I WAS A GRAMMAR SCHOOL KLEPTO

It's hard to know why a man turns to a life of crime.  A broken family?  Grinding poverty?  Hanging out with the wrong crowd?  Or maybe he's just a rotten seed, destined from birth to be a blight on humanity.

I have no excuse.  My family was stable and loving, we were solidly middle class, and my friends were harmless dorks.  The biggest hardship of my youth was hay fever.  The mean streets of Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Murder Incorporated were a world away from my idyllic New England home.  So I must have been born bad; nothing else can explain the reign of terror I visited on my second grade class.

It started innocently enough.  In the spring of 1957, my class set up a beautiful miniature farm.  It had a farmhouse, barn, and silo made from construction paper, and a large population of plastic poultry and livestock.  Within a few days, that population started to dwindle.

Why cattle rustling?  Because like most fledgling criminals, I was burdened with a first-class set of model trains.  My layout included a farm which was not nearly as well stocked as the one at school.  I figured that I would borrow a couple of cows and return them the next day.  Even though I forgot to bring them back, nobody seemed to notice.  That afternoon, I lifted three chickens and a goat.  I just lingered a while before heading out to recess, and when the classroom was empty, I stuffed them in my pocket.  As before, there were no repercussions.  Even my parents seemed oblivious to my farm's sudden productivity and my remarkable success at animal husbandry.

I grew headier with each heist.  I soon left the farm behind and started moving small school supplies - rulers, scissors, and the like.  But even the thrill of unlimited paste wasn't enough.  I got greedy.

As part of a science unit on weather, our teacher, Mrs. Pierce, constructed a milk carton anemometer.  We took it outside one windy day, and she timed the blade rotations with a gleaming silver stopwatch.  It was love at first sight.  I had to have it.

I spent that night in feverish preparation, devising a scheme so diabolical that Sherlock Holmes himself would be baffled.  At exactly 2:55 the next afternoon, as school was letting out, I asked Mrs. Pierce if I could see the watch.  When she left the room for a moment, I bolted.

Ingenious, no?

For the next few hours, I went into a timing frenzy.  How far could I run in a minute?  How long could I hold my breath?  What I should have been timing was how long before the jig was up, because soon after, I dropped the watch on the sidewalk and broke the crystal.  I could no longer tell Mrs. Pierce that I simply forgot to give her back the watch before I left school - the linchpin of my scam.  Despite this setback, I was determined not to crack, to play it cool as long as I could.

Which turned out to be not that long.  When my father came home from work, he found me banging my head against the side of our porch.  He asked what I was doing, and I said, "Trying to kill myself."  Keen observer of human nature that he was, he got suspicious.

After a call from the school, he had the facts but decided to sweat it out of me anyway.  When my father got seriously angry, he would speak softly and slowly, but with menacing intensity and volatile sarcasm.  He also possessed an extremely potent version of the hairy eyeball which could extract a confession faster than the Spanish Inquisition.

"I understand you got a stopwatch at school today."

Deny everything.

"A stopwatch?  What stopwatch?"

"How about the broken one we found in your jacket."

Oops.

"Where did you get it?"

"My teacher gave it to me."

That was true.

"Why did she give it to you?"

Uh oh.

"She gave it to me for being a good student."

Even at seven, I knew I was in it deep.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Deeper and deeper.

"Well, we'll just have to call her up and thank her for giving you such a wonderful gift."

He reached for the phone.  I folded like an origami crane.

"Wait a minute!  Let's talk."

Game.  Set.  Match.

Justice followed swiftly.  I received a thorough spanking, lost a few month's allowance to pay for the watch, and was forced to apologize to Mrs. Pierce.  I'm convinced that only part of the punishment was for the theft; the rest was for the dimwitted way I'd committed it.  My father, who'd led a fairly wild youth on the streets of Paterson, NJ, was likely more embarrassed by my ineptitude than my criminality.

And so with chastened heart and sore behind, my career as an evil mastermind came to an end.

NOW THAT YOU'VE LOST WEIGHT, WHO ARE YOU?

Congratulations!  You've made it!  There is no more glorious moment in life than getting on a scale after months of dieting and seeing your target weight in the window.  It's winning the Nobel Prize and heavyweight crown on the same day the Sox take the Series and Juliette Binoche invites you to bed (assuming you're a prizefighting physicist from Boston who's smitten with Juliette Binoche.)  Now that you've reached the pinnacle, what's next?

Start by soaking up some adoration - you've earned it.  Let words of tribute and laudatory speeches fill your head until it bursts from the pressure.  Glory in the discomfort of naysaying colleagues who once ridiculed your efforts and now betray their hypocrisy with oily praise.  Treat compliments from overweight friends with a shrug and assure them that they could do the same if they wanted to.  It's utter malarkey, but it provides them with a reprieve and earns you a merit badge in humility.

Given your accomplishment, you are allowed to do some bragging without tarnishing your halo.  This can be subtle and non-verbal, such as wearing tight clothes to your final Weight Watchers meeting, or more overt:

"Really, Officer, I was doing forty-five in a school zone?  Because that's how much weight I've lost."

Yes, revel in this moment because it's over in a heartbeat, and once it's gone, it ain't comin' back.

People will quickly accommodate themselves to the new slimmer you.  Their praise will fade, and as long as you stay at your current weight, it will no longer be discussed.  But there will always be an undercurrent of jealousy and a lethal lode of suppressed schadenfreude waiting to erupt the minute your self-discipline shrinks and your waist expands

After all, you're expected to keep the weight off.  All the effort you put into reaching your new size is now required just to keep you there.  The term used by the diet community is "maintenance," which is like referring to Marine boot camp as an invigorating spa treatment.  Maintenance is going to the dentist twice a year and changing the oil in your Camry.  What's demanded of you is a life of constant denial and perpetual vigilance, all without the benefit of friendly encouragement or positive reinforcement.  You're already trim; nobody cares.

Further, you've lost the support of your diet plan, that rigidly defined program that got you here, and you've reawakened those demons who were previously soothed by your overeating.  The temptations of the world didn't disappear because you were losing weight and righteously avoiding them.  Burger King flourishes, potato chips are as popular as ever, and Hostess hasn't gone out of business.  That sound you hear?  It's the footsteps of your old weight hunting you down.  Don't look back.

In short time, the joy of the new you is replaced by the fear of becoming the old you, and it's not idle paranoia.  You should be very afraid; the statistical rate of recidivism among dieters is somewhere near 90%.  And even if you beat the odds and remain steadfast, your anxieties will quickly spread from the physical to the existential.  For once the blush is off the rose, it's not so easy to figure out who the rose is. 

At the same time you were losing part of yourself, you were also losing part of your self.  If you were heavy for an extended period of time, it's likely that your personality and behavior were informed by your shape.  Maybe you were defensive or withdrawn in response to your weight, or you possessed an oversized persona to match your oversized bulk - the Chris Farley Syndrome.  As you became thinner, your need for these character traits also diminished, confusing your emotions and blurring your identity.  By the end of your diet, you might not know who you are anymore.

An old friend who lost over a hundred pounds a few years back, said of his transformation:

"Everything changes along with your shape, how you move, sit, get in and out of a car, and ultimately how you perceive yourself.  You're a different person, but that person is an alien, someone you're not totally comfortable with."

He eventually regained the weight.

If you're unsure of who you are, your friends and family are even more bewildered and often resentful.  You've changed the comforting role you played in their lives and taken away whatever superiority they felt because of your former girth.  If you were boisterous before, they miss your constant antics and bonhomie.  If you were introverted, they now dislike your good humor and optimism.  They've remained the same; who are you to rattle their world by becoming someone else, even if you don't know who that someone is?

Congratulations.  You've made it.

IN HONOR OF MY FATHER-IN-LAW ON VETERANS DAY

It's been just over two years since my father-in-law, Morey Hunter, passed away at the age of ninety.  During the thirty-five years that I knew him, he never once spoke voluntarily about his service during World War II.

For Morey not to speak about a subject was unusual.  He was a garrulous and highly opinionated man, operatic in tone and sentimental by nature.  Where family and close friends were concerned, he didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve, he gave it to you wholesale.  He was a tireless worker, a dapper dresser, a fastidious cleaner, and a rabid Yankees fan which led to some truly hilarious banter with his New England transplant daughter.  He loved to argue, waxing both poetic and crude about politics, movies, sports, and the quality of the fruit at various local markets about which he was more fanatic than he was about the Yankees.  But about the war, he would say almost nothing.

Because of his reticence, the details of his service are sketchy. He was sent overseas in 1944 as a radar specialist with an artillery battalion.  He saw service in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany where, being a natural if untutored linguist, he became a German translator despite only knowing Yiddish.  He arrived in Dachau the day after the camp was liberated.

If pressed, he would tell us some of the more humorous incidents that befell him in Europe - the time his rifle split during guard duty in a rain storm or the time his precious supply of canned tuna from home was destroyed by German artillery.  But even in these stories, there was always an undercurrent of the fear and brutality he'd experienced, the sense of isolation he'd felt as a young man far from family and home and in constant peril.

Only twice did I fully see the psychological scars the war had left on him.  The first was in the summer of 1999 during a family vacation in Italy.  We were driving from Tuscany down to Naples, the car ringing with laughter over some forgotten travel mishap, when Morey suddenly became quiet and withdrawn.  I asked him if he was okay, and he simply said that he'd been there before.  I looked up at an approaching road sign:  Monte Cassino.  He had been present at one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war.

The second time was in the spring of 2003 when Morey received a cryptic phone call from France to his Florida home.  Given the bad connection and his partial deafness, he couldn't understand much of what was being said but managed to get enough information for me to follow up.  The call was from a French family, the Merciers, who had befriended him and a GI buddy while they were stationed in Épinal after the liberation of France.  The father, Marcel, was a young boy at the time but had very clear recollections of the time he spent with the Americans.  In broken English, he wrote Morey the following:

"The last time I saw [you] was some weeks before Christmas and [you] should have come to dinner but [your] unit moved some days before...and we were very sad."

"Please [know] the friends who are dead for the France are not dead for nothing.  French people love their American friends...I wish to your family a good health and I address you my good and faithful memory."

When we asked Morey what he would write in return, he looked at us sadly and said, "I can't.  You write him back."  We were stunned and pressed the issue.  This family had gone through a tremendous effort to make contact; how could he not reply personally?  He got mad and told us again that he couldn't and wouldn't.  The pain of remembering was clearly much deeper than we imagined.  We never brought up the subject again.

Morey was among the fortunate who returned from the war.  He married, raised a family, prospered in business, and lived a full, rich life.  But it would be thoughtless of me not to remember him today for his service to this country and for the sacrifices he and countless others made for the freedom of the world.

GOOD BYE MR. CHIPS AND GOOD RIDDANCE

At the tender age of fourteen, I abandoned hearth, home, tube, and fridge and went off to boarding school for three years.  When I arrived at Williston Academy in the fall of 1964, I was a chubby lad of 160 lbs., but after three months, I was twenty pounds lighter and three inches taller.  The inches were a consequence of puberty; the pounds were victims of circumstance.

Before I wallow in the Dickensian details, it's only fair to note the benefits I received at Williston.  I was given a solid general education with a strong emphasis on writing and literature.  With no TV available, I discovered that there just might be something to this book-reading thing.  I also developed a keen interest of theater since the Drama Club was one of the few places a sports-challenged dweeb could meet girls.

For Williston, like most New England prep schools of that era, was strictly single gender.  Apart from plays, the only contact we had with women came during the occasional Saturday night dance.  These two-hour affairs were more tightly chaperoned than Sicilian mob trials and afforded all the intimacy of a subway platform at rush hour.  Your escorts were chosen by the sole criterion of height, and more often than not, this was bungled.  Many was the night I found myself dancing cheek-to-sternum with some mortified amazon from our sister school.  Prep school may have sharpened my mental skills, but socially, I was one evolutionary step shy of Neanderthal.  As a result, I spent most of my first semester at college gawking at female classmates like a randy village idiot.

The lack of women was only one of many rigors at Williston.  Boarding schools in the 60's came fully equipped with an exhausting and rigidly maintained schedule of studies, athletics, and vicious hazings.  There were daily room inspections, a mandatory dress code, and a dearth of fellow Jews.  Because the school was founded by a dour Congregationalist minister, attending chapel was mandatory six days a week.  To this day, I'm one of the select few of my tribe who knows the words to "Onward Christian Soldiers."

But those hardships were like a week on the Riviera compared to what passed for food at Williston, and I use the word "food" in the broadest possible sense allowed by the English language.

Meals were taken in a large communal dining hall tastefully decorated in Early American Penitentiary.  It could have easily been mistaken for Leavenworth except that the inmates wore blazers and sported more pimples than tattoos.  The room held fifty long rectangular tables, each seating nine students and one faculty member.  Food and drink were served in bulk from indestructible stainless steel platters and pitchers - clearly a time before Martha Stewart had any influence on "institutional" decor.

Like classes, meals at Williston were for instruction, not pleasure.  Apart from providing basic sustenance (dubious at best), the partaking of food was seen as a means to manners, civility, and restraint.  Since the actual food was merely an adjunct to these lessons, it was treated with the same joyless severity as logarithms and gerunds.

However fresh and savory provisions may have been when they arrived at the Williston kitchen, they were soon taken to task by the school's culinary Marine Corps.  Under the stern leadership of head chef Albert Boudreau, the staff didn't so much prepare food as beat it into submission.  Chicken was shaken down and bullied by these gastronomic goons until nothing remained but grease and bones.  Crisp string beans were strong-armed into limp, colorless straw, and potatoes were clubbed into mush right out of the sack.   Serving this stuff wasn't merely an affront to the palette; it was a violation of the Geneva Convention. 

Our biweekly "treat" of roast beef was cooked so far beyond well done that science has yet to find a name for it.  It's as if the recipe came from The Solar Core Cook Book:  "Place meat in preheated oven at 15,000,000° F and roast until nuclei are sufficiently fused."  The remains were then stored in steam chambers until the texture became indistinguishable from an all-weather radial.  Once it was certain no vestige of flavor remained, the meat was cut into thin grayish-white slices and stacked on cold metal trays.  It was served with a brown sludge-like gravy consisting of equal parts beef drippings, butter, flour, flour, flour, flour, and flour.

Another feature of the Williston dining experience was the requirement to wait tables for a three-meal rotation every nine days.  Apparently, it wasn't enough to be nauseated by the culinary horrors tableside, you had to witness first hand how meat and produce could be cruelly transformed into hardened criminal fare.  You also learned the brutal lessons of natural selection as you and forty-nine other crazed students fought with Darwinian fierceness for the clean dishes and silverware needed to reset the tables before you were late for class.

In such a place at such a time, weight loss wasn't a sign of deprivation, but a blessing.

OF GHOULS AND MR. GOODBARS

Autumn has arrived, and with it, crisp apples, fresh cider, and clogged gutters.  New Englanders are nailing Indian corn to their doors while the sound of metal rakes on sidewalks drives psychopaths to serial murder.  With winter on the way, squirrels scurry about, collecting acorns and storing them in secret caches.  For they know instinctively that in a few short months, these precious morsels can be sold on the black market at predatory prices.

The transformation of summer to fall has been a literary inspiration through the ages.  It is the basis for Aesop's best-known fable, "The Ant and The Grasshopper," which extols the virtues of hard work and decries indolence.  Nowadays, of course, the industrious ant would be laid off his job of thirty years and end up an alcoholic, while the lazy grasshopper would stash the take from his Ponzi scheme in an offshore account and flee the country before the idiots at the SEC catch on.

The joys of the season are many, warming the heart and delighting the eye.  Some revel in the excitement of old college football rivalries.  Others flock to harvest balls or take hayrides on moonlit nights.  For me, it's the sublime weather that puts a smile on my face, the chill, bracing air which prevents people who weigh more than lawn tractors from parading around in sleeveless Celtics jerseys.

But the true highlight of autumn is that time in late October when the wind turns bitter, and gloom settles over the city like a burial shroud.  No, I'm not talking about the Red Sox being eliminated from the playoffs, but Halloween, Christian holy day, commercialized celebration of the spooky, and pagan festival of high blood glucose levels.

Halloween is distinguished by the confluence of two powerful and mysterious forces - the supernatural and candy.  What is this cosmic connection, and why, on this one day of the year, does it cause a heightened awareness of the otherworldly as well as rampant tooth decay?

Few people know this, but the spirit world is crazy about candy.  Parapsychologists now theorize that ghosts are actually the souls of the dead who refuse to leave for higher realms because Junior Mints aren't available.  They wander the earth ceaselessly, craving the sweet tastes and gooey textures they adored in life but can no longer experience in death.  Dickens was wrong.  Ghosts aren't tormented by good deeds not done, but Snickers not eaten.

Once a year on All Hallows Eve, the spirit world attains the power to influence the living.  After invading the minds and bodies of well-meaning homeowners, these pudgy phantoms from beyond ply eager youngsters with enough refined sugar to make a black forest cake the size of the actual Black Forest.  The children then grow up to be candy-addicted adults, and after their passing, new soldiers in this portly legion of darkness.  And what weapons have we mere mortals to combat this evil?  Toilet paper, shaving cream, and eggs.

There are those who believe that jack-o'lanterns provide some protection.  Right, because nothing terrifies disembodied beings who exist beyond time and space like a rotting squash with a goofy smile.  Unless it's made of

chocolate, they couldn't care less.

There are, however, certain precautions which vigilant parents can take to minimize the dangers and insure that the holiday affords their children a bit of carefree fun instead of an eternity of despair.

• Limit the amount of sweets your kid can collect.  Don't let them go trick-or-treating with military issue duffel bags.

• Don't let them eat gummy candy with chocolate candy. Apart from providing a windfall for your dentist, this combination causes a heartburn that can bring down a bull moose.           

• Once they've finished their treats, tether them securely to prevent interference with incoming air traffic.

While I do counsel caution and moderation, I despise those health nuts who drop toothbrushes into treat bags instead of candy.  Back off, killjoys.  This is the one night a year when adults have no say in what children stick in their mouths and regurgitate three hours later.  Happy Halloween, everybody!

THE TEN MOST INFURIATING CLICHÉS ABOUT DIETING

Who doesn't love a good list?  Thanks mostly to David Letterman's "Top Ten," the list is fast replacing the expository essay as the literary form of choice for periodicals.  Everyone benefits.  The reader is spared long-winded explanations, grandstanding commentary, and pointless flourishes of style.  The writer doesn't spend untold hours worrying about structure, progression, or transition.  A short intro, ten zingers - badda bing, badda boom - you're done.

So I couldn't have been more delighted to find "Ten Secrets of the Effortlessly Thin" on the MSN Health & Fitness website.[i]  For contained in this one list of supposedly helpful hints are the most irritating and noxious platitudes ever uttered or written about dieting.  Even the use of "effortlessly" in the title is an affront to anyone who has struggled with weight loss.  If it's really effortless for you, you should thank God every day and keep your precious suggestions to yourself.  But since you feel that our lives would be so vastly improved by your keen insights, let's tackle them one by one.

They don't diet.  Well, "they" don't need to diet because they're already thin.  The explanation for this banality emphasizes the despicable, "permanent lifestyle change," i.e., eat better regularly and make more sensible food choices.  Yeah, and you'll live a lot longer if you don't get hit by a bus.

THEY KEEP TRACK OF THEIR WEIGHT.  That's because the scale is their friend, not an instrument of abject terror.  It gives them positive reinforcement.  It gives us nightmares.

THEY EXERCISE REGULARLY.  They don't look like the Hindenburg in sweatpants.

THEY DON'T SOLVE PROBLEMS WITH FOOD.  They don't have problems with food.  In fact, the effortlessly thin have fewer problems in general.  Since "the food won't fix what's bothering you," they suggest "going for a walk, watching a movie,...or taking a bubble bath."  I can't speak for everyone, but when I'm ravenously hungry, food works a lot better than lukewarm suds.

THEY STOP EATING WHEN THEY'RE FULL. They're full when they've consumed enough to satisfy their biological hunger.  I'm full when it would take an air compressor to drive so much as a single Cheerio into my body, and my pants are so tight I sound like Al Green on helium.

They don't surround themselves with temptation.  They're so pure that nothing tempts them.  For the rest of us, seeing a Snickers wrapper in the gutter is enough to trigger a binge.

THEY ALLOW THEMSELVES TREATS.  "A small but really delicious chocolate bar" may "put the craving to rest" for the saintly slender, but it incites me to clear out the snack inventory of Seven-Eleven.

THEY EAT BREAKFAST.  Not Denny's Lumberjack Slam.

THEY MOVE, STAND, AND FIDGET MORE.  If nervous energy provides such a great weight loss benefit, how do they explain the late Rodney Dangerfield?

THEY DON'T SKIP MEALS.  "Thin people keep their gas tanks [i.e., their stomachs] between one-quarter and three-quarters full all the time."  How thoughtful of them to clarify the gas tank-stomach conundrum; I was halfway out the door to fuel up the car.  But keeping with the metaphor, it takes a lot more gas to fill up my Lincoln Navigator than their MINI Cooper.

Please, just go back to living your naturally skinny lives in silence and leave us to our efforts in peace.

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[i] http://health.msn.com/weight-loss/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=100218116

VIDEO ERGO DEVORO (I WATCH, THEREFORE I EAT)

The recent return of NBC's The Biggest Loser has generated some interesting criticism.  Amanda Vogel, a certified fitness professional, has provided a thorough analysis of the show's training methods on the IDEA Health & Fitness Association website.1  Among the concerns of her sources:

“There seems to be no rationale for exercise program design. Clients are pushed to their limits, which places them at risk of injury and overtraining."

“Making a person feel badly about his or her effort, mental/emotional status or progress is not a strong motivator..."

“I believe [the show] sets unrealistic expectations for many people who have a large amount of weight to lose.”

However valid these complaints might be, they ignore one crucial but obvious detail; it's a TV show.  The categorizing of such shows as "reality programming" only confuses the issue.  Jean Shepherd, the late humorist, broadcaster, and social critic, had the most profound answer for those who complained that television didn't reflect reality.  He simply pointed out that it isn't reality, it's television.

Look no further than the show's use of the "cliffhanger" scale.  When you step on your bathroom scale in the morning, does the indicator swing wildly for twenty seconds while dramatic music plays?  I didn't think so.

The fact that weight loss is a serious concern for so many people only adds to the confusion.  I don't imagine viewers of The Bachelor really feel that withholding a rose is the proper way to dump a potential mate or consider the bungee jumping on The Great Race a normal component of foreign travel.  These shows are clearly contrived competitions manipulated for maximum thrills and with no long-range consequences for the contestants beyond winning a prize.  But the very real health risks of the contenders on The Biggest Loser resonate with viewers who then look to the show for personal guidance.  Caveat emptor.

And while you debate the merits of dieting as seen on TV, it's also wise to remember that watching TV itself can be major factor in needing a diet in the first place.

This issue is far more complex than mere couch potato syndrome.  In my case, the conjunction of food and television has not only affected my girth, it has influenced my personality, my cultural tastes, and my choice of profession.  It also explains why I whistle "Howdy Doody Time" when I'm hungry.

There is a strong elemental synergy between the tube and the fridge.  For one thing, they are both purveyors of the limited yet precious freedom afforded modern man.  Your TV may provide you with five hundred channels of absolute swill, but at least you control which swill to watch.  And during commercial breaks, you can run to the fridge and choose which swill to swill.  There's more personal autonomy for the average American in an hour of TV viewing than exists for the entire population of Albania in a year.

My own blurring of show business with chow business began in infancy.  When restless at night, I would be rocked and fed, but not to some old-world lullaby.  No, I was soothed by the gentle sounds of Jerry Lester and Morey Amsterdam on Broadway Open House.  The bottle-and-Borsht Belt combo was my first TV dinner.

During my grade school years, my bond with television and Twinkies grew stronger.  This came about as a byproduct of my early bedtime.  I knew that while I languished in bed, something was going on that was exciting, something denied to me by rigid and autocratic adults.  Through the bedroom door, I could hear the muffled sound of the TV along with my parent's laughter, and I seethed with revolutionary fervor.

My parent's absorption in their program allowed me to sneak downstairs and stock up on goodies.  Since I was a chubby kid, they severely restricted my intake of snacks but inexplicably, kept the house loaded with them.  I'd creep back to my room with enough provisions to last the siege of Leningrad, and except for an occasional telltale crumb, they were none the wiser.  Not much of a rebellion to be sure, but I was ten, and Holyoke wasn't Havana.

Eventually, unable to monitor my hours due to their own fatigue, my folks sensed defeat and eased the restrictions.  During school nights, I could only stay up until 9:30, but on weekends, I had carte blanche.  With this last concession, they opened up Pandora's (and Admiral's) 21" black-and-white box, and out blew the strange cultural winds that shaped my character.

Unencumbered by parental oversight, I watched TV until comatose, and consumed mountains of junk food with impunity.  The link was forever forged.   Happiness is a warm puppy, said Charles Schultz, but for me, you couldn't beat Steve Allen and Cheez Doodles.

---

1 http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/weighing-in-on-the-biggest-loser

BRUSHES WITH FAME: I BUMMED A CIGARETTE FROM A NOBEL LAUREATE

I've been fortunate in my life to have had several encounters with the rich, famous, and infamous.  I've eaten Chinese food with Joseph Heller, bumped into Abe Vigoda on 3rd Avenue, and was running camera on a late-night Boston TV show when the late Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics pulled her top down on air.  None of these, however, has had the lasting impact of my encounters with Professor Allan Cormack.

I was a student at Tufts University School of Engineering in the late sixties, and I use the term "student" in the loosest way possible.  I was convinced that my youthful fascination with tinkering and taking objects apart made me well-suited for the program.  Given my inability to ever reassemble said objects, this was perhaps a bit presumptuous.  The curriculum for all freshman engineering students included an introductory physics course in Newtonian mechanics which was taught by Dr. Cormack in the fall of 1967.

Almost immediately, I ran into problems - linguistic, ophthalmic, and sociological - none of which were the fault of the professor.  I was assigned to a lab group where the instructor had an accent so thick and indecipherable, he might as well have been speaking Romulan.  Maybe he was.  All I know is that it took most of the first session to figure out that an "offapackle" was an alpha particle, and by then, I had already bungled the experiment.

In those halcyon pre-Hewlett-Packard days, all experimental data and statistical evaluation was calculated using a slide rule, an ingenious but complicated device as common today as a chariot on the interstate.  For those of you too young to remember, it was an adjustable ruler with multiple scales and a cursor that you manipulated to perform various math functions.  Given the infinitesimal size of the scale markings and my abysmal eyesight, it was as useful to me for computation as a chainsaw for embroidery.

In spite of my empirical ineptitude, I enjoyed the lectures and had a good grasp of the theory, until the moment a girl with great legs and a penchant for short skirts started sitting next to me.  I spent the rest of the semester in a R-rated reverie while the voice of one of the century's great minds drifted like faint Muzak in the background.  Before Tufts, I had attended an all-male boarding school, and my social graces weren't fit for a Tijuana Bordello.

After three torturous semesters, it was obvious that I wasn't cut out for engineering, but in my clueless egomania, I blamed the subject.  The problem was that I was clearly too abstract a thinker for such a practical field.   Despite mediocre grades, I decided to become a theoretical physicist.  I met with Dr. Cormack who was the department chairman, and switched my major.  In retrospect, that was the task I really excelled at.

I don't remember much from that first meeting, except that he was a kind, down-to-earth man who didn't laugh in my face outright as he might have considering my qualifications.  We talked about the curriculum, and he suggested I enroll in his course on advanced electricity and magnetism for the next semester.  It was at this point that my tobacco jones got the best of me.  I asked for one of his cigarettes which he graciously provided and lit.  For anyone correlating Nobel laureates with their preferred cigarette brands, Dr. Cormack smoked Parliaments.

Advanced E and M turned out to be the most difficult course of my academic career.  It was only through his superhuman patience that I wasn't KO'ed by Maxwell's equations, and could get up off the canvas to earn a respectable B.  But I had stretched my science brain as far as it would go, and I knew I would never make it to my degree that way.  I swallowed my pride and told him I was switching my major to English.  As before, he was understanding and non-judgmental, and he wished me well.  He also let me bum another smoke.

Dr. Allan Cormack was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979 for the theoretical work behind CT scanning.  He died in 1998.  It was my honor and privilege to know him.

THE UNBALANCED DIET

The principle of moderation has been espoused by nearly every religion and philosophy, but it's most often associated with the ancient Greeks.  The temple at Delphi was adorned with the inscription, "Nothing in Excess," and I doubt many people would disagree with that sentiment today.  It makes sense, right?  Yet in the convoluted world of food and dieting, this simple concept has been overshadowed by theories of fanatical abstinence as well as their polar opposite, the embrace of gross indulgence.

On the "less is more" side is the CRON or Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition diet.  Based on scientific studies, this theory holds that a reduction of caloric intake by as much as 30% from the average western diet can lead to longer life and minimize the effects of aging.  According to various CRON websites, the studies that support this contention were carried out on monkeys, cows, rats, mice, fish, worms, and various insects.  One website (www.cron-web.org/) provides a colorful chart that lists the extended lifespan of various species on restricted intake.  White rats top the list with up to 14 months extra life, guppies get an additional 13 months, bowl and doily spiders pick up 49 days, and protozoa, 12 days.

This is wonderful news for anyone who has ever felt the pain of reduced rat longevity or lamented how badly bowl and doily spiders were aging.  Another article1 gushes about test results showing that mice "retain a youthful appearance much longer."  I'm sure this is a great comfort to my wife whose blood-curdling screams last winter might have been mitigated if only our rodent intruder had looked more youthful.  And remember, all you kids out there:  Withholding a few extra grains from the top of the fish tank might keep your beloved pets a few precious days further from their Viking funeral in the family commode.

Most importantly, we all laud the tremendous strides made in solving the protozoan obesity crisis.  What exactly scientists withheld to keep them svelte remains a mystery.

So much for creatures small and microscopic, what about humans?  The optimal.org website lists the following potential drawbacks to CRON:

- Feeling cold

- Having difficulty sitting comfortably

- Reduced libido

- Hating it

So not only does this diet severely restrict the amount and type of food you can eat, it also makes you cold, uncomfortable, sexless, and angry.  You've got to wonder why it isn't more popular.

On the "more is more" side, one need only consider the oft-reported expansion of the national waistline to realize that the world's largest consumer society is largely consuming too much.  Clues to the blubbering of America are not hard to find.

7-Eleven has done its part with its "Gulp" line of soft drinks.  These are fountain drinks served in cups with straws, not bottles meant for storage and consumption over time.  The Big Gulp holds a mere quart, the Super Big Gulp, 44 oz., and the Double Gulp, a full half-gallon.  A Double Gulp of Coca Cola has 744 calories and 186 grams of sugar - enough, I imagine, to bring on diabetes in a blue whale.  It's only a matter of time before 7-Eleven markets the Super Double Big Gulp, 44 gallons of your favorite soda served in a standard oil barrel.  It'll come with a straw, but you'll have to bring your own forklift.

McDonald's is also in an inflationary mood, moving beyond the Quarter Pounder to the new Angus Third Pounder.  I'm guessing we're about two years away from the Five Pounder which will be packaged in a disposable bowling bag.

Not only are we not ashamed of this excess, we exalt it.  Eating competitions, such as Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, continue to proliferate and attract media attention.  There is even a governing body for the "sport," the IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating) which supervises and regulates contests, and also awards the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt to the Nathan's winner.  I can think of nothing that would make a parent more proud.

The apotheosis of this trend is the Travel Channel's remarkable show, Man v. Food.  A burly New York food maven, Adam Richman, travels the country and takes on insane eating challenges, including a twelve egg omelet, a thirteen pound pizza, and a seventy-two ounce steak.  The show website refers to him as an "ambassador to all things delicious," but this hardly describes his noble stature.  He is a lone warrior in the tradition of the Homeric heroes, knights-errant and samurai, an Achilles for our gluttonous times who battles burritos and chicken wings instead of Trojans.  I love this guy and I love the show, but it may not present the best blueprint for rational diet and nutrition.

Can someone tell me how I get to Delphi?

1www.brighthub.com/health/dietnutrition/articles/23680.aspx#ixzz0PsApxdSz

THE GIFT OF SHARING

In my opinion, the three most unpleasant expressions in the English language are, "There's smoke pouring out of your hood", "Somebody from the IRS called", and "Oh, that looks great.  Can I have a bite?"  And frankly, I'm far more tolerant of greedy auto mechanics and rapacious tax auditors than of dinner companions who want samples.  I'm eating here, folks, not selling carpet. 

The first time I took my wife to a restaurant, she innocently asked for a taste of my Beef Teriyaki.  It required every ounce of restraint I possessed to smile politely and offer her a bite instead of stabbing her hand with a fork.  My suppressed rage eventually subsided, but I made sure my steak knife was close by in case she came back for more.  Over the years, I've taken fewer pains to hide my hostility

What's ironic is that trading food with my wife is a bargain.  She always returns more than she gets and sometimes offers a taste without demanding compensation.  I, on the other hand, require a notarized affidavit before I'll ante up, a pre-victual agreement with a penalty clause assuring forfeiture of the entire entree if the return portion is too small or not immediately forthcoming.

Now I'm no Sigmund Freud (I'm no Fred Astaire either, but that's another story), yet even I realize this paranoia didn't arise in a vacuum.  It arose at 45 Yale St. in Holyoke, Massachusetts where I grew up surrounded by my parents and older brother, the villain of this saga.

Western Mass. in the '50s wasn't exactly a culinary hotbed.  It wasn't even a culinary sleeping bag except for Mel's.  Mel's is a small Italian restaurant in Holyoke whose specialties include spaghetti in a spicy red sauce, meatballs, roast chicken, and...French fries.  Now I know that by today's health-obsessed standards, a dinner that includes both spaghetti and French fries is as unthinkable as a meal of poached salmon and motor oil, but back then, the greasy starch was a basic food group, as important to growing young bodies as red meat, butter, and Twinkies.

We would take out from Mel's about once a week.  I can recall few more joyous moments of my childhood than contemplating those two enormous meatballs floating on a sea of glistening pasta, with a hefty portion of my beloved fries on the side, steaming under a squirt of ketchup.  Then it would happen.

"Hey, Jeff!  Look at that huge dog in the driveway!"

Alas, I was the perennial sucker. I'd automatically turn to stare out the window, and by the time I looked back, most of my stash had disappeared. My brother would be in convulsions - half with laughter, HALF FROM CHOKING ON MY FRIES!

But even the biggest sap catches on eventually.  One night when I was nine, I feigned distraction and bashed him solidly across the hand with a serving spoon as he went in for the kill.  I didn't inflict any real damage, but the dynamics of our dining relationship changed dramatically.  Mealtime evolved from a cordial family gathering into a tense battle of will, no quarter asked, none given.  It must have been a remarkable sight -  the two of us sitting there in stony silence, eyes locked in a steely glare, left arm curled protectively around the plate, right hand clutching the fork like a shiv, just a couple of lifers in Alcatraz.  This standoff continued until he went off to boarding school, and I could again eat in peace.

But once you're accustomed to dining in full combat readiness, you can never fully relax again.  This is why I still regard every request for my food, no matter how innocuous, with suspicion and fear.  I'd like to think, however, that I've mellowed over the years and become a more genial fellow to break bread with.  I've learned to curb my more violent tendencies and conceal my outrage, save for a telltale blink or two.  As for my brother, we've since become very close and can now enjoy a meal together provided nobody makes any sudden moves.

MISSPENT YOUTH

Like all true Bostonians, I'm a loyal Red Sox fan.  I take pride in their successes, suffer grievously over their failures, and detest anyone who wears pinstripes.  So virulent is my hatred of that pattern that it extends beyond Yankee players to anyone sporting parallel lines on their clothing including train engineers and candy stripers.  If Mother Teresa had worn a pinstripe sari, I'd have booed her too.

I love going to Fenway and rooting for the team.  I jump up and down and scream with the best of them, cheering on our boys and excoriating the opposition or any official who dares rule against us.  In begrudging deference to Yogi Berra, I never leave a game until it's over.

And yet, I possess a certain animus towards the sport that I just can't shake.  Through deep introspection and extensive analysis, I've uncovered two possible explanations.

Ken Burns and my childhood.

My gripe with Burns is professional.  I've spent most of my working life as a television editor, and in my many years of cutting and watching documentaries, I have never been subjected to anything as stupifyingly dull as Burns' twenty-three hour snorefest, Baseball.  Employing a reverential tone normally reserved for Papal investitures, he smeared his Civil War paintbrush over the national pastime, obliterating every last bit of genuine excitement and color from the sport.  I mean, really, how many different ways can you play "Take me out to the Ball Game" in a minor key?   A complete hack could have generated more fun out of a ten-part series on crescent wrenches.

But this is a minor insult compared to the trauma that baseball inflicted on my youth.

There were other sports and activities while I was growing up, but none held the exalted boyhood status of baseball.  In addition to playing the game, there was the endless discussion of players, teams, and stats, as well as the constant buying, selling and trading of cards.  It wasn't the high-stakes memorabilia racket it is today, but many a tooth became cavity-ridden in a vain search for a Stan Musial or Moose Skowron.  From April through October, baseball was all that mattered.  Proficiency made you popular, ineptitude branded you an outcast.

I couldn't hit the damn ball.  It didn't matter how slowly it was pitched or how many swings I was allowed, my time in the batter's box was spent in utter futility and embarrassment.

I really tried.  I would hold my breath, tense my body, and glare wide-eyed and unblinking at the pitcher - more Marty Feldman than Mighty Casey, but no less determined.  It didn't matter.  As soon as the ball was thrown, it would disappear into some multi-dimensional wormhole until it smacked against the catcher's mitt.  On the rare occasion that I did connect, it was courtesy of the same dumb luck that allows a roomful of monkeys to type a word or two of Macbeth.

My problem?  Congenital Nystagmus, which, for all you Ophthalmology buffs, is a neuromuscular condition that causes the eyes to jitter uncontrollably.  Objects don't appear out of focus; they just dance around the visual field like blood-crazed mosquitoes.  As a result, my depth perception is on a par with a medium-sized plum.  I was diagnosed shortly after birth and began wearing glasses at the age of two.  During the "50s, it was the misguided belief of opticians and frame manufacturers that children’s glasses should simply be scaled-down versions of hideously ugly adult models.  In an era that worshipped DiMaggio, Williams, and Mantle, I could have been mistaken for Bennett Cerf.

My fielding was worse than my batting.  When grammar school teams were forced to include me, I was stuck deep - and I mean WAY deep - in center field.  The second baseman or shortstop would run miles to grab any fly headed my way.  My field of dreams was more like the Sea of Tranquility.

Finally, I gave up, reluctantly accepting the fact that this avenue to fame, fortune, and popularity would forever be closed to me.  My father made a valiant effort to keep me competitive, but when a simple game of catch resembles a medieval stoning, it's unlikely that pro scouts will come knocking at your door.  I put away my glove and became the youngest embittered cynic in the history of Western Massachusetts.

Forging an identity apart from sports was daunting.  I wasn't a gifted student, and my miserable eyesight meant that I always sat in the front row of class, a sitting duck for teachers' questions and classmates' spitballs.  I didn't have the smarts to be teacher's pet, and was too shy to be class clown.  My age and social background ruled out delinquency and petty crime.  And while alienation and angst were hot topics in North Beach and Greenwich Village, they were seldom discussed by the ten-year-olds who hung around the Coke machine at Lincoln St. Texaco.  The only beatnik we knew was Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis, and he was no more a viable role model than Nikita Khrushchev.

Ironically, while desperately seeking an identity, I was growing one.  My lack of baseball skills along with the attendant derision led me to disdain physical activity of any kind.  Spurred on by a twenty-three hour-a-day TV habit and voracious sweet tooth, I began to gain in girth what I lacked in self-esteem.  In sixth grade, I claimed the heavyweight crown of my class. 

From then on, I was "The Fat Kid," a role I coveted about as much as "Pariah Outfielder."  But a certain prestige did come with the pounds.  How many other boys my age had the stature to play William Howard Taft in historical dramas?   And while I was still shunned during ball games, I was in great demand for "Johnny-on-a-pony."  I couldn't lick any man in the place as John L. Sullivan had boasted, but I could do some real damage if I sat on him.

Still, the perks were few, and the bullies many.  Because of my size, I stood out from the other losers on the playground like Joseph Stalin at a DAR picnic.  And with the first stirrings of adolescence, I discovered that sheer bulk is not highly prized in romance (at least not in the Western Hemisphere.)  Today, unable to earn millions by playing a game eight months a year, I spend my time sifting through the detritus of a misspent youth trying to explain my dietary fluctuations and adult eccentricities - all because of that son of a bitch, Abner Doubleday.