KNEWSING 1: Fighting Food

I have decided that everyday I will respond to an article I read in the newspaper. Sometimes these articles will be front pagers; sometimes they will be paragraphs found right in the underbelly of the nytimes.com. I will read a different newspaper from a different city everyday, choosing something that stands out. It will be a combination of knowing the news and musing – I’ll call it knewsing. Why not? It’s also a way of opening up a discussion, so I welcome comments here, anytime, from anywhere.

Today’s article is from The New York Times. It’s called: Parenting and Food: Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever. By Frank Bruni
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30bruni.html

The article is about how to deal with your children and food – how to keep your sixteen year old from imitating the bulimic/anorexic model in the fashion magazines that sit at the check out aisle in the grocery store; how to keep your son from becoming the next case of childhood obesity.

Food strikes a personal chord for me. My father died of obesity, at 50 – a life cut short by too much eating. I myself went through a different disorder and almost cut my own life short by lack of eating. Food is something that I have hated for a very long time; fought with, Tyson-fisted. I have never been able to receive pleasure from food -- not the kind that soothes and eases, like the way the French eat, at Cafes, slowly. Or the Spanish and their Serrano, happily loving the fruits of the earth. I’m sorry for that, for that loss of happiness.

It's a happiness I channel by watching the food network and writing restaurant reviews -- talk about paradoxes and irony. I love doing both of those things. I love watching garlic sizzle on the pan on Iron Chef; the carots on the chopping block; I love writing about the way a succulent piece of broccoli tastes dipped in butter and coconut curry.

But it really is about so much more than food. My father’s appetite and eating was so much more than gluttony. Bruni’s article ends with a statement about the “mysteries of appetite.” And it’s telling, I think. This animalistic drive within us, like a pregnant woman who eats dirt, seeking minerals. The other day I saw a woman on the airplane, she took up two seats, and was so bloated I had the sudden violent urge to yell at her, while at the same time feeling like I should hug and ask her what she was really hungry for. What was it, in her, driving her to fill herself up to the extent that she got to the point where she had to buy two plane tickets just to take a vacation and fly back home to Tennessee. How is it that we have allowed food to stop nurturing us and start nullifying us? Why has food become something we fight instead of flavor?

Early Morning Elvis Blues

This morning on the plane back from Memphis to Miami. I realized my brain was working in starts and starts and particularly visually. Maybe because I had woken up at 3am to catch a red-eye. Maybe because I was looking out, above the sky above the clouds, onto a magnificent view of the universe.

I had this vision in my head, as I was god knows how many feet up in the sky, of a blue stove, crackling in rust, dripping, as if I were looking at it through a window sill during a rainstorm. Or, like its paint was melting off. Right on top of this blue, melting stove was an orange tea kettle. The orange and the blue were spectacular in the image, next to each other like that.

I think this has to do with Elvis.

Years ago, when I lived in a shit-hole apartment in Washington Heights, I had a gaudy image of fat Elvis in a blue suit on top of my fridge. I also had poetry books in the kitchen at the time, which is where I still think they belong. Blue-suited, bloated Elvis was in a gold frame. A couple of feet to the right, on top of my white, rusting, NYC-shit-hole-apartment-stove was an orange tea kettle I used to have (that I left behind when I moved).

Because I’ve been thinking of Elvis while visiting Memphis, I think these two fused in my head (the Elvis picture and the tea kettle), taking me back to Manhattan from Memphis on my way to Miami (which was merging with a Mozart soundtrack, because I was writing a book based on Mozart at the time I was living in Manhattan…a lot of M’s here, I know. I apologize). In other words, the blue from Elvis’s suit was merging with the orange tea kettle and the feeling of New York and of the kitchen poetry. It was making me remember what I used to think of as Elvis back then. I think differently now, but the image is still relevant.

Now, I’m falling in love with Elvis. Which is a good thing. It’s always a good thing to fall in love with people you are writing about.

Shrinking Pains

So, I’m seeing a shrink. It’s been about 8 months and it’s starting to get really hard. It was okay at first, then months rolled by and it started getting good, and now it’s just awful. I’m beginning to hate going and if my pleasure buttons had a say in it, this would all be over. I would sign out, say goodbye, I’d put my credit card away, happy to not have to pay for pain. Because the last time I went in for a session I left with an ache I couldn’t stand, it rattled around in me for days.

But, I guess this is what happens before you heal – these shrinking pains. The bones of all the past cracking and shaking before they disappear and turn to dust. Ouch. I know I can’t stop going. Not now. The skin is only starting to crack and I know there’s so much buried beneath it – canals and rivers. I want to be able to swim in them, bask in the sun, be happy in myself for the long haul. And so…on to the next session.

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”
- Lance Armstrong