Gardening

Becket remembered reading an entry in Kafka's diary: Gardening. No hope for the future. Becket wrote: At least he could garden. 
I smiled when I read that, which may reflect badly on my sense of humor. It should be noted that Becket found a modicum of happiness working in his own garden and wrote his comment when he was older and no longer able to work outside. Perhaps it was a mournful comment. For me it was wonderfully grumpy.
Rachel Maddow was being interviewed by Terry Gross and mentioned having been depressed since she was in high school. She said she has learned how to assess her level of depression and manage her life accordingly. She says she can't concentration so she tries not to schedule a guest for her show who has written a book she might need to read. I took something like comfort in hearing this. My first reaction was to marvel that someone with meaningful work, the respect of her peers, a relationship that ( if you can judge by photos ) is loving and mutual. (Google: Rachel Maddow's girlfriend. It's interesting. Apparently she is considered fat. She is both slagged and bragged about on the Internet because of it.) All of this "having" means nothing to a depressive.
I think that if you aren't a little depressed you aren't paying attention. I also think that depression is often an indulgence. A tantrum of sorts.
I've been depressed for so long I can barely remember a time when I wasn't. But I don't suffer it all the time. Most times it's a low dull buzz. I am lifted out of it randomly and usually unexpectedly. Small things. Observations.Good conversations. A visit from my eleven month old neighbor. A watercress salad with marinated white beans, red bell peppers and artichoke hearts. A new leaf on a house plant.
David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to Kenyon college articulates mechanics of narcissism in how we observe (or don't observe) our world and maybe even more importantly how we choose to think about what we observe. I reread it often. The section about the grocery store speaks loudly to me. I am a horrible person in a grocery store. Internally. You might not see it if you were there with me. I reread it knowing that he hung himself.
A few years ago ( hard to realize how many) I wrote about hearing Parker Palmer on Moyers talking about "negotiating the tragic gap." I was depressed at the time. I was aware of my own tragic gap. No hope for the future. I was clinging to the raft of his lucidity. Like I cling to DFW's lucidity. Like I cling to Rachel's lucidity.
Depression may be chemical. A pill might make it all go away. I prefer to rely on the things I listed. And I know that all of those same things might not always work.
Pain is certainly part of it. Every day there are things I don't get done because the pain narrows what is possible. Age is part of it. Politics. Too much media.
But I smiled. At least he could garden. I don't really know enough about Becket to know if he was being particularly sulky and petulant or deeply in pain. I choose to believe he was making a small joke. The kind of joke depressives tell. We know there is beauty and value and fun and love. We know that there are people with more difficult circumstance. We may even know the parameters of our own depression. We may have charted the place at which we have a right to sing the blues and the place where we have built a shrine to our failures and losses. We may own it all. Or not. We may weed the garden of our perceptions but the weeds always grow back.
I'm actually relatively OK. I can list my blessings and, of course, I can also list the reasons they don't help. I'm not suffering. At least not every minute of every day.
And. Ya know. I smiled.

Possibly Funny. Or Maybe Just Odd.

Last year I bought a scale. I stopped weighing myself decades ago because my teenage dieting years were so scale driven and obsessed. No matter how much I embraced being fat I found that a scale could turn me into a manic number checker. I only got weighed at the doctors office. Last year I decided that not knowing the numbers was as obsessive as manic checking. Hence the scale.
I hid the scale when Mom was here because she was already crazy about food and weight gain. She's been gone a few months but I forgot about the scale. The other day I pulled it out and the batteries were dead. I replaced them and reset the clock. Why there's a clock on the scale I will never understand. You can set a timer. Why? I dunno. But the weighing function still doesn't work. So now I have a scale that says I weigh 0.00 pounds.
Uhhhh....

Fat Like Me

 A few times when Mom was here she said something about not understanding why I was as fat as I am because she didn't think I ate enough to be to be this fat. Of course other times she said I was fat because I ate two eggs for breakfast. She eats one. I was recounting these conversations to Jane when she visited and she said she's never believed I eat enough to be the size I am.
There are two things that are true. I eat what I eat and weigh what I weigh so what I eat is enough to be the size that I am. But it doesn't seem like I eat that much.
I've met fat vegetarians and fat vegans. I've met fat people who aren't that interested in food. I've met fat people who feel food addicted and tell stories of obsessive and manic consumption. I've met fat people who love to cook and fat people who hate to cook. I've met fat people with health conditions that require hyper food monitoring. When you see a fat person you  DO NOT know how they eat. It is not simple. If I could make one difference in how fat people are perceived it would be to get people to understand this.
Sometimes when I read a new article about the evils of obesity I remember Eugenics. Science forms a hypothesis and then sets about to prove it true. And truth likes to be absolute. But fat bodies are not absolute.
There are truths in most ideas. I nod in agreement when I hear reports about hidden salts and sugars and the general horrors of processed food. I've seen the big gulp cups and the full meal deals. There may well be a general truth to if we are and why we are more fat. But it's not an absolute truth. It's not my truth.
For a fairy long time in my life I thought of myself as not like other fat people mostly because of the way I eat. And I've always walked. My working life was physically active for many years. I wasn't like those big gulp couch potatoes. But I am in one very specific way. I am fat.
I don't feel like I am unfairly fat. I eat what I eat and I weigh what I weigh. My life. My body. My truth. Being fat is not about merit or a lack there of. When you say nasty crap about fat people you're talking about me. Fat people who eat more than what I eat don't deserve your hate.
I wrote a post about my foodie identity. I love food. I love reading about food. I love cooking shows. I love cooking. My current obsession is kale. I eat huge bowls of it three or four times a week. Some people will read that and think something about the health of how I eat. Some will think about the pleasures of seasonal eating. Some people will be completely bored. Who cares if I eat kale?
Who cares if I eat two eggs?

Pain

I wake up every morning because I'm in joint pain. Mostly my knees. My fingers are the second most often. The other day it was my ankle and my thumb. The next day my shoulder and this morning my hips. I can stretch and shift my position and get some relief but most of the time the pain is louder than any alarm clock.
I'm in some amount of pain all day. On a scale of one to ten I'd say I travel from four to to seven. It can shoot up past ten usually as a result of movement.
My doctor and I have had conversations about all the kinds of arthritis and the treatments. The problem with drugs is the side effects. She gave me a pain killer that knocked me out every time I used it. We tried another that was a bit better. I take herbs and I have ointments and patches. Swimming helps. Yoga helps. There is a perfect combination of exercise and rest that works but is always changing. 
Cold makes it worse. Rain makes it much worse.
Mom being here has thrown me off. I'm either over doing or recovering from having over done. When she leaves I'll get some of my rhythm back.
It seems like the constant presence of pain makes me tired and unfocused and edgy.
And. I just felt like talking about it.

The Nattering Mass

Years ago, at the end of a visit, Mom brought me a stack of Weight Watchers propaganda and asked me to read it with an open mind. During the short conversation about why I probably couldn't do that she told me not to blame my genetics for my weight because ..."I've been fighting this all my life."
And she has.
I have early memories of her sitting at the dining room table nursing a glass of some kind of diet liquid meal while the rest of us ate.She did her last liquid diet under the supervision of a doctor who wouldn't do knee (Or hip? I forget.) surgery until she lost weight. She was in her seventies. I was livid. It seemed crazy dangerous. She's always talked about her weight as a success or failing of her own will power. But do not dare say anything if she's indulging. She'll coil like a cobra and hiss.
A few years ago I stopped plating her meals. What ever I did was wrong. One plate brought protests about too much food and the next was met with a fearful query about how much more was left in the kitchen. Maddening. She'd talk about too much food when it came to salad and pile a bowl full of ice cream and cookies after the meal.
Dieting makes people crazy.
I read an article from  the Times to her today. There's lots to like in it although it is written from the perspective of a fat person who does not want to be fat and assumes all fat people would rather be thin.

Nobody wants to be fat. In most modern cultures, even if you are healthy — in my case, my cholesterol and blood pressure are low and I have an extraordinarily healthy heart — to be fat is to be perceived as weak-willed and lazy. It’s also just embarrassing. Once, at a party, I met a well-respected writer who knew my work as a health writer. “You’re not at all what I expected,” she said, eyes widening. The man I was dating, perhaps trying to help, finished the thought. “You thought she’d be thinner, right?” he said. I wanted to disappear, but the woman was gracious. “No,” she said, casting a glare at the man and reaching to warmly shake my hand. “I thought you’d be older.”

But it does however document how complex fat bodies are and how the eat less/ exercise more thing is not as simple as it sounds.
The author wishes her mother were still alive so she could tell her not to blame herself so much. Having read and discussed the article with my mom I could tell her it would be futile. I don't even try to argue with my mother's desire to be thin. I am frustrated and annoyed by the daily accounting of how much she's eating and how much weight she's gaining. We've had so many talks about the holidays and as we eat up all our gifts and treats we get back to simpler eating. But a life time of denial and indulgence has taken over and all reason is lost.
Many times fat people try to talk to me about their diet successes and failures. It's almost like a code. A way of acknowledging the "problem". I listen to Mom confessing to her friends on the phone, my friends who visit, waiters and grocery store clerks, anyone, everyone.
I've seen this in a friend with no history of  weight gain. She's very health oriented. Lots of hiking and exercise. She's beautiful inside and out. And almost every time I see her eat something like a cookie she talks about it being bad. I've never been able to impact her thinking.
Out national dialogue about food fluctuates from hyper and dubious ideas about health to bigger and more food. Commercials for diet products are followed by commercials for fast food. It's been this way for years and years. My favorite commercial right now advertises a kind of girdle as a solution for unsightly bulges. I mean ... just crazy.
When Mom leaves I usually go through a sort of food break down. I come home from taking her to the airport and order a pizza. I crave bologna and potato chips. It lasts a week or two and one day I snap out of it and .... just ... eat. Eat. Not from reaction or in resistance but just ... eat. Nothing to prove or confess.     

The Light Guy

I sent this to the local paper but never heard back. I sent it kinda late for the holidays so I thought it might not get published. Ah well. I'll just publish it my self. 

“The black car is gone again. “

My mother and her mother before her were inveterate neighborhood watchers. They were not really gossip seekers; they were chroniclers of the comings and goings of folks.  When mom is home in North Carolina she and I chat on the phone. She tells me about who is walking a dog and how many birds are at the feeder. I did not inherit this trait. My view out of a window is rather more visceral.  I see colors and shapes and the passing of shadows. When Mom asks me who owns the black car I am at a loss. 

“What black car?”

If Mom is at my window it’s because she’s here for the holiday visit, which became annual about four years ago.  At dinner time I’d call her into the kitchen, she’d lean toward the window and announce with jubilation,” The lights are on! The lights are on!”  The first few times she did it I thought she was looking at the lights in the windows of other apartments and didn’t understand the fanfare.

There is a deck on the back of a building on the other side of the parking lot. Each year after Thanksgiving it has been decorated with lights. I guess I had noticed them but never with the joy that Mom took in their nightly appearance.

Last year, shortly after Christmas, I snapped out of my window stupor one afternoon and noticed a guy taking down the lights. I half threw myself out of the window trying to get his attention. “Hey! Hey! I want to say thanks for the lights! My mother loves them! “

The light guy smiled and said something about having big plans for next year.

A few months ago my landlord asked me if I knew that Donald Casper had died. I didn’t think I knew Donald Casper but he showed me an announcement on which was a picture of someone I recognized.

I learned more about Mr. Casper and his untimely death, killed by a hit and run driver. I learned that he’d been an active member of the San Francisco community, so much so that the flag at city hall had been lowered to half mast after his passing. I didn’t know that guy. Had we met, we might not have been friends.

When you live in a city you have lots of these kind of relationships. A neighbor whom you never meet but you admire the garden they’ve planted in the small square of dirt under a tree. A crossing card with whom you exchange pleasantries until one day she is replaced by a younger person and you never get the chance to say goodbye.  Relationships that live like small flashes of light that are only connected in random moments of reverie.  

I am tempted to resolve to be more like Mom and Grandmom.  But I know myself. The world outside my window is something more than scenery but I still don’t know who owns the black car. Mom is here for the holidays. I showed her all the articles written about Mr. Casper. We talk about how sad it is. And every night, when she comes into the kitchen for dinner I see her look toward the deck.  She is still keeping track of comings and goings. For us he will always be the light guy. 

Dr. Glenn Gaesser responds to Dr. Oz