Starvation
My father was seven years older than my
mother. They met when she was eighteen,
and married when she was nineteen and a senior in high school. It was 1934, and knowing what people would
assume, they slipped away from family and friends to get married privately in Pocatello.
My dad gave the Justice of the Peace an
extra five dollars to keep the marriage secret because my mother wanted to
finish High School and knew that she might not be allowed to do so if the word
got around that she was married. When the
two of them arrived back in Ogden they found that in spite of dad’s five dollar
bribe, the facts of their marriage had already appeared in the local newspaper.
It wasn’t long before word got back to
the School Board who immediately made the obvious assumption and ruled that my
mother would have to leave school. Knowing
that the Board was wrong, and hoping that they would listen to reason, she asked
for a formal hearing. There she stood, a
shy teenage girl trying to convince a bunch of old men that their decision had
been both wrong and unfair. Somehow they
were convinced and agreed to let her finish her senior year. I tell you all this to prepare you for my
arrival one year later.
My mother, still a young girl but now a
High School graduate, was preparing to have her first baby. And she was doing so with no previous experience
at mothering. She came from a broken home
with her only siblings being two younger brothers who were tough as Hobnails
and always into mischief. Not only did her
brothers feel that they did not need mothering by an older sister, they were
dead set against it because being chaperoned might restrict their opportunity to
get into trouble.
And so my mother found
herself with a brand new baby, me, but without any idea as to what mothers did. There was no Similac or baby formula in those
days. There were two choices, cow’s milk
or mother’s milk. They didn’t have a
cow, and they couldn’t afford baby bottles for feeding, so they chose mother’s
milk. As I grew and began to need solid food
the challenge to feed me escalated because I suddenly began to crave French
fries even though I had never seen one, tasted one, or even knew that they
existed. Beyond French fries and
mother’s milk I was excessively picky with an innate distrust of cooked beets
and pureed liver. Several months later, after
she and my dad scraped together enough money to take me to a doctor for a
checkup, she was embarrassed to find that I was malnourished. I tell you this to prepare you for my adulthood
several years later
I was
a cautious Engineer even as a youngster and so to make certain that I never
embarrassed my mother again by being malnourished I strived to be over-nourished. My diet included plenty of my favorite elixir
of life, French fries, along with hamburgers, milkshakes, and more than enough
sweets to make certain that my diet was well rounded. I became so nourished that before long I was
carrying 200 pounds on a 5’-8” frame. That
is the point at which Ann, my wife, became Ann, my mother. At first it was the simple things she
restricted like cutting back on French fries and milkshakes. Then she began to read labels and, like my
friend the Un-muddled Mathematician who collects numbers, she never saw a
calorie that she didn’t count. Then her focus
shifted to things like my favorite pudding and diet pop whose contents include hard
to pronounce words like Aspartame, Tetrapotassium Pyrophosphate, and
Phenylketonurics. “The evil deeds of
conspiring men,” she called them. My use
of multiple cans of diet pop for hydration bit the dust because it contains
Phosphoric and Malic acids which are bad for my teeth, she claims. Drink water instead of pop, she always tells
me. It is natural and is much better for
hydrating your body for a proper fluid balance than is diet pop.
Now she has a vendetta against Hydrogenation. Saturated Fats are bad enough by themselves,
she tells me over and over, but Hydrogenation also turns saturated fats into
trans-fats, which are bad for anyone’s diet.
Now I am afraid to tell her that water (H2O) is just
hydrogenated Oxygen for fear that my diet will be down to one slice of low
calorie, sugar free, gluten free, one hundred percent whole wheat bread with a
small glass of water. Without the water.
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