Under the Oak

One man's worry is another's effort at improving life, a definitional gap that is broad, unbridgeable and worthy of fighting for.  It's worthy of standing your ground, phoning your doctor and making an appointment with your local dietitian.

Marlou was rolling her eyes before I rolled out the door.  Never mind.  Let them laugh.  Soon I was sitting opposite this raven-haired beauty in her 30s who is either humorless or used to being hit on and in no mood for jokes.  I was in a mood to lose weight and keep on losing it until I find whatever I'm losing it for.  What I'm losing it for is a youthful weigh-in around the 140s.  I was 158 when my doctor's nurse last put me on a scale.  Which was three weeks ago.

The dietitian began with a chat, an excruciatingly boring one, about my typical day's ingestion.  Let's start with breakfast.  Good idea.  Turkey on pumpernickel some days.  Hummus on wheat toast others.  I tried to gauge the impact of this disclosure.  Never mind.  We had moved on to lunch.  A typical mid-day meal?  Hard to say.  Brown rice sushi being something of a favorite, but often displaced by the likes of a sandwich, a luncheon plate of Kurdish grains, now and then Chinese.  White rice Chinese, dripping in cotton seed oil, billowing with cornstarch.  What did she think?  Well, it depends.  What about you dinners?

Snacks, it turned out, are okay.  Even advisable.  What sort of snack?  Almonds okay?  Ummm hmmmm.  She was something of a poster child for svelteness.  But adding things up in the ways of the male, not much of a bosom.  I compared her to Marlou and easily determined that mine was the better deal.

Is that all?  She was asking me this, but I was thinking the same thing.  Oh, I did have a confession.  Peet's coffee daily.  And not just any old coffee but a latte.  With milk, by definition, but whole milk by choice.  Plus sugar.  Okay.  Just a minute.

She produced what might be described as a pocket calculator, but a greatly stripped down version.  Just a few buttons, which she punched, glancing at a sheet of paper on her desk, rolling up the numbers, physiological and caloric summation on its way.  I knew there was a lot going into all this.  Probably a special numerical factor for the Little Fat Jewish Men, LFJM coefficient, among my forebears.  Grandfather Paul, Uncle Bob, little guys apparently determined to give up walking and start rolling pill-bug style.

Is brown rice a good thing, you know, better than white?  I had to ask, confident that women can do two things at once, which evolutionists attribute to the twin focus inherent in, say, raising a child and keeping an eye cocked for that saber tooth tiger.  Yes, brown rice is better.  More fiber, more vitamins, more appetite satisfaction.  A lower glycemic index, I added.  Yes.

The result: 1700 calories a day, more or less.  Depending on exercise, genetics and, though she doesn't say it, mood.  What about the pumpernickel?  I want her to tell me that this is the most anti-glycemic thing a person can do, fibrous, wholly composed of slow-take up rye flour.  Only just a bit rough and sour and, in some hard to explain way, fatiguing.  Yes, it's okay.

I'm running out of questions.  Except the general one about how I can shave a few calories here and there.  She holds up a plate.  It contains plastic food, like those permanent displays in cheap Japanese restaurants.  The salad, an almost fluorescent chartreuse, looks like it could cosh someone.  There's a chicken breast, breaded I notice, that looks alarmingly like it's frozen cousin.  She takes these components, rearranges them on a plate and shows me how to eat.  Half the plate should be vegetables.  I'm glad parking is free.

My car repair is also free.  I've been worrying about it for years.  Ford sent me a recall notice, at least 18 months ago, urging me to take my massive white van in for repair.  Something goes wrong with the cruise control, it seems.  Since I don't use the cruise control, this news didn't faze me.  But the NPR news story last week about the 60 people who had burst into spontaneous flame driving big Ford vans, well that had an effect.  Thus my appointment with the dealer.  I rolled out to the Palo Alto Clinic's parking structure, ascended in my hydraulic wheelchair lift, hit the ignition.  And hit a brick wall.  The car was making those anticipatory but incomplete sounds, straining and failing.  I tried again.  Now just clicks.  The lights didn't work.  

Fortunately my cell phone did.  There's a reason why God invented the California Automobile Association.  Be there in less than an hour, the operator said.  I told her I was trapped.  In a wheelchair, in a van, in a parking structure.  Are you in a safe area, she asked?  I decided to give this one a long pause.  Well...yes, I think so.  With Italian shoes marked down to only $500 at the shop up the street, the sale crowds could be dangerous.  The auto club woman said she'd send someone right away.

I waited a few minutes, realized there was no playing the radio, gave the ignition another go.  And the van started.  A quick call back to the auto club, and I was on my way.  A little late, but better late than never, cruise control immolation being what it was.  Driving north to Redwood City, a tail light in the car ahead of me glared.  It seemed to have extra light bulbs, maybe a laser or two, blazing in mid-day like a miniature supernova.  Excessive light coming out of things is a probable symptom of a brain tumor.  I decided this on the spot, no evidence to the contrary being available.  I drove on.  

In 10 minutes, I pulled into the auto repair place, a warehouse-sized chamber with floors one could eat off, staffed by guys in white coats who might have just scrubbed for light neurosurgery.  No need to explain that I was a disabled driver.  Just wait here.  I did, and in less than half an hour the offending switch of cruise control death was gone.  A new one was there, and I cruised away.

Home is where the heart is.  As for the iPod, I couldn't find it.  My middle-aged memory is so reliable that I have a set of rigid practices regarding objects.  One thing goes here, the other goes there.  The iPod with its own canvas strap goes around my neck.  Before going on the desk.  It wasn't on the desk, and I kept feeling about my neck, which contained nothing but my head.  Although that was in doubt, now that the iPod wasn't in the living room, in the bedroom, by the kitchen sink.  I rolled back out to the van, opened the passenger door and peered inside.  No sign.  I opened the electric door and looked on the back seat.  I went back inside, bemoaned my general decline and accepted this, the first sign of Alzheimer's or a brain tumor or both.  In desperation, I even lowered the wheelchair lift and ascended.  Inside the van, a suspicious wire trailed into the utility compartment between the seats.  The iPod had fallen there when I slammed the big glove compartment shut.

In the garden there was nothing to worry about but acorns.  The oak tree above has been raining them for months.  Now my lettuce was dotted with small red leaves, prickly ones, bravely ascending toward their parent.  I plucked out the embryonic oak trees, placing the sprouted acorns in the sun to dry.  They would make excellent compost.  All they needed, like everything else on the garden, was time and patience.