– In which Dorn is transformed by the pandemic in small but insignificant ways.
Overall, I feel that I’ve come through 2020 and the covid pandemic relatively unscathed, so far—if it’s been alternately frightening and boring, at least it hasn’t been devastating to me and mine, as it has for some. If my retirement travel plans and ability to see my family have been upended, at least we are still covid-free, and receiving our pension checks.
That’s not to say that the experience hasn’t changed me psychically and physically. When the news of the virus first came out in February, and no one knew exactly what to expect, and toilet paper and hand sanitizers vanished from the shelves of grocery stores, Kathleen and I went into zombie apocalypse mode. We didn’t seal ourselves into the basement (couldn’t—don’t have one), but we did stock up as best we could on survival-type items like food and no-fridge-needed milk, just in case. And why not? Who knew when next we’d be able to enter a grocery store?
We started on a diet regimen that, looking back, I see was rather spartan compared with our usual gourmand lifestyle. We prepared our meals with a limited palette of ingredients that were selected for hardiness and longevity rather than sumptuousness. After a few months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had lost a significant amount of weight. Bully for me, I thought. If I can keep this up, I’ll be at my healthy goal before the year’s out, without even trying.
But the hysteria and hoarding subsided, businesses reopened, and grocery stores perfected the art of online ordering and curbside pickup. Huzzah! We could now get most of what we bought before. So now, we could add a new activity back into our daily routine: fancy cookin’! You’ve probably guessed where this is going: since I wasn’t really trying to lose weight, and the external circumstances that allowed it were going away, by mid-summer I noticed an alarming trend. My weight was inching back up! If I didn’t want to regain it all back, I needed to get more mindful about my weight-watching.
Fortunately, one of my late-summer activities was to clean out the shed in the back, which had been gathering junk indiscriminately for the last 15 years. I’m not kidding, there was some OLD stuff in there. There was my entire collection of cheap tourist thermometers from around the world, and even an old 45 of the forgettable “Edge of the Universe” by the BeeGees.
(Children, by “45” I’m not referring to a gun from the Old West, but rather a data storage medium that went obsolete long before you were born. It was designed to store mainly audio data, and was in vogue about half-way between the Compact Disk or ‘CD’ (remember those?) and the piano roll, that rolled-up scroll of paper with holes punched in it that you fed into your player piano. You can still find 45s in use today if you look hard enough for them. Piano rolls too, for that matter.)
But more importantly for this story, I found a photocopy of a diet given to us by Kathleen’s old family doctor, Dr M—. This was so long ago that I bet that when Dr M— was just a young upstart, he knew a old doctor that claimed that he used to make house calls. (“House calls”, children, are another obsolete technology. They were kind of like Door Dash or Instacart, except instead of groceries, they delivered a doctor to you who gave you medical advice or treatment right in your home! You can imagine how long a business model like that was able to sustain itself.)
It’s a relatively simple diet, consisting of three days’ worth of meals, showing exactly what you should eat (do they even make saltines any more? Or beets?), and how much, and not allowing any deviations. I could tell this diet was a relic from a simpler time, because it said right on the diet itself, “This diet is based on science, and is proven to work.” Such confidence makes me nostalgic for the days when we had things like science to believe in.
In a shocking plot twist that I’m sure none of my readers could have anticipated, this story doesn’t conclude with me actually using this diet and re-losing all the quarantine weight I had re-gained. No, just finding the copy of the diet has made me confident enough in my ability to lose this weight that I no longer worry about it. Besides, Christmas is coming!
The next change in my story, though, resulted in a much different conclusion…
TO BE CONTINUED … Here!!!
Thanks,
Dorn
12/6/2020