Day 365

It’s day one, and already it’s a bit rocky.

What I thought was the usual reaction to airplane recycled air and cedar pollen now appears to possibly be a cold – can’t really tell, but it’s kicking my butt nonetheless. Tried the usual cold meds and it didn’t seem to matter (which it usually does), so maybe it is the darn cedar trees after all. Eventually plan to have many of them off the land here but more for aesthetics and their ability to suck up so much of the hard-to-be-had water in the area.

Anyway, the soup came out today, and it was pretty darn good. Not the usual homemade – this was a slightly modified dry mix package, but it was potatoey (looks like a word, doesn’t it?) and hot and good and with a few other veggies in it (celery, carrots, and, of course, the spinach my wife puts in nearly everything).

One of the problems here with getting more outside the perimeters of weight (you know, the low and the high limits we all set for ourselves) than I ever planned to be has always been that I look pretty okay, for the most part, from the front. The good Scottish stocky legs and my dashing good looks (Let me play a little in the fantasy - the fever has come back, okay?) seem to make me “Scot-Looking” if that too is really some sort of term). You know, the Mel Gibson image (plus a full beard and less the blue face paint, of course). But from the side, oh, yeah, that’s a little scary. Too much belly. Period. Especially as belly fat has been shown to be so detrimental to older men.

Mom was a little thing (120 when she was at the absolute top of her weight, and more like 100 or so virtually all the time), but I apparently got all of dad’s food-processing genes somehow as he had weight issues and I distinctly remember him working on them from time to time. His was a generation of old-time eaters, hearty breakfasts, substantial lunches, and big dinners, before the amazing amount of information we now have about what we should eat, shouldn’t, and might this week, but not next. Confusing? Uh huh. But I do know dad, being from southern Arkansas and western Oklahoma was a fried guy for the most part. I distinctly remember seeing him eating eggs most morning (remember – they were good for you, then not, and now seem to be again) fried in the grease from the bacon he’s already cooked. I too grew up like that, at least until I went away to college and discovered I could only afford to eat mashed potatoes and black-eyed peas if I wanted to pay tuition. Likely saved my life – or at least helped extend it. You’d be amazed how much I still like that occasionally. Sometimes when we are in the local cafeteria, I get both just so I can eat them together. And like many in this country, I never knew when I was a kid that we securely entrenched middle-class and thought everyone ate red beans and rice (or cornbread) at least once a week. Still like it and if that won’t pass for solid, good peasant food, I don’t know what would.

Dad (and mom) smoked, which I, luckily do not. Did a bit in college – the whole pipe and tobacco smell thing (mostly because girls liked it). Didn’t last. Too much hassle for me. So at least I don’t have to face trying to quit tobacco too, as I know how difficult that can be for virtually everyone.

Much of my exercise used to come from sports and work, but no longer. I mostly talk for a living now and spend long (and I mean long) hours behind a desk writing. By the way, the book I’ve been working on for over five years is nearing completion – it needs only one more slight correction to the manuscript to have it ready to “go out.” Five years sounds like a long time – and is - but there are two other books in the same historical trilogy and some middle reader books for kids and a play and a collection of short stories and did I mention I am slightly compulsive and more than a little busy?

So it’s now the second day of the year, and I guess for many, it’s “Resolutions” time. Not for me. Not this year. This is my journey and it is all I am resolved to do at the moment.

Oh, by the way. I lost dad in 1976 when he was only 54 – six years younger than I am now. Mom went in 1995, just before our wedding. The younger brother I have not mentioned as yet died when he was only twenty, in an accident. So I am all that’s left of the original family. That, and the love I have for my wife and the life I now have is why I am on this path. A friend who is a terrific and proficient blogger mentioned in an email to me after having a look at this “creation” that I was “really putting myself on the spot” and that’s true. But the spot now is only one day wide, and I’m doing this one day at a time.

-Average Joe
Somewhere, USA