” Yes, surely that was it. Surely, my finicky little cat who didn’t even care for seafood-based cat foods had eaten a button. There would be surgery, then healing, then… then the vet arrived to show me the films and tell me the ugly truth.

Cancer, you guys. Fucking cancer. This is two cats in two years, now, cancer. And let’s not even GO INTO my father.

But all the fist-shaking and fuck-cancer in the world doesn’t actually stop it. And in the week I had Katie after the diagnosis I tried to take stock. For the first 24 hours I couldn’t stop crying. From Wednesday night until Friday morning I was wracked with the unfairness of it, even though I know cancer has nothing to do with “fairness.” When I woke up Friday morning, preparing to pick up the steroids that would give Katie that one last relatively happy and comfortable week, I felt worlds better.

Cancer robs us, it does. It takes away the people and creatures we love. But it can’t actually take away what matters most about them: the love we have for them, and they for us. Cancer cackles like a demon but cannot take away that which built the joy we are losing. And since it is impartial, there is no self-blame. No guilt. Nothing I did gave my cat cancer. Hell, I saved my cat from cancer in the first place, sort of. The whole reason she was at the animal shelter when I adopted her was that her original owner got cancer and had to surrender her pets because she couldn’t care for them. Katie, a cancer orphan, came into my life and helped me thumb my nose at cancer in that little way.

But that little way is what matters. Every time, in that last week with her, that she rubbed noses with Desmond or gave me a head-bonk or slept curled up next to me, that was thumbing our noses at cancer. Cancer, you may take this sweet kitty away, but you won’t take away the two lovely years I had with her. And you can’t take away the love I could give her right up until the end, when the wonderful hospice vet arrived to do the at-home euthanasia. It was comfortable and kind and stress-free, and it released her from suffering. It released her from cancer, and she still remains the loving little cat I got to spend all that lovely time with. I wish there had been more of it, but I know we made the very best of it we could.

It’s inauspicious, but in a strange way the retreat prepared me for both situations. In 2011, I was concerned about there being too much heaped on the anniversary, too much poking of wounds, too much use of the ghost of the attacks as a reason to stir up jingoistic sentiments that make me deeply uncomfortable. Instead of focusing on what the world wanted me to focus on, that anniversary day, I could focus on what I wanted to focus on. That was forgiveness.

On Monday the 15th, when the attack happened in Boston, once again I found that my retreat experience allowed me to remain calm and responsive in what I felt was a more productive way. Sympathy, sadness, yes – but I looked away from links labeled “WARNING GRISLY PHOTOS” and was able to take a deep breath in the face of the stare-at-the-car-wreck mentality that often takes over. My main window to the events that Monday was the internet, and the internet is very, very good at the car wreck mentality.

It is also very good at communication, and humanizing, and opening doors, if you let it. It was important to me to keep a measured, calm perspective on the events. Not to diminish them or their seriousness, rather to diminish my own sense of helplessness.

At the monastery they now offer green burial. I spent a lot of time walking around the grounds, picking my way down to the banks of the Shenandoah and thinking that if my life, whenever it ends, could be lifted away on a breeze in a place that beautiful, then that would be all right. We all go. None of us get to stay. It is a terrible shame when anyone does not get what we consider a full measure of life; to have the measure of our life shortened by the hatred of another is absolutely one of the worst sins and horrors that any human can commit. But there is still beauty in life, absolutely everywhere. In people extending hands of help and healing in a time of crisis. In flowers growing in a still wood. It is harder to see in dirty tears on frightened faces, but somewhere, it is there. I didn’t know anyone personally affected by what happened in Boston. But it is a comfort that it affected so many, because it affected our common human bond. The worst part of cowardly acts such as planting a bomb and walking away is the utter disregard it shows for the common family of humanity.

Maybe my retreat weekends are a good spiritual shelter-in-place. Not to keep out anything that may harm but to reinforce the strength we all can draw on from inside. When I came back, I felt rested and renewed and ready to deal with those most human bonds.

Even the winding drive lowers your blood pressure.

The thing is, I don’t want to focus just on number of pounds lost. That’s obfuscating and frustrating and can be a trigger for some people. And yet. I was tired, and when I got sick I was that too. As treatment made me feel better I started, for some reason, doing Tae-Bo in the mornings. There was an 8-minute tape, the quick morning workout, and I would do it maybe three days a week. Eight minutes. Three days a week. 24 minutes total. And even that little bit helped, so out of shape was I.

That was the start of my way out – of my own head, and my own weird issues about weight and numbers. I didn’t have to take anything away, I thought. I merely had to add exercise. And so for a few years that’s what I did. And it worked! I didn’t really get into weighing myself so I don’t really know quite how quickly pounds went, but they did. Eventually.

In 2007 I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. The time had come, the nutritionist said, to change the way I ate. (Actually if the time had come a few years earlier I might have put off this diagnosis, but that is not what happened and not worth fussing over at this point.) At that time I believe I weighed around 240. I got more serious about exercise, making sure I was going to the fitness room every morning, and I did change my diet. Mainly by cutting carbs, but it was something. And to make up for the cut carbs I had to eat something, so at last I turned to more fruits and vegetables. Grudgingly, sure, but I did it.

After a couple years I got down into the 180s pretty consistently. Then in 2009, when my father passed away, I gained about 10, maybe 15 pounds back. I didn’t worry about it too much. I hovered in the 190s. Then I hovered around 200. Then this summer I realized I was over 200 as often as I was under. And I was tired of it. There is so much that is harder to change, I realized.

Understanding I’m worth the effort. Understanding all my problems won’t be solved by losing weight. Understanding that working on this doesn’t excuse me from working on other things. Understanding that all of this change takes time. Understanding that it’s not fair that I have to write down everything I eat and measure stuff. Understanding that it is not about “not fair,” it’s about doing the things that even the field. That make up for what nature didn’t give me.

This morning, and yesterday morning, and two days is a trend, I weighed 174.6. I’m not skinny and I never will be. I love every stupid frustrating minute – month – year this took, and I realize it’s not over. I realize the effort has to be habit. I realize the habit pays off.

I wanted to post a “before” and “after” picture, but I had trouble finding a decent picture of me from the pre-digital era. I got my first digital camera in 2003, and didn’t realize how much easier (and less stupidly self-indulgent) it made self-portraits. Anyway, so I have no idea what the hell I am wearing on my head in the “before” picture. It is from Christmas 1998. It is kind of ridiculous, but I’m not here to ridicule. Somewhere in me then was the seed of who I am now, and I’m thankful for that. Here’s to you and your absurd sense of haberdashery, 1998 Me! And 2013 me…it really probably is about time you got a full-length mirror. Sometimes it is honestly okay to be able to see if your shoes match your shirt.

Thank goodness I eventually learned how to pick a suitable hat.

It’s been another strangely un-snowy winter here, maybe still making up for the ridiculous Snowmageddon winter four years ago. Or maybe just because the proper low-pressure systems aren’t meeting up with the right solid-frigid high-pressure systems. At any rate, when we got an inch of powder on Wednesday night with promises of another inch or so on Friday, I hatched a plan. Last week, while volunteering for the National Day of Service, I went to the Howard County Conservancy for the first time. I’ve lived in Howard County for nine years now, and I had no idea it existed until I signed up for the volunteer gig. We had a beautiful sunny day out attacking invasive plant species (futile, but necessary) and I was impressed with the facility, most of all the 232 beautiful acres I hadn’t known about in my more-or-less backyard.

My plan, with our few inches of powdery snow, was to go for a sunny, snowy tromp. Today, a blank-slate Saturday, would be the day. I let myself sleep until I was done (a luxury!), then got up, ate breakfast, showered, and headed out. I wore leggings under my jeans which turned out to be a brilliant idea. When I pulled into the parking lot, there was only one other car there (the Conservancy is not actually open on Saturdays in winter – you can walk the grounds, but there are no open buildings, programs, restrooms, etc.). I took only my car keys and my phone, in case I wanted to snap a picture or something. The snow was already melting under the bright sun, though it was but 29 degrees outside. The sound under my boots was still satisfyingly crunchy as I headed for the woods.

I tried to identify tracks in the snow. Some of them were easy: rabbits, squirrels, deer. A few other people had already been there, along with at least one dog. There were tiny trails that probably belonged to field mice. There were delicate bird trails. There was some kind of three-pronged track that I was utterly unable to identify, and my hazarded guesses were pretty slapdash. (“Some sort of overgrown emu?”) The week before, working near a stream, I’d seen some unusual prints in the mud on the bank. “Do we know what these tracks might be?” I yelled to anyone in my vicinity. They weren’t deer tracks, that was for sure. Our volunteer guide looked and said, “Might be someone’s dog.” When he saw my crestfallen look, he said, “Or it could be a coyote. We do get coyotes here.” I perked right up. A coyote track was much more interesting than a dog track.

This morning, I walked and walked, only occasionally puzzling over those three-pronged tracks (which I saw over and over). It was quiet and still. Eventually I ran into the one other human there, who had come in the lone other car. He had a fancy camera and tripod set up near an eagle observation point. We exchanged pleasantries, and I walked on as he fussed with his gear. I rounded a corner, turning onto the leg back towards where I’d started, and a bunch of birds lit up from a stream-bed in an alarmed fashion. “It’s cool, guys,” I said quietly as I stood still and watched them light on branches. The birds were all robins, which was a little startling to see in January, but nice. I watched them for a few minutes and got distracted by a gentle tapping, which was caused by another bird pecking determinedly at a small branch. I suppose it was a woodpecker, but tapping on a tiny branch like that seemed somewhat futile. Maybe it was another type of bird tapping for a non-food purpose? I made a mental note to check when the local birding organization took walks at the Conservancy, and moved on.

Near the end, in sight of the parking lot, there was another trail off to my left. The marker said “Hawk’s Nest Trail, 0.3 mi.” That didn’t sound daunting. I started walking up that trail and hadn’t gotten 50 feet when I heard a horrible scream. It was one of the weirdest sounds I have ever heard in nature, although as a lifelong suburbanite it’s not exactly as though I’ve heard lots of weird nature sounds that weren’t in zoos. Then more loud, quavering sorts of shouts. My first thought was, cat fight. But I didn’t think there were any types of cats there, and after hearing a few more awful yelps and yowls, I realized they were not feline. I had frozen in place when it started, and now that I was alert I heard the crashes in the underbrush. They were up a hill, then rounding down closer. Something, several somethings, were very angry and moving closer to me. For a minute I felt fear, then I remembered that I have already been vaccinated for rabies. (Comes in handy sometimes, that does. Like when I take trash out and there’s a raccoon hanging out by the dumpster, and I’m like, “Yo, what up, raccoon?” instead of worrying if he or she is out in a little too much daylight for comfort.) I stood still listening to the horrible guttural sounds for a few more moments, then the rustlings in the underbrush turned to actual, enormous, gorgeous, bright red, very angry foxes. Foxes! FOX FIGHT! I was fascinated. There were at least three, but I only got good looks at two. They ranged down the hill and back up, over to the path I’d just turned off of and back into the brush, making a godawful racket the whole time. While I craned my neck off to the left to try to track one, I didn’t notice another one had stopped to notice me. Less than 20 feet away, there he or possibly she was, staring at me. I looked back at the fox for a minute then it trotted away. I didn’t hear any more shouting. The rustlings diminished. Whatever got those foxes all fired up, it was over. I waited a few more minutes to see if anything else exciting would happen, but all was quiet again. I decided to leave the rest of Hawk’s Nest Trail for another time. I turned to go back, and ran into the photographer from earlier.

Fully out of nature suddenly, talking with another human being, laughing about whatever I must have done to cause the fox fight, I happily seized on a chance to tell the rabies-shots story, because that one never gets old. But I never stopped being thankful I’d gotten to see that, even if I never thought to get my phone, with its camera, out of my pocket.

Hello, 2013. I’ve been utterly at a loss as to what to write or say in here, as it always seems there is So! Much! Going! On! And so there is, always, somewhere, for someone. There’s no reason to stop writing, though. Even if I can’t quite figure out what to say. Sometimes it’s enough to say, I took a beautiful walk and saw three foxes fighting, and they screamed fair to bring down the sky.

It’s not my intention to have a cooking blog, though sometimes I clasp my hands dramatically and lift my too-wide eyes to the heavens with the hearty wish that I had picked a damn theme for the blog. But I didn’t. So you get what you get! Today it is a recipe!

A few weeks ago I came home from work one evening to a wonderful smell filling the hallway in my apartment building. Apartments have their share of upsides and downsides, and smelling-what-everyone-else-is-cooking can honestly fall on either side. On the upside, Sunday brunch of bacon and eggs! A delicious cake! On the downside, organ meats. Smelling something delicious can be an upside and a downside simultaneously, as demonstrated by my inner monologue:

SMART HALF OF MY BRAIN: Boy, that Sunday brunch someone is making smells delicious!
DUMB HALF OF MY BRAIN: It sure does! Let’s make waffles!
SHOMB: No, no. We don’t have time, and we don’t need waffles.
DHOMB: Sure we do! They smell so good!
SHOMB: They do. They’re delicious, but we totally do not need the carbs and piles of sugar.
DHOMB: Those won’t be a problem.
SHOMB: Of course they will.
DHOMB: Nope. Got a thing going. With the pancreas. We’re cool.
MY PANCREAS: What?
DHOMB: Our deal! If we eat waffles, remember? Mmm, slathered in maple syrup.
MP: *thud*
DHOMB: Dude?
SHOMB: Great. You made our pancreas faint dead away. Also, do I need to remind you that we just ate a delicious breakfast?
DHOMB: It was okay.
SHOMB: It was more than okay. It was great. It was the finest breakfast ever concocted by humankind. The mere thought of that breakfast should keep other food-thoughts away for days.
DHOMB: Don’t forget to add maple syrup to the shopping list.
SHOMB: Got it.

But sometimes I come home and smell something delicious being cooked by a neighbor, and it reminds me there are delicious things that I can cook, too! For myself! That won’t cause various body parts to revolt!

The other week it was spaghetti sauce. One of three recipes passed down to me by my father, a man of many fine qualities but usually no skill or patience or grace in the kitchen whatsoever. I don’t know what about these few dishes distinguished them to the point where my father would not just consent to making them but enjoy making them, but I’m grateful for it.

But enough chitchat. You guys want spaghetti sauce! Let me say right up front that we are not Italian. As far as I know we have zero Italian heritage whatsoever. And I don’t think this sauce is genuine…anything, really. Other than delicious! This is not a recipe that my father ever wrote down. (Like most of his, it probably came from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook originally, but changed over time.) When I moved out, I told him I wanted to learn how to make it, so he had me watch/help him make it. It’s dead easy. Here it is!

Note One: I have actually changed it a lot since Dad taught it to me, but the basic idea is the same.
Note Two: The last recipe I posted also had a vegan version. This SO doesn’t.

Ingredients:
1 lb ground turkey
turkey pepperoni (to taste, I use a little more than what they call “a serving” on the package)
onion, diced
2 tbs olive oil
Worcestershire sauce
Garlic (minced, diced, powdered, smashed, I don’t care, just get lots of it!)
salt
1 32 oz can tomato sauce (is it 32 oz? The big can. You know.)
1 6 oz can tomato paste (The little can)

Cut up your onion and get a big ol’ stewpot or saucepan heating up over mediumish heat. Dump the olive oil in there (all amounts are guesses on my part except the one-pound-of-meat thing) (and canned stuff) (obviously). Soon as they’re chopped, throw in the onions. Then grab your trusty Worcestershire sauce (I use Lea & Perrins because I am an enormous snob) (Also I bought it like six years ago) and dump some on in there. I have no idea how much. A goodly amount – several tablespoons’ worth. It will start smelling awesome almost immediately. Add the ground turkey and let the whole thing brown nicely. While that’s browning, cut up the turkey pepperoni. I just pile up the pre-sliced pieces and cut them into small strips. Dump those into the pot. Also dump in a bunch of garlic. I tend to have jars of minced garlic and powdered garlic, so I use both of those. Once everything is happily browned and the ground meat shows no more pink, open your cans of tomato substances and dump ‘em on in. Stir the whole mess real good and lower the heat about as low as you can. Once it’s stirred together, taste a tiny bit. Figure out how much more garlic you need (duh of course you need more garlic) and also salt, if any. Usually I do add a little bit. It’s rare for me to add salt to anything but even just a little bit helps kick this up to the right degree of tanginess. If you’re not sure, just don’t add it. It can be added later after all. Anyway, then leave it on low and walk away for a few hours. Don’t actually walk far, I mean, this is a stove. Stir it every so often, especially if you have a gas stove like me and tend to have a little concentrated ring of heat where stuff sticks to the bottom of the pot.

Anyway, when it’s done, which is two hours/until you can’t stand it anymore, turn off the heat and stir. Dump over whatever type of pasta floats your boat. It has so much meat in the sauce you don’t really need an alternate protein source. If you want a yummy one-bowl meal, steam up a little broccoli and dump it in with the pasta and sauce.

This recipe makes a whack-ton of sauce but it freezes really well. Put some up in the freezer for later chowing down!

Mostly as a child I had the faith of a child, of course. I loved the Catholic church very deeply because it was a place of rules and order, a place that had an answer for almost anything my questioning mind would ask. The expectations of my church, what I perceived as my God, were clear. Nowhere did they say I should sit and visualize the power of human spirits acting together.

But then again, they didn’t say that I shouldn’t. As I grew and struggled – with the church, with God, with expectations – what kept me interested in the struggle was that overarching feeling that I sometimes got in church. That feeling of being part of something larger. When I was a child, I thought that was God. When I got older, I thought it was human energy. I just knew I felt a connection and peace in prayer, even in the midst of my struggles, providing I could clear my head and heart enough to pray.

When I left the Catholic church the first time, I distinctly remember saying that I would still have a spiritual practice. I would go in the woods, and experience holiness directly! I would be attune to the wonder in the beauty of the world! I would tend my struggling spirit!

Right, sure. I didn’t do that at all. Not for years. Not that I was incapable of appreciating beauty, or of having a sense of wonder, but I never thought about that strange sense of overarching connection. I studied mythology and folklore in college. I was fascinated by the idea that all human societies invented gods and religions. With the arrogance of youth buoyed up by stuff straight out of textbooks, I declared that impulse all of God there was. Just a striving in us for answers, I thought. Probably a biological imperative. Obviously its final pathway was science, and eventually we’d all just evolve out of needing religion and be terribly brilliant and enlightened. While shunning the idea of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is such a wonderful term, for a wonderful idea. Yesterday I attended a new member class at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia, a valuable experience. We talked about many things in a wide-ranging conversation on faith, including an exercise where we were to write down our own beliefs. When we talked about the ideas we had behind various “loaded” religious words, we got to “soul,” which I found simple. Light, I thought (and said). The light, the spark, the divine in us all. The light we seek. That biological imperative. The questions we ask. The joy that lights our faces at a beautiful song or an amazing view or a stunning new scientific discovery.

I’ve been attending UUCC for about two months, and I can already feel the ways I am changing in response to finding a faith community that honors that light in everyone. My struggling spirit will likely never cease its struggle until it ceases to be. Despite my many positive experiences since returning to the Catholic church 8 years ago, that struggle never fit. I didn’t feel that overarching bond very much. There was light, yes. That light is everywhere. But it was hard to find, harder than it should be. It was growing increasingly difficult to find within myself. The first time I attended a service at the Unitarian Universalist community, I found myself weeping, experiencing the kind of joy I haven’t felt in church in a long, long time.

Lately I know I’ve been pretty quiet here on the blog. Part of it has to do with all the inward-looking stuff I’ve been doing in the past two months since joining this new community. Part of it has to do with all the changes that were happening in order for me to see my path to that community. Part of it has to do with never knowing quite how to present these Big Ideas. Part of has to do with the fact that so much has been going on I have no idea how to cover it all. Anyway, I hope I can start sharing more stuff here, big and small. Maybe I’ll focus on small.

But in the meantime, you know, here is the next enormous step on my lifetime spiritual journey! Next, a funny story about work! Or the cats! Or this hurricane!

But eventually, I did! Both my brother and I turned into capable cooks, perhaps out of spite. One thing that I caught a love of that he didn’t was baking. I love to bake. I am diabetic and constantly struggling with bad eating habits, so I try not to bake too much, but I love it. That really probably did come out of some kind of stubbornness – no one in my family baked. Not my grandmothers, not my parents. Nestle Toll House cookies at Christmas and German chocolate cake at birthdays was it. Maybe once in a while brownies from a mix. From what I understand my paternal grandfather was a good baker, but he passed away when I was eight years old, so I can’t really remember.

Or maybe I learned to do it because man do I ever love baked goods. Cookies, muffins, cake. I would happily eat a fresh-baked brownie sooner than almost anything else in the world. Once I figured out that baking wasn’t so hard really, it just required strict attention to detail, I began doing it more and more.

Unlike cooking, which often rewards improvisation, baking really doesn’t support it unless you know what you’re doing. On a food science level, for a long time, I did not. So I never altered a recipe, just found ones I liked and made them over and over again. Over time, as I learned more about what ingredients played what roles, I got interested. I couldn’t see making up a recipe out of whole cloth, exactly, but I could see playing with one.

And so I did! In fact I turned this recipe around so much I could almost call it entirely my own. It’s pumpkin pound cake and despite a few things I’d still like to work out regarding texture, I’m proud of it. I’m especially proud because I experimented and made stuff up without fear of failure. Maybe the kitchen is a good ground for that, because I am fortunate enough to be able to afford to make some mistakes.

For health reasons, I removed the eggs. For a friend with a few dietary restrictions, I came up with the vegan version. Both are yummy! I will present the main recipe then afterward I will note the vegan substitutions I made.

PUMPKIN POUND CAKE

Preheat oven to 325 F and grease and flour a Bundt or tube pan (10”).

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 cups pumpkin

2 3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup sour cream

2 3/4 cups sugar

1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

(or whatever spice mixture you prefer for pumpkin flavored things)

In a stand mixer or with a hand mixer in a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, and sour cream. Sift the baking soda and flour together in a separate bowl. Gradually add the sifted flour to the creamed mixture alternating with heaping tablespoons of pumpkin. Add the vanilla and the spices, mix, and pour the mixture into your prepared Bundt or tube pan. Bake for 1 hour 20 minutes.

VEGAN SUBSTITUTIONS

Earth Balance buttery spread instead of butter, maintain proportions

Vegan sour cream (I used Tofutti), maintain proportions

Ensure vegan sugar – turbinado or another “evaporated cane” process, not the kind that uses bones or horse’s hooves or whatever.

I’ve made this twice now and tweaked it each time. This is a heavy cake – to be expected, it’s pound cake! I believe that the next time I make it I will increase the baking soda to a full teaspoon, since it is the only leavening agent left in without eggs to help give it a lighter texture. The calorie content doesn’t change significantly with the vegan substitutes, and it’s a whopper cake – approximately 480 calories for 1/12th of a cake (a respectable-sized slice out of my Bundt pan). But without egg and, in the vegan version, dairy, the cholesterol and fat are definitely cut.

Because it is pound cake and that’s what I do with pound cake, I slather mine with chocolate syrup. If you are fond of pound cake but not so much pumpkin, you can substitute unsweetened applesauce for the pumpkin. The proportions are unlikely exactly the same as applesauce is wetter and sweeter than canned pumpkin. If I made a “plain” version I would probably experiment with one cup of applesauce and maybe a little less actual sugar.

Enjoy in good health! If I come up with anything else non-deadly, I will share.

Honestly, though? This is a blog. It’s a public place for sharing, and all that stuff is stuff I feel I’ve barely begun to figure out. What I’d prefer to do is celebrate the joy of his life, not the pain of his loss. What I’d really like to do is share something fun.

I will tell you how my father taught me that jokes never, ever have to die.

In the early ‘80s, Trivial Pursuit was a huge trendy thing, so I really have no idea how my family ever stumbled across it. But we did, and we embraced it with gusto. A fun game the whole family could play! That wasn’t UNO! (We played A LOT of UNO over the years. We about wore the fur off the cards.) At first we’d play with mixed-age teams, meaning one parent and one child on each team. But my brother is nine years older than me and was legally an adult by the time the game came out, so in short order we figured out the preferred pairing was kids vs. parents. Sure, being young and hip we had certain advantages, but my parents, being old and wily, had their own.

We had our strong and weak categories, which we of course learned to use against each other when selecting the final question. Watching our parents try to tackle an Arts and Entertainment question that focused on anything post-1960 was hilarious! As, I’m sure, was watching my brother and I tackle any professional-sports-based question. One evening, we were having a rousing game. My parents landed on Arts and Entertainment. I am fairly certain it was for a pie wedge, too. My brother and I took turns reading the questions. I can no longer remember whose turn it was to read, but I know that whoever-it-was turned to the other to share the question. We giggled madly. No WAY would they get this. I wish I could remember the exact question but that was nearly 30 years ago. The gist was: “What British band made the album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’?”

My brother and I grinned. I sat on my hands to keep from clapping them in glee. In my head, I thought “LED ZEPPELIN” over and over again, forming a steady psychic stream of misinformation. No way were they using any hoodoo to get the answer out of my head! Mom and Dad rolled their eyes at each other. They quickly eliminated The Beatles. My brother and I grinned wider. At last my father threw up his hands and said, “Pink Floyd.”

Stunned silence. My brother and I stared at each other. My Dad knew right away he’d gotten it right, because we weren’t openly cackling at his wrong answer. He could not stop crowing about it.

I want to say that this happened no later than 1984 or 1985. For the remaining 25 or so years of his life, my father would NOT let that go. He made Pink Floyd jokes at any opportunity. The default thing to guess for any Trivial Pursuit question that we did not know was Pink Floyd. We gave him a Pink Floyd album as a joke. My brother gave him a Pink Floyd t-shirt as a Christmas gag gift. And my father wore it proudly, even on vacation in Greece. When he opened the box containing the t-shirt, he exclaimed, as he so often found (or made up) reason to: “All right! My man Pink!”

Though I am fairly certain that whatever afterlife there may or may not be doesn’t involve our spirits sitting around and chit-chatting with other deceased persons, there’s a part of me that gets a kick out of the idea of my Dad telling that story to Syd Barrett. Or whoever will listen, frankly. Just like I just told it to you.

Love you and miss you always, Dad. Give my best to Syd.

Check it out! All the way on the right! (Oh, and that’s a statue of Lord Byron or somethin’)

A few years back the plans for 2012 were different. My mother and father were planning a trip to the U.K. for their 50th anniversary, and I was going to go along to do the driving/hauling/etc. Since it’s also the year I turned 40, I’d have a milestone to celebrate too. Now it’s been almost three years since my father passed away so obviously these weren’t very solid plans, just in the won’t-that-be-cool stage. Also obviously, the plans had to change. Which is okay. That is often what plans have to do.

It later occurred to me that if I was very careful, I might be able to save enough money and enough vacation time to drive cross-country by myself this year. That, I told myself, would be a milestone trip. A journey for myself. I am extraordinarily blessed and lucky that I’ve been able to travel with my family as much as I have, and my parents have been beyond generous through the years. But there are times when we break away from our family in very concrete ways, and those breaks are important. Facing forty and after losing my father, I felt very keenly that I didn’t have enough breaks, that I hadn’t gone and done enough by myself. The cross-country trip took on a talismanic importance in my own mind.

Then Mom offered up a free trip to Hawaii. And to show how very solidly entrenched my driving-across-country plans were in my brain, I told her I’d have to think about it. So I did, and what I thought was, “DUDE this is a free trip to Hawaii are you insane? Drive across country next year!”

And so I will. And so I accepted, and we went, and it was awesome. It was a lot of things other than awesome, and here is where you the reader are going to wish I was more like Bill Bryson.

I took – and already shared – so many pictures that it started to feel almost mean. It was never my intention to make other people feel badly that they weren’t in Hawaii, but there is a problem, and it is two-fold. Fold One: When you are in Hawaii, you are surrounded by beauty. One of the most beautiful flowers I saw on my trip, I happened to find near a trolley repair garage in the grotty bits behind a strip mall. Beauty slaps you in the face and sneaks up behind you. You breathe it in and sleep in it and walk in it. I suppose eventually you might become immune to its charms, but I can tell you right now that doesn’t happen in two weeks. It doesn’t come anywhere near happening. Surrounded by all that beauty, and especially in the age of digital photography and smartphones, the only reaction is to take eleventy-billion pictures. And Fold Two: When you are not in Hawaii, and you see a picture from Hawaii, you are filled with a powerful keening urge to be there. It is especially bad when you have been there and can add in other associations – the smell of the air, the feel of the tradewinds – but it’s pretty bad even when you’ve never been there. In other words, our natural reaction in Hawaii is to take pictures, and the natural reaction to pictures of Hawaii is to be filled with crazy longing. I didn’t do it to you on purpose. I was compelled.

In 2006, when the family went on the Mediterranean cruise, I kept a detailed diary. It was Europe (“where the history comes from”), and there were things I knew I HAD to see, HAD to do while I was there. There was actually a good bit of (mostly self-imposed but still very real) pressure to make sure that I didn’t miss any opportunities. Writing down what we did every day was like a mental checklist. Today I did climb the Acropolis and see the Parthenon! Today I did see the Sistine Chapel even if I was a cranky old grump by the time we got there! Today I did go on a gondola ride in Venice! Presenting the evidence for my cultural case, I wrote a series of very long very boring LiveJournal entries to describe my trip.

I’m not going to do that this time. I have my photos to sort out the day-to-day. I had active days (Climbing Diamond Head! Snorkeling!) and not so active days (bus tours! Afternoons of hula lessons and reading by the pool!). I had great family times and stressful family times, as is always the case with long family vacations. I did get bits of alone time but also had the challenge of bunking with my Mom for two weeks, the last week of which was in a 170-square-foot cabin. (And she, of course, had the challenge of bunking with me. I’ve been living alone even longer than her and am in some aspects more set in my ways.) I have a lot of stories to tell, and maybe some will come out here over time. I’m sure to tell a number in person, complete with wild gesticulation (“Seriously, I was only THIS FAR from Scott Caan and Alex O’Laughlin!”). There are even more pictures coming, when I get the ones from the underwater camera I took snorkeling and the rental DSLR I had for the tour on Kauai.

I will end with a photo, though, as it only seems right. The hibiscus is the state flower, especially the yellow ones with red at their hearts.

You can kinda see why they picked it.

When I was a kid I got teased. Not bullied; certainly not in the way that today’s children must suffer at the hands of tormentors who can reach them not only in school but also online, electronically, constantly. (I seriously thank God the internet didn’t exist when I was a kid.) But I didn’t just get teased because I was fat, I got teased because I had a ridiculous overbite, and I was the first kid to get glasses, and the first kid to get boobs, and on and on. Mostly I think what that did was make me stubborn.

I’ve talked before about some self-defeating mental loops I’ve caught myself in over time. Here is a typical one, I think this one started in high school:

I sure like that boy. I bet if I were thinner he’d like me. But if that’s true, how terrible! I’m more than just what I look like! And so is he! If I try to change myself JUST for that boy, or any boy, that would be wrong! But being thinner would be nice. Because then maybe that other boy, the quiet one, he would…no! I am not dieting to attract a man! 

Around and around and around. It’s a nice idea at the base. But I think in a lot of ways it was an excuse.

There was no way for me to think of my weight without emotion. Either I built myself a shaky kind of high ground, as above, or I tore myself down and dug a hole. I did know, on some level, that it was really about treating myself better, not about numbers on a scale. It was about what I ate, not because “it’ll go straight to my hips!” but because what we consume is important. It is our fuel, and gives us the energy to do what we can with these brilliant flashes of life we’re given.

Maybe I knew that under it all I should treat myself better, but it still took a lot of things to start moving my stubborn mind. First there was exercise. Because, I reasoned not incorrectly, I was damned lazy. ANY exercise was more than I was getting, ergo I could add that one thing and not take anything away and boom! I would lose weight!

And I did, a little.

Then I got diagnosed with Type II diabetes, and met with a nutritionist. She was very cut and dry. “You need to eat 188 grams of carbohydrates per day or fewer,” she said. She also gave me pamphlets and a blood glucose meter and a lot of smiles and compliments, but she gave me a simple number to hold onto. Keep exercising, and watch only carbs. Simple! I’d lose weight and help control my blood sugar!

And I did! More so! I still needed drugs to help my enfeebled pancreas, though.

Somewhere along the way, and I’m not sure where, I realized that by treating myself better I felt better. I didn’t just feel better about the way I looked, though – I felt better about the way I felt. I had energy, for the first time in what felt like forever. I walked with a spring in my step, not just because I was toting around a few less pounds but because I was treating myself well. I hadn’t precisely hated my body, no. But I had been neglectful.

Still, the emotions and comfort associated with food are strong. I lost weight, and then during the summer and fall when my father sickened and died, I gained some back. Not all that much. But some. And then came that eternal winter, Snowmageddon, and what did I do to entertain myself those long, snowy days? I baked. Cookies, scones, whatever. And I ate. I took some to friends, and to work, but I ate a lot too. What a comfort, a cold snowy day and a warm scone. Or five.

(For the record I never ate five scones.)

(At one sitting.)

I gained a little more back. And I’ve been wobbling around on this plateau ever since, over two years now. It’s not a bad plateau. I treat myself so much better than I used to. And I have turned into a person who loves to exercise, even if people who buy that crap about how you can’t possibly be heavy and healthy at the same time wouldn’t believe it.

That plateau bugged me. Because it was my emotions, coming back. Not just eating my way through loss and loneliness, but grudge-holding “it’s not fair” emotions. It’s not fair I can’t eat like I used to. It’s not fair that as hard as I work out, I can’t budge that scale. It’s not fair that so-and-so can eat five scones in a sitting.

Right, it’s not. So?

A couple of weeks ago I finally got a new little toy, one several friends had first. It’s called a Fitbit, and it’s kind of a marvel. Daily, now, I track what I eat – not out of grudge-holding, not out of health-related-alarm, not because (heaven forfend!) anyone told me to, but because it’s fun! It’s like a game! The game is called, can you burn more than you consume? I get up and work out, boom! A tally of my deeds is presented to me! I eat a sensible lunch, boom, a tally of my sensibility shows I am keeping my equation balanced! There is even a certain pride when I eat a decidedly non-sensible lunch, because I am honest with myself and the tracker, and I can own up and say, “Hey, know what happened? The equation got a little skewed.”

I’ve lost like three pounds in three weeks, but that’s not what it’s about. What it’s about is knowing. And not judging. So help me, after all this time, reducing the whole thing to simple math might be the thing. Math isn’t judging me. Math doesn’t care how many calories are in that scone. It’s just a tool. So that if it’s working, I know why, and if it’s not working, I also know why, and can make changes if I want to. If I want to! I don’t have to! That little gadget is just as pleased as punch with me when I eat steamed broccoli as when I have a scone! Here is your number! Here is your tally! Here is how well you slept! Look, you climbed some steps, hooray!

Math. Math, a calmer mind, and a few gold stars. Who’d’ve thunk?