The Put Down Factor

Saw Swimming Studies on someone's must-read list. It's an interesting book by Leanne Shapton, an almost Olympian. What I enjoyed about the story is Shapton's devotion to swimming -- all the way up to her fascination with the Titanic disaster from the perspective of a swimmer.

Being a newer swimmer, I haven't spent time considering swimming-related injuries so I found the tidbit below interesting:

Freestylers, backstrokers, and butterflyers usually have shoulder problems, but most breaststrokers have knee problems...After workouts and races, I would sit in the bleachers with a styrofoam cup of frozen water, rolling the flat ice against the insides of my knees until they turned bright pink and lost all feeling... (4)

Shapton has illustrations of swimmers and a Smithsonian-like catalog of swimming suits that she once owned along with notes of where she bought them from and where she swam in them (Canadian Olympic trials, Switzerland). I like Shapton's portraits of what it requires to compete then later of her non-competitive tendencies:

The last ten or fifteen meters are tho most painful, physically and mentally. Muscles flood with lactic acid. Strokes shorten, weaken, churn, and find no purchase. It's a terrible, desperate feeling, where the results of training are determined. Not enough cardio and your entire body fails, not enough drills and your stroke slips, not enough strength training and muscles burn like paper curling in flames. (33-34)

* * *

I'm a poorly drawn jock. I suspect, these days, I am more suited to bathing...(288)

Swimming Studies is a bit eccentric but I was drawn in from the beginning and couldn't put it down. I totally related to Shapton when she forgets to pack her swimming suit and is at a hotel with a famous swimming pool. Been there -- not at a famous pool but leaving my swimming suit or workout gear at home because I didn't think I'd have a window of opportunity then debating about whether I should buy something new...

How To Say Goodbye

I don't do Weight Watchers -- never have -- for some reason but, of course, I saw quite a few posts about the new points system.

This title caught my attention recently:

Outrage: Weight Watchers forces us to eat fruit!

The company rolls out a smart new diet plan with more emphasis on health -- and a furor ensues

I really dug the ending of the "outrage" article by Mary Elizabeth Williams, a Salon magazine writer.

We have a lifelong relationship with our bodies, and like love, that relationship is healthier when we put good things into it. And like love, sometimes that takes thought and effort. Yet the basic notions of more apples, fewer cookies and stopping when you're full that Weight Watchers are embracing makes a lot of common sense. Common sense is still there in all of us -- right there in our guts next to the Sabor de Soledad -- and if we take the time to respect and listen that wisdom, it will reward us in ways that, unlike a weekly points system, are incalculable.

And speaking of Mary Elizabeth Williams, she really hit the ball out of the park with her article Elizabeth Edwards: Don't call it "losing" to cancer which she wrote yesterday morning before Edwards died and I thought Edwards' last epistle to the world was profound and I was deeply moved:

I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined. The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that...

What a gracious way to say goodbye; so glad that she had time...

A Charmed Life: A Look at Making Toast

I picked up Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt after seeing it recommended in O, The Oprah Magazine, I believe. I was pulled in by the synopsis. The author’s daughter, a 38-year-old pediatrician who had an unknown heart abnormality that people rarely succumb to, collapsed while on a treadmill. Rosenblatt and his wife, Ginny, move in with their son-in-law, Harris, to provide support for their three young grandchildren.

Sammy prefers whole milk in his Froot Loops or MultiGrain Cheerios. He calls it “cow milk.” Jessie drinks only Silk soy milk. She likes a glass of it at breakfast. Sammy prefers water. Such information had to be absorbed quickly. (6)

One of the most touching things that I read about in the book is that Amy and Harris' friends made a website in order to provide meals for the family.

Participants deposited dinners in a blue cooler outside our front door. Food was provided every other evening, with enough for the nights in between, from mid-December to the beginning of June. (7)

In addition to being surrounded by the love of family and friends, the family also has Ligaya, a nanny for the youngest child. She gives them her take on the situation as only an immigrant can:

“You are not the first to go through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most.” (8)

Ligaya is right. Harris is a hand surgeon. Rosenblatt is a professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University, Ginny is a former teacher and the kids have access to a grief counselor.

Rosenblatt talks about a road trip that the family went on when Amy wanted a plain hamburger from McDonald’s which made me remember my own requests for plain hamburgers. Actually, I have no memory of it but my family tells me that they had to wait and wait – just like the Rosenblatt family:

Since orders for a plain hamburger were not anticipated in the billion hamburgers prepared by McDonald’s daily all over America, it took as long as twenty-five minutes for the fast food restaurant to dish one up. (23)

When Amy turned 21, her mother gave her letters from 30 of her friends. Ginny asked her friends to advise Amy on the nature of womanhood. How cool is that?

Rosenblatt feels like nothing has prepared him for the death of his daughter:

Except for a few disappointments, probably less than my share, I've had a charmed life. I am learning what most people know at a much younger age -- that life is to be endured, and its rewards earned. (156)

There were so many touching moments in this book including how Jessie, I believe she's eight, is so tender with her two-year-old brother James. This part of the family story is only 166 pages but, substance-wise, it feels twice as long...

If anyone has a need, I highly recommend Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death and Dying. Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is another memoir that deals with grief. Didion and her husband were eating dinner when her husband stops speaking mid-sentence. Not only does Didion lose her husband to a heart attack, she loses her only child who was already gravely ill before her husband's death.

A poem that has always pulled me in is Grief by Gloria Wade Gayles which reads, in part:

I tell them,
"It's not my mind I have lost,"
but those who have not seen
the cutting of the cord that gave them life
cannot understand.

Cannot.

There is a female poet whose name eludes me. I've been wanting to reread her book for a long time. Her brother had cancer of the eye, I think, and there's one poem in which she talks about a doctor sticking a needle in his eye and another poem that says something like:

He had washed his last dish...

I am hoping that in the process of decluttering, I will come across a book review that I undoubtedly clipped of this book.

Hope this post doesn't come off as gloomy but I have a need to know how other people deal with grief. In addition, food memory also fascinates me...

I happened upon this article in Salon the other day. I swear, I didn't go looking for it: Building my father's coffin.

Where Your Butt Is Right Now

I have a half-filled journal that has inspirational quotes or portions of articles which I haven't laid hands on in ages but I went hunting for it this morning because half of the articles are excerpts from Anne Lamott's former Salon column Word by Word.

A Bad Thing Happened at the Beach

Diving Into The Wreckage

Into The Mouth of the Cave

Into Thin Mud

Jesus and the Lemon

The Things We Carry

I only cut out one line from her essay My Secret Body since I so related to that line at the time:

I was once again the world's oldest toddler.

This young lady, Ena, told me that Lamott would be in town. At first, I didn't feel like going but I've read several of Lamott's books and had never seen her before. I felt it was time to unplug anyway so I headed downtown last night.

The clergyman who greeted everyone to the Christ Church Cathedral was very welcoming. He invited people to not only look around later but to come back saying that it was our house and what a beautiful house it is...

Lamott is engaging and funny. She invited late folks to come to the front of the cathedral (with the other latecomers) saying that they could be closer to the M & M's and Hershey's Kisses. It was Lamott's birthday and I'm assuming the M & M's came with the balloons.

Lamott covered a lot of ground -- talked about three things she did to raise her son right (raised him in a church in the presence of multi-racial and multi-generational people, was sober and didn't get him a Nintendo) and she talked a lot about friendship and the grace of God in friendships.

During the Q & A, someone asked Lamott about her dimply thighs that she wrote about in Traveling Mercies. A light bulb finally went off in Lamott's head when she asked a dying friend if her thighs looked okay in a dress and her friend told her you just don't have that kind of time.

Radical self-love came out of Lamott's mouth a lot. I also dug other things she said:

If you're not okay at 180 pounds, you're not going to be okay at 140.

You're only going to be okay where your butt is right now.

I'm so militant about self-care and self-love.

Diets will make you fat and crazy if you're not doing the spiritual work.

Some days are just going to be too long.

I just want to give people my strength, my light...

There's comfort in self-love and there's comfort in quiet.

We are preapproved.

A woman asked Lamott's advice on how to help the people in her life without being completely drained. Lamott took that time to tell people that she would not personalize books. She said I have an old hand and if I personalize books, I won't get back to my hotel room until 10:30 p.m. She did tell people that they could write whatever they wanted and she would sign it.

Lamott addressed the woman's question by saying, in part, that no is a complete sentence and that so many sweet women get caught up in being the flight attendant for the world.

How do you take care of yourself and do you feel as if you are preapproved? Who inspires you?

‘Drea Minus 60 (Allowances Included)

It took me two years plus six and half months to do it but I finally reached my 60 pound weight loss goal.

My aunt Al, cousin and I were sitting around talking about weight loss. My cousin has recently gotten back in the gym and wants to lose a significant amount of weight to which my Aunt Al said, If I lost 50 pounds, I wouldn’t tell anyone.

At first, I thought it was the usual tactic of not airing one’s dirty laundry but I see my Aunt Al’s point of view.

Sixty pounds is a lot and it signals excess but I’m glad that I’m letting the excess skeleton out of the closet.

When the Bernie Madoff scandal hit, there was a great deal of commentary but only one essay, Geneen Roth’s I was fleeced by Madoff stuck with me.


In the essay, Roth talks about how 30 years of retirement savings went down the drain. She also talks about her decision to be a waitress and maid in order to buy time to write poetry.

Over and over again, I've asked myself: Why didn't I secure the most basic of all things -- shelter itself? Why didn't I pay off my mortgage? And if I don't engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more -- I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don't have, not what you have. My relationship to money was no different from my relationship to food, to love, to fabulous sweaters: I never felt as if I had enough. I was always focused on the bite that was yet to come, not the one in my mouth. I was focused on the way my husband wasn't perfect, not the way he was. And on the sweater I saw in the window, not the one in my closet that I hadn't worn for a year.

Roth’s essay moved me in so many ways but it was also a reminder not to excessively consume food or worry.

In trying to reach my 60 pound milestone during the past two months, I became aggravated because the scale would head north then south then north -- always one pound or two shy of 60. I couldn’t believe my tactics of exercising longer and drinking more water weren’t working. I knew that I had more weight to lose. So, why wasn’t it coming off? In addition, I was literally counting what I was putting in my mouth while making allowances for my recurrent snacking.

What I lost sight of in the last few months was the fact that I’m in great shape. I can tell by my 40 minute stints on the StairMaster. Before, I had to stop the machine and, now, I don’t need to take a break. I’m swimming more laps and I’m better at rock climbing.

I forgot that my body works superbly and has supported me with the excess weight and it has supported me as I’ve gone through the process of shedding the excess weight too. I have practically been on a non-stop regimen for over 800 days.

I forgot about the simple joy of being in motion and reacquainting myself with the athlete that I left behind so long ago.

I was also reminded to be grateful by several bloggers’ Love Your Body Day posts:

FAT!Fat!FAT!—it’s all talk

Exposed: Why I Love My Body

Hopefully, as I continue this journey, I won’t lose sight of the fact that I feel healthier and I’m in a good place – even when the scale is teetering back and forth.