Quiet, Please - I'm Thinking

This morning, as I was silently eating cereal at the table, spoon in one hand and nothing in the other, not even my omnipresent cell phone, I realized I was actually lost in my own thoughts, a phenomenon which had not happened for a long time. I was thinking, actually thinking, all by myself, unaided by scrolling news stories or radio commentary, music lyrics, or television advertisements. That’s when it dawned on me what has happened to the world: WE'VE STOPPED THINKING! The deluge of entertainment has finally engulfed our minds, flooding our consciousnesses and dulling our wits. Predictably, chaos has ensued. Chaos everywhere!

I often think about how natural and quiet the world must have been before Thomas Edison discovered a means of recording sound in 1877.  Before the phonograph and the radio, which came along 18 years later, no one on the earth could hear music unless it was being performed live within the range of their own hearing. How remarkable! We’ve become so used to recorded sound that we do not think of it as miraculous, though it is. It is not only miraculous, it is omnipresent. 

Before 1877, no one could hear distant voices, except over the telephone, invented only one year earlier. Today we hear music almost everywhere we go. We can hear the same song played the exact same way over and over again, long after its performer has died. We even hear commentaries on sports and politics from people we’ve never met whose voices we nonetheless instantly recognize. We hear jingles that are impossible to forget, though we’d often like to. 

I often want entertainment, thought-provoking commentary, and news of events far and wide, but sometimes I think it’s all too much. Sometimes I’m glad that devices can be turned off and I can hear my own thoughts again. 

Good Ground

No actual progress to report on the weight loss front - but I do have a new plan. Enough about that already. I'm even tired of hearing myself talk about this most tedious of all subjects.

Who really cares how much I weigh besides me and a handful of people who are genuinely concerned about my health?
I don't like letting petty, vain obsessions take over my life. So I will update here from time to time when there is news, but I will now move on to other more interesting topics...

Like dirt. Specifically, the wonderful, intoxicating smell of dirt.

A few months ago I scooped some potting soil into an old milk jar to use as an object lesson for my Sunday School class on the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13:

3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;
4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, and the fowls came and devoured them up.
5 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth;
6 And when the sun was up they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.
7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up and choked them:
8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
9 Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

There are so many things I love about this passage of scripture, but for the purpose of this blog post, let me draw attention to verse eight: good ground. As opposed to the wayside, the stony places, and the choking thorns. We need to cultivate good earth in our lives where seeds of faith may grow into good fruits.

So I passed this jar around the class saying this is what good earth looks like and smells like. And I brought the jar home and put it on my desk, where I breathe deeply from it at least once a day. It smells like the shady woods after rain when water is still dripping from the leaves.

It may be the greatest smell in the world. 

Now back to the parable. Jesus's disciples asked him to explain it further, and this is what he said about verse eight:

23 But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also bearers fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

In a recent speech condemning the industry surrounding elective abortion, I said, "It is incumbent upon all who see the atrocity of abortion to denounce it." I said this on microphone at a large gathering at the Capitol rotunda, because somewhere along the line I realized not everyone CAN see it. Some do not have eyes to see it or ears to hear it.

So I ask myself: Do I hear truth and wisdom? Do I understand it? Do I bring forth good fruit as a result?

I hope so. That is my goal - and it's even more important than losing weight.

Food Fight #2 - Sunday Dinner

This week I made cabbage soup, planning to live on it for seven days. I thought it was delicious! Flavorful, filling, low fat, high fiber, nutritious, and yummy.

But I haven't been exclusive with the cabbage soup. My husband doesn't like soup. My daughter doesn't like the smell of cooked cabbage. I've been tempted countless times by countless things, but cabbage soup is really good and if I lived all alone in a vacuum, I might be able to survive on it for a week at least. 

Tonight we had beef stroganoff over rice with artichokes and Hollandaise sauce. Delicious. 

Sunday lunch is always a feeding frenzy after church, but Sunday dinner is always something special.  Funny how we get into habitual grooves with food.  

Food Fight #1 - The Fat Lady Sings...Or Will Sing...Hopefully....Some Day....Soon

Until entering politics a year and a half ago, I successfully hid my appearance from the world. Even in this age of social media, it isn't hard to do. Just substitute a "vintage" picture of yourself from 20+ years ago instead of posting a current image, and guard your "privacy settings" religiously to avoid being tagged in anyone else's photos. Also, make sure to keep your nose clean - you don't want your current driver's license photo to be posted on television and computer screens as part of a nation-wide manhunt. And don't get kidnapped for the same reasons.

If you do these things, you can control how people remember you - people you haven't seen for decades. This is the best way to preserve in their memory the skinny you, or the skinnier you. Also the younger you. And it won't shatter their illusions about what you probably look like now. This also allows you to imagine that someone somewhere remembers how you once looked.

I would like to say that I'm not ashamed of my appearance exactly, but I am, despite other successes. I would like to be comfortable in my own skin, but I am not. I am not even comfortable in my own clothes - I am especially not comfortable in my own clothes. And I want what I write here to be true. That's kind of the whole point of writing it.

I've spent most of my adult life trying to lose weight. I remember joining Weight Watchers for the first time about six months after our wedding. I've tried dozens of diets since while steadily gaining weight and almost never losing a single pound. But that isn't what this series of blog posts is going to be about. I couldn't care less about the mechanics of dieting, which is undoubtedly part of my problem.

I am not maligning any diets or diet programs. It isn't their fault - I'm sure most of them are sound and reasonable and work for some people. I've known all along the problem is me.

I am engaged in a one-person food fight. Without being overly dramatic, this is Mein Kampf. And now, for the first time, I am "coming out" about being morbidly obese. Of course that is very easy to do when your weakness is also your most obvious defining feature and when you are a very, very, very minor public figure known to just enough people to render you locally recognizable, like at the grocery store or the post office. It's like saying, "You may not have noticed, but I am fat, hugely fat. It wouldn't be polite for either one of us to mention it, but I am. Go ahead and make your judgments about that, and let me begin the process of proving your assumptions wrong."

I know this is how people think, because I am a person and I think this way, too. I see people like me at the grocery store and assume the worst about them in terms of their intellect, their living conditions, their education, their family life, and their aspirations. It's hard to admit that, when most of the people I've ever loved in my life have been fat, but I do have those biases, even though they are untrue. We probably all have them.

And I'm not going to defend being fat, or tell you there is something wonderful about it or that I am intentionally fat.

Though this is only a short blog post, over the years I've written whole, unpublished books and epic poems on the subject of my own obesity, hoping for a mental breakthrough of some sort. I've been immobilized by analysis paralysis. I've sought therapy. I've attended Overeaters Anonymous. I've tried prayer, anti-anxiety meds, tai chi, meditation, walking, biking, swimming, water aerobics, and tennis. (I haven't tried acupuncture, but it's on my list.) I've read dozens of books on the subject, searching for just the right insight that will motivate me to succeed. I've made myself checklists and kept food journals. On and on and on, ad nauseam...and it is nauseating.

I'm not saying that it is impossible for me to lose weight, because I am sure that it isn't. I'm simply trying to get some street cred here for having tried. You need to know that I have tried so that I can avoid boring you with decades of details.

And I am most emphatically not seeking sympathy. I don't want a doctor's note excusing me from gym class. I don't want anyone saying, "You poor thing! How awful for you!" Every enlarged fat cell in my body is the result of some edible enjoyment which I judged at the time to be more enticing than weight loss.

So for this first post on the subject (at this open blog) let me enumerate some of the "Reasons to Lose Weight" that I came up with this week. I have made similar, much longer lists in the past:

• To alleviate health concerns - fear of diabetes, sleep apnea, stasis dermatitis, heart disease, arthritis/joint pain, high blood pressure, stroke, edema, inflammation, cancer
• For longevity 
• For increased mobility 
• To give me energy and confidence for my re-election campaign next summer 
• To preserve my quality of life as I get older
• To demonstrate to others that you really can do this. It's some kind of scientific phenomena, not a mystical one.  
• To go horseback riding again - an activity I loved as a child and young adult that is completely out of the question now. 
• To enjoy bicycling again - another favorite youthful activity.
• To enjoy downhill skiing again and teach my children to enjoy it. 
• To travel with greater ease and less fear. (It's never fun to ask for a seatbelt extender or to see the reaction of fellow passengers as I approach the empty seat next to them. And it isn't fun to have to cut sight-seeing short due to fatigue.) 
• To meet my grandchildren and be a memorable part of their lives. 
• To be a voice for obese people, who are often marginalized or who self-marginalize. 
• To take myself and my dreams more seriously. 
• To gain confidence in myself, though I hope I never become that person who considers weight loss her greatest accomplishment
• To go hiking again in beautiful places 
• To gain self-respect
• To have more energy. (Imagine how difficult it is to do everything I do with a 200lb. person clinging to me like a ball and chain.) 
• To play tennis again without becoming winded so easily. Tennis is a sport I enjoyed in my youth and one that I could enjoy into old age if I were fit.  
• To make my dream of losing weight come true. 
• To rebloom, like a perennial. To be beautiful again, outside as well as inside. 
• To surprise people. No one ever expects anyone to succeed at dieting, especially when they are as large as me. I am in the "lost cause" category. Pass the creme brûlée. 

Six More Weeks of Summer

I realized one week ago today, the day of the solar eclipse, that I am kind of the seasonal opposite of Punxsutawney Phil, the prognosticating groundhog from Pennsylvania, but instead of forecasting how many more weeks of winter we must endure, I am speculating about summer and how much longer (*shudder*) it could go on.

As much as I try to love all four seasons (because how awful would it be to dislike a full quarter of the year?), I simply have never been able to enjoy summer much. It's blast-furnace hot all day, and just when it starts to cool down, the mosquitos come out threatening everyone with West Nile virus and spoiling the evening. Yes, it's nice in the middle of the night when it's cool and the stars are shining in a mercifully sunless, typically cloudless sky, but I'm usually asleep then.

I remember enjoying summer a little bit more when I was in elementary school and spent every free moment at the community swimming pool. If I got too warm, I just jumped into the water.  If I got too hungry, I bought something at the snack bar with my "underwater tea party" friends. Time flew by at the pool, and life was good.

But one summer hour at home is roughly the equivalent of a whole evening at home during the schoolyear. A teenaged babysitter taught me to crochet one summer -- a skill I probably would not have learned any other time of year. I read a lot of books and drew a lot of pictures and watched a lot of reruns of Gilligan's Island and Leave It to Beaver on afternoon television, but I could only take so much unstructured time before becoming listless. To alleviate the boredom, my family would go to Kansas City Royals games or pile into the car for spontaneous weekend road trips -- most memorably due north from Kansas City to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Ahhhh, I loved everything about Wisconsin, especially the cool, dense forests.

In retrospect, I've never really wanted to vacation on a tropical beach anywhere (though I have enjoyed such vacations.)  I've always wanted to go further and further north. Despite seeing wild bears everywhere (one of my phobias), I was perfectly at home in the Yukon Territory. Given enough bear repellant, I could easily summer there.

At least once every summer as a child I visited my grandparents and cousins in Quincy, Illinois, a town surrounded by cornfields on the Mississippi River. It has to be one of the most humid places on earth, with all of the corn "sweating," as corn does, and the deep, slow river evaporating. A short afternoon walk to Zim's for a soda or to Deter's for ice cream was made bearable by the shade of large trees. I remember becoming physically ill at church in Quincy because of this dome of humidity. The Mormon church in town back then did not have air conditioning, and a folded paper fan can only do so much to cool a body down.

I was home alone during the eclipse, so I took a break to sit outside for half an hour and watch the event unfold through a makeshift pinhole contraption that didn't actually work. (Fortunately my neighbor called me over to look through his welding helmet.)

While I sat there baking in the sun I realized how rare it is for me to be outside this time of year. I tend to stay underground, like Punxsatawney Phil, unless forced out by once-in-a-lifetime celestial events.

The bad news is, I saw my shadow, which may mean six more weeks of summer. The good news is that it will then be fall -- my favorite season of them all.

Grief and the Charmed Life

Souvenir shops everywhere sell charms, small amulets you attach to the delicate links of a bracelet to indicate where you've been and what you did there, or what you saw. The small trinkets dangling from the bracelet serve as memory goads to recall past experiences, each one telling a story lest we forget delightful vacations and events that we want to remember.

But what if we received charms for all of our experiences, good and bad? By the time we are old, our bracelets would be heavy and thick and we would clink and jingle with every movement.

All of the charms on our life bracelets would be valuable, but some would be more valuable than others. Some would be small and bright, the stories behind them easily forgotten. Some would be pure gold.

I thought of this analogy today after messaging with a friend who lost her healthy young son to a sudden illness. She will not need a charm to remember this experience, because she misses him every day. She struggles to live without him, and she knows that she will always struggle to live without him. The pangs of grief will likely become less frequent over time, but they will still come, unpredictably and with full intensity. This will happen for the rest of her life. Because of the loss of her son, she has become acquainted with grief, like the Savior himself. And while no one would wish to have a charm like that, it would be impossible to calculate the value of it.

Some quotes on grief: 

I walked a mile with pleasure, She chattered all the way but left me none the wiser For all she had to say. I walked a mile with Sorrow And ne'er a word said she But oh the things I learned from her When Sorrow walked with me.  – Robert Browning Hamilton

Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes. - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude. - Thornton Wilder

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life. – John H. Groberg

Moving to Mayberry

I’m thinking about moving to Mayberry. I’ve been vacationing there for years, retreating through random episodes of The Andy Griffith Show on the DVR whenever I’ve needed a different time or place or sense or pace. But lately, in the turbulent world of 2017 America, with no where to turn for news and fewer and fewer places to go for entertainment, I find myself going to Mayberry more and more – whenever I’m walking on the treadmill, for example, or sorting socks, or doing any number of mundane household tasks. There is something about Mayberry that is comforting and reassuring and stands in stark contrast with the modern world.

But, you may say, Mayberry doesn’t exist – and  it never did exist. It’s a figment of someone’s imagination. I know, I know, but now it is also a permanent fixture of mine.

I suppose the main thing I love about Mayberry is its people. They’re all characters in every sense of the word. I credit The Andy Griffith Show, along with Mark Twain, Harper Lee, and a few others, with my lifelong delight in quirky characters. And every character in Mayberry is mostly good.

Who could be more honorable and empathetic than Sheriff Taylor? More domestically talented than Aunt Bee? More innocent than Opie? More dedicated and well-meaning than Barney Fife? More long-suffering than Thelma Lou? More devoted than Helen Crump?

Even the show’s troublemakers are endearing, like Otis Campbell, the town drunk who lets himself into jail whenever he’s had too much moonshine.  Or Ernest T. Bass, the hillbilly who throws rocks through windows to announce his arrival in town.

I’d like to sit on the Taylor’s porch on a summer evening and listen to Andy play his guitar. I’d like to go to Wally’s Filling Station to buy a bottle of soda and say hey to Goober.  And I would be delighted to get a ticket for jaywalking from Deputy Barney Fife.

I never saw The Andy Griffith Show on primetime television, but watched it years later in after-school reruns sandwiched between Gilligan’s Island and Leave It to Beaver. Maybe that’s why Mayberry so imprinted on my brain. I must associate it with after-school snacks and perfect peace.

People often complain about the effects of television on young people’s minds, and I would agree that most kids watch too much TV and the vast majority of programs on television are not worth watching, but I am grateful that I paid attention to The Andy Griffith Show. Even as a child, I sensed that it was idealistic, but what is wrong with focusing on the ideal? The ideal may serve as a model for the real.

When the world of 2017 feels inhospitable, even acidic at times, join me in cueing up an episode of The Andy Griffith Show and feel the stress of modern living melt away.