Blue light ~

Posted on January 23, 2010 by K

It snowed last night.  I took the camera with me, hoping that this dawning might remind my eyes of light.  What I found the moment I walked through the door – the moment the sun crept over the lip of the mountains – was magnificent.  I shot what I saw.   Most of these are straight out of the camera – no fixing of anything.  It was hard to get my breath.  In the middle of winter and politics and money and waiting and aging and worrying, this is what I was given.

Now I give it to you.

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Dawn

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I kept trying to get him to look at me.  The light inside was low.  He’s blurred, but beautiful, and frosted.

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A deer in the snow.

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The sun broke through the storm clouds, then was swallowed again.  Looking south.

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Looking north.  Like a different day entirely.

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The sun, free again, and snow—beginning to form the wave once more.  Fences covered with snow cased in ice.

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South.

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North

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South

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Now the sun lights the north also.  And the ice crusted snow is full of diamonds.  Fences covered with diamonds.

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The odd texture of icy snow.

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The dawn, broken.

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Twin pines, perfect.

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Twin pines no longer in silhouette.  Flocked for real.

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Home.

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Belnaps’ ponderosa pine, each needle a white spine.

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Good neighbors.

Kent Taylor, with his grandson – he took the kid along to show him what it meant to do service for friends.

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John Marrott, who uses this little plow to free every un-manned driveway after every storm.

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The Stones’ house.

He is in his late eighties, but he’s gone this morning at the crack of dawn on his own plow, doing the same thing.  His trees look like crazy fireworks, or some kind of spiny sea creature.

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Home. Home. Home.

Perhaps there is a lesson here.

On my level—shadows, but above it all an unbelievable eruption of light.

Hope in the morning.

Posted in Images, Seasons | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

How Chaz flew ~

Posted on January 23, 2010 by K

My Chaz.  This was one fab outfit.  Sadly, I didn’t shoot the hat by itself.  It’s incredible.

I’ll put up more a little later.  We’re missing the boots, here.

Not the way I fly.  I prefer pajamas.

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Posted in Images, The kids | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Another fuzzy lesson

Posted on January 23, 2010 by K

Taught by puppies:

You can, as I have said, stuff two fat bones with cheese and put them down, each one in front of its puppy.  But only one will prove interesting; the puppies will agree to wrassle each other for it.  The other bone can languish on the rug, a foot away, totally forgotten in the heat of jealousy.  Their fighting is amazing—they have rules; they body-block.  They grab the bone out of each other’s mouths.

It’s all fun and games till somebody gets an eye put out.

But at some point, the dogs forget what they were fighting over; even the favored bone is forgotten—and at this point, the attacks become ad hominem.  They go for each other’s faces and necks, they pull out hair, they sink teeth into each other.  They are fierce.  So fierce, we have to wade in and remind them that they are brothers.

Just like people.

Fights escalate until the point is forgotten.  The debate turns personal.  The anger, the wit, the nastiness focus not on the issue, but on the person who is on the other side of it.  As though killing the messenger will change the message.

I become wrong, not because my reasoning is bad, or because my evidence is flimsy, but because I’m mean.  I’m a big jerk.  I just don’t listen.  I’m not educated enough.  I’m trailer trash.  I’m effete.  Maybe because I never returned your ladder.

Eventually, the pups will settle down, curl up and go to sleep, curled together in one safe, confident little mass of happy fur.  People have a harder time coming together.  Sometimes, they end up blowing up the planet.

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just talk | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Viva la

Posted on January 22, 2010 by K

And here’s another odd thing.  We watched the Polar Express this Christmas, a film I find both off-putting and oddly likeable.  The animation puzzles me—and my response to it is pretty well summed up by what I just said about the whole film.  Only I can’t put my finger on why it strikes me so oddly.  The people are too real, too round—but at the same time, their movement and line—too angular, too much of whatever style they came out of.

Tom Hanks showing up in thirty characters—strange.  Good thing he charms me.  But the kid.  All the kids, really—but especially the head kid; his movement seems so unnatural to me, the angle of his chin, his arms – the way he turns his head—and I assumed that this was just flawed and awkward animation.

Then the other day, doing the treadmill thing, I watched Second Hand Lions.  There I am, running along, and something about that kid was really bugging me.  Not that I didn’t like him.  It was just that odd angle of the chin, the way he turned his head—and suddenly I realized: this Haley Jo Osmet, he was the kid in the Polar Express. All that movement I thought was just bad animation?  He was doing it, down to the cellular level.

We did a little research, and it turns out that Osmet was not credited in the movie.  My only conclusion, then, is that they stole him.  He was a hot commodity in those days, box office gold.  Is there a law against stealing somebody’s posture?  Their movement?  Because the Polar people couldn’t have come up with so perfect a mimic any other way than capture. (Besides, in the bit of internet inquiry I just did, I found a page that juxtaposed one of Osmet’s younger pictures and the Sad Kid from the express.  They couldn’t look more alike.  So they stole him twice.

That begged a question: years after the Express was produced, I watch it, and am put off by the singular, odd movement of the animated character.  If I had seen it in the young Osmet’s hay day – if I had been familiar enough with him, would I have been more likely to find the movement of the animated boy pleasing by association?  Would I have noticed it, then, at all really?  Would I have been used to that chin, that turn of the head, and simply accepted it as normal?

Here’s where I’m going with this: movies and books date themselves when the creative people lean too heavily on current cultural stuff.  Like I almost wrote, “Let’s google it,” in this book I’m putting together.  But you can’t write something like that, even though for a moment it might make the book more hip and current and realistic.  What you can say is, “Let’s research it,” because people throughout the ages have researched stuff.  But if you mention the current hot tool – a thing everybody has heard of and everybody accepts as an Eternal Element of Life—ten years down the road, people are gonna say, “Wow.  That’s an old book.”  And wax sentimental about the old days of googling.

So, can animation do the same thing?  In taking a very current, saleable and oddly specific pattern of movement, did the movie target the audience of the time – but end up putting off the audience of the future?  Can personal movement be as marked an aesthetic or style  element as music or slang or clothing styles?

Okay.  So then I started to wonder—if you did a study, if you picked a dozen people off the street and did image capture on them, as specific and almost caricature like as this movement of the Polar kid’s—real movement, reduced to it’s basic line and movement—how odd and different would the study reveal our personal movement to be?

We’re used to summing people up by shape and size.  But movement?  I’m very intrigued by this.  And how many of us, our movement captured and grafted on to an animated character, would be freaked out by how we move?  Would it be like me hating the sound of my voice when I hear recordings?

I haven’t thought about this, about how a person’s movement is probably just as individual as the sound of his voice.  In fact, it was only a few years ago when I was talking to a friend, that I realized how different bodies actually are, one from another.  Yeah – height and weight.  But—I was parked by the little corner store, talking to Ruth about my car.  She was talking about how she had to sit too close to the steering wheel air bag to be safe – because her legs were so short.

But I can sit pretty far from my steering wheel.The thing is, she and I are about the same height, standing side by side.

Turns out, her legs are super short, and her torso is super long.  Like, if she had my legs, she’d be significantly taller than I am.  And I’d never considered that difference in proportion.   I think I’d just spent my entire lifetime assuming that human bodies had two legs and two arms and we were pretty much proportioned the same, regardless of size.  Frankly, the thought made me feel a little weird.  It also made me understand why some people love skiing and some people just crash on their behinds – it isn’t necessarily just training or talent – it’s distribution of weight, length of bone – it’s how well the skeleton is designed for the stresses and demands and counter-balances of skiing.

I don’t know about you.  Maybe I’m just really slow.  But this was a revelation to me.  White, black, red, tall, short, yellow, fat, thin – these are such over-simplifications of our differences, I don’t know how they ever became that significant.  We are amazingly the same, but astonishingly different.  Snowflakes are nothing to us.

Am I the only person to find this interesting?

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just talk, Making Things, The outside world | Tagged , , | 16 Comments

The kind of people we are~

Posted on January 21, 2010 by K

Kids figure things out by induction. Their picture of the world is so small, their experience episodic.  All they can do, really, is extrapolate from the things they observe in a tiny corner of reality.  And they categorize from the beginning: first categories?  Things that give them pleasure—things that, by absence, give them discomfort.

As kids figure out life, slapping themselves in the face with their own hands, watching people jump and run when they cry, noting changes in the voices around them, they build a picture of the structure of the world: this works; this doesn’t.

And gradually, they work out kinds.

I’m just thinking this through, because I’m pretty sure I’m still unwittingly seeing a lot of things from that basic lattice of understanding, built from the beginning.

I am the kind of kid who’s always the root of the trouble. The kind who is pretty smart, but not brilliant.  The kind who loves Halloween (in spite of the scratchy, flimsy fabrics and the musty smell of costumes), and Easter and tradition.  The kind who bonds with Christmas trees.  The reader.  The talker.  The horse lover.  The kind who always answers the questions in class – all the questions—but not (duh) the popular kind.  I am not the kind who ends up rich, buys “outfits,” wears make-up, cooks, drives a new car.

My sister was the kind of kid everybody loved.  The quiet kind.  The kind who takes care of things.

Our family: the kinds of people who speak French (except for mom – and my sister and brother).  Who don’t put up Christmas lights outside.  Who always pay the bills on time.  Who moved all over the country, and so were never close to family (vacation visits, yes).  We were the vacation kind—camping, mostly.  So, the camping kind.  But not the woodsy kind.

Middle-class.  Educated.  Philosophical.  Church-going, but far more intellectual than emotional about it.  Honest.  Straight-shooting.  Tea-totalling. Musical.  Practical.  We didn’t waste anything.  But we laughed a lot.  We were the laughing, singing, playing games kind.  The piano kind.  The grassy yard kind.  The handyman kind.  The capable kind.  Not the entertaining, quirky, fancy-at-all kind.  Or the brawling, yelling, name-calling kind.

My parents were definitely the plain, straight-forward, good, strong, dependable parent kind—with a shot of whimsy on my dad’s side.

How much of what we end up becoming is couched in those early self-concepts?  I remember, working for my dentist one year, how wowed I was when I found my parents’ ledger entry (wisdom teeth removed before I started working there – on my parents’ dime): not only were we the bill paying kind; they actually did pay their bills.  On time.  Cash on the barrel-head.  So we evidently were also the WYSIWYG kind.

That’s what my folks were.  That’s the slot I settled into.  That’s the kind I’ve been becoming—fulfilling my destiny?  Or just being true to those early self-concepts?  Is it built in to the wiring? Nature or nurture?  Am I limited by this?  Or made free to focus?  Did I choose it?  Would I—the me separate from my genes and my upbringing—choose it, all things being equal?  I think I would, but is that because I already have?

And how many of my emotional responses to other people are based on similar early assessments?  I think most of the “kinds” in my head have mostly to do with behavior.  I never had any skin color “kinds,” or ethnic or chauvinistic ones—until the huge race riot at my HS, back in the sixties—even having travelled in France, with all it’s reputation for unfriendliness to strangers.  But even then, all reassessments concerned behavior—the kind of people who beat up other people.  The kind of people who stay after school to scrub the paint off the walls.  The kind of people who will listen patiently to an idiot who cannot speak well enough to make herself understood.  I’ve had to fight some of my ‘60s assumptions about police and military—so I know that I’m revisiting things, at least often enough to be able to revise.  But I worry about what drawers I haven’t had reason to clean out.

She is the kind who takes food to sick neighbors.  She is the kind who gets her nails done to match her clothes.  She’s the kind who gets her hair done every week.  Or who gossips.  Or who calls and talks for hours.  Or who is the go-to woman.  Or who listens and never repeats.  The kind of person who drives the speed limit, or only exceeds it by five miles an hour, or who doesn’t give a hang as long as she gets where she’s going?

One of my grandmothers, who worked all the time I knew her, could run an office, but was silly beyond belief.  She was heavy and wore serious make-up (which is one reason I don’t wear it often), she wore dentures and a girdle, and she smoked all the time.  How many “kinds” are in my head because of my years sharing a house with her?  Or my other grandmother, the kind of woman who never learned to drive, never worked, to whom the country club was deeply important, who never went on vacation the entire time I knew her and wore proper, pressed housedresses, always with light socks and shoes.

There are patterns, aren’t there?  I think I see them.  I’m pretty sure they’re there.  And I’m pretty sure they are, at least to a measure, predictive.

So what kind of person are you?  The kind who puts lights on the house at Christmas?  One string?  Billions of strings?  I know we do choose some of it, because G and I are both definitely the kind who hang lights, even though both of us came from dark houses.

If you have kids—living with you, what kind will they see as themselves?

If you have friends, will they influence the kind you think you are?

If you had to put one phrase on yourself (which you can’t), what would it be:

I am the kind of person who . . .

Loves?  Hopes?  Explores?  Fights for?  Fights against? Breathes?  Flies?  Votes?  Travels?  Stands for something?

Or is there just no pat “kind” for you at all?

?

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just talk | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Forget Balance

Posted on January 20, 2010 by K

I went to Costco today and bought only the thing I went there to buy.  (Puppy food)

I want a prize.  A great big, first time prize.

When I came home, G said, “And did you remember the toilet paper?”

No prize.

—–=0=—–

When you are cleaning the shower, be careful that when you reach for the Tilex mildew spray (I will not tell you why), you don’t end up grabbing the Lime-away instead.  They don’t work the same way. Especially on paint.

Be warned: the dang shower curtain will fall on your head three times.  One time, part of the assembly will land in the toilet. (I did not take pictures.)

My suggestion: forget the cleaning.

Do something that makes you feel good about your life instead.

Posted in Just talk | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Ahhh-balance~

Posted on January 20, 2010 by K

May I say how excited I am with the results of the election in Massachusetts yesterday? Sort of.

Happiness: I find it terribly disturbing when any one group in a government that is supposed to be answerable to the people – all of the people – has a “super majority.”  Too much power.  Not enough real debate.  We benefit one another when we have to talk things through and compromise.  When we have to listen to each other thoughtfully, we temper each other.  Even when my pride is involved, I like to be shown another way of seeing things, because there are ALWAYS things I’ve missed in my favored point of view.

Sort of: of course, it had to be some idiot who posed butt-naked in a cheap rag of a stupid women’s magazine.  I was hoping we would improve on the moral behavior of the previous owner of that seat.  But no.  Not a respectable, sensible man with solid values.  A male model.  So in many ways, we’ve just taken another step down the path of intellectual and spiritual decay.  Oh, joy.  Another idiot in congress.

And yes, I know it’s Cosmo I’m talking about.  I chose my epithet with care.

Addendum: G googled the guy.  His stint as a naked man evidently took place when he was in his early twenties.  He’s fifty now.  This does not mean he is still not a naked man – but he’s also served his time in the military and has other good credits to his name.  I do wonder how many people actually knew anything more about him when they voted than the fact that he was not a Democrat and that he did not support the health care legislation.  The vote was, in my opinion, an expression of the frustration of the actual people who live in this country and have been sitting helpless by as the government has been re-shaped right in front of them.

I am an independent.  I vote my conscience.  But I would have voted for a flipping horse as long as it meant that we could come closer to balance in the legislature and the gov as a whole.

PS.

So I heard about the truck.  Mr. Brown drives a pickup truck with over 200K miles on it.  I’m sure he does it with his clothes on.  And now I’m beginning to feel better about him.  Politicians in fancy cars raise my hackles.  But a man who drives a truck that long?  I’m re-thinking this thing.  And Mr. Obama does not respect this?

Posted in IMENHO (Evidently not humble), Just talk, The outside world | Tagged | 8 Comments

Building the stable

Posted on January 19, 2010 by K

We don’t sleep. G is camping out on the floor of the living room because Skye is now limited to living in the front hall, the only room with a dependably impermeable floor, until we can get a handle on his incontinence.  G tries to wake up every time Skye needs to go out.  But spends half the night Lysol-ing the floor in his jammies.

My job is the surgery twins.  Stripped of their manhood (and for some reason, suddenly lifting their legs to mark things????), the Terrible Two did not sleep through the night last night, but required “OUT” three times, which means lifting them over all the Skye gates before we can get to the back door.

All of this on top of the doctor bill for the surgery and $150 worth of meds for Piper’s weight and dry eyes.

Were you thinking of getting a dog?

Presently, all are sleeping.  So why aren’t I?

Okay, I snuck in that stuff above here because I don’t want you to think this post is about dogs either.  This post is about knitting.  First Rachel decided to take up knitting and took a class from Heindselman’s (oldest yarn shop in America and probably misspelled), then I found Little Cotton Rabbits , then I started looking around Etsy for knitted animals and found —HORSES— and then patterns for everything BUT horses.  Then I started buying books of really cool knitting stuff, including the weird Japanese art of knitting animals you’ve never even heard of outside of Discovery Channel and books mostly written by Danish people, translated (badly, some of them) into English (knitting English, which is arcane to say the least).  I found three major horse patterns, made all of them, and have been experimenting ever since, trying to come up with a pattern for myself, cobbled (love that word) out of all the stuff I’ve been learning.

In sewing you deal with bias and its effect on shape – not so much with quilting, but with clothes.  And I’ve been interested in making stuffed fabric animals for some time (without ever managing to get past the buying books about it part).  But knitting is a whole nother ball game.  Not woven.  Like repetitive tiny macrame, sort of.  But you end up with a fabric, and you end up with a bias.  I’ve taken to making little bitty horses so as not to waste yarn or time (time – HA, same number of stitches, just smaller needles), and so I thought I’d show you what I’ve come up with.

Dick and Gordon, you don’t have to look.  Everybody else has to.  Pretty soon I will be posting the pattern on here and explaining why I did what I did.  Nobody has to read this to qualify as a beloved friend.  Only knitting people will care, and of those, only people who like knitting toys instead of clothes.

Anyway – here’s the collection of tiny horses.  There are two that are still naked so you can see how they look without the band-boy hair.  I still haven’t got the hang of making manes yet.  The naked ones don’t have ears, either, I think.  All of them are engineered differently through neck and shoulders.  I  think the beige naked one is going to end up being my favorite design.  You can vote if you want.

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So, maybe if I can exorcise the horse thing, I can get on to doing something else – like a giant squid, perhaps, or a Siberian Husky.  Or another chapter in our book –

Posted in Fun Stuff, Images, Making Things, Pics of Made Things | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Penitence

Posted on January 17, 2010 by K

I wore you out last week.  Which is too bad, because I really liked my large person last one, and only a very brave and patient die-hard few stuck around for the finale.  My bad.  So I am rounding up a few unrelated bits of chaos and offering them, a snack tray of minutiae (some day I will actually remember how you spell that word without mechanical help).

And here is the ugly truth: I set up a stat counter long, long ago when I published my Abbeville Equity Court abstract database on line.  This thing could probably count as a Life’s Work.  It took me five years in a dark basement in the BYU genealogical library, poring over the actual clerk-written records of over 3000 cases argued between 1770 and 1868 or so, and abstracting every name, and the main points out of every one of them.  I did this looking for my own ancestors – but figured, since I had to look under every flipping pebble, I might as well look for everybody else’s ancestors, too.

I put the thing up for free, and the stat counter was a joy to me, because it let me see that the tool was being used by LOTS of people from all over the world.  And I was happy.  Then, a couple of years later, I started this blog.  And ever since, I’ve had this little self-competition going: the big dream being that some day, I want my blog to so outnumber my database that I can rack up 200 whole hits before the database buries me again.  Which it inevitably does.  Do you understand what I’m telling you about myself?  That actually I hope the number of dear -to-me people who read my narcissistic  little Howdy-look-at-me piece of fluff in a week-and-half’s time will outnumber the number of productive and diligent strangers of all ages and creeds who are actually using this important,useful, serious tool in doing good.

I almost got my wish last week.  By accident.  I really had a mess of stuff to talk about.  Still.  The waters are running pre-tty shallow around here these days.

The Tray

  • Why is it that when a bird dumps on my car, it’s ALWAYS on the very half a square inch of the windshield that ends up being RIGHT BETWEEN my EYES when I’m driving.  Unless I’m not driving.  Then it’s on the passenger side.  HOW DO THEY KNOW??? And why is the stuff made of some kind of highly adhesive acrylic that won’t come off, even when you spray it and then scrape it for hours with the windshield wipers? (There is no picture of this.  I know, I know – Rachel would probably post one, but only if there was a kid in the shot, too.)
  • I haven’t been taking my camera anywhere in the last few months.  Too tired to lug it, and the world is too dreary outside.  Last year, I shot the fog.  This year, I just want the fog gone.  But this morning, camera-less, I saw something beautiful: I have two horses with long, lush, romantic black tails.  This morning, every black strand was rimed with frost.  If you had your hair frosted by a master dresser, you’d still be pitiful next to these elegant equine tails.  (No picture of this one, either. I took the camera the next day, but of course, the fog had vanished by then.)
  • I got a cardinal in the mail today.

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    Chaz’ dear friend and fellow artist, Chelsea, sent this to me for the tree.  It’s actually ON the tree at this very moment, though it the only thing, save the lights, that still hangs there.  This shot is a little blue—sorry.  Between Snow Leopard and uploading to Mozy, we’re still techno-limping.  I’ll fix it and show you again later.

  • Very early this morning, we found out that our aged collie is now incontinent.  We found this out in a most inconvenient manner.  So today, the house looks like this:

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Puppies shut out of the upstairs and the kitchen.  Now, Skye shut out of everything else.  I am now the proud owner of three sets of these fences. Dog cubicles.  Or kids ones.

You always know this day is coming when you own an animal.  You just hope it never will.

  • By my calculations, I have fed between three and fifteen horses between 400 and 6000 times each in the last eight and a half years.  If you’d told eight year old Kristen, “You will feed horses over 4000 times in your life,” her heart might easily have burst right out of her eyes.  If she then had  asked “When do I start?” And you’d told her, “When you’re about forty-nine years old,” it wouldn’t have gone over well.  No child can ever turn 49 years old.  Not in a lifetime.
  • Back in 1984, when these children were very young—

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Gin and Cam, waiting for the big truck to arrive, early one Saturday.

in an effort to slow Chaz down (she had a great desire to escape and do dangerous stuff all during her entire childhood), we bought a bunch of dirt to make a sort of barrier between the yard and the street.

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Everyone helping.  Cam in a home-made jacket.

And we planted things on it.  Chief among the plantings, a few pine trees.

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Note the pine tree, just behind the mailbox.  You will see this later, when it turns into the monster that ate the fence.

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Two years later.  Notice the red arrow, pointing to the pine tree that has grown TREE-mendously in that two years.  Cam’s first ride on a bike, by the way.

They told us that we’d have to wait thirty years for those pines to grow up.  It didn’t take quite that long for the trees to look like decent mountain trees.  Here they are, twenty five years later.

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Here is that same little pine tree.  Not the one in front.  The one in back.

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Fence munching as promised.

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Its brother on the far side of the mound.

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And one we planted a couple of years later, on the far side of the driveway.  This is the one that sports bright red Virginia Creeper in the fall.

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Bookends.

Back then, I couldn’t imagine ever waiting that long for anything.

But I guess that’s just what I did.

Posted in Fun Stuff, Images, Just talk | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Fat headed

Posted on January 13, 2010 by K

First of all, sorry I keep writing.  But I did scan some of my great grandmother’s letters.  And I wrote a chapter of the book, and I took a shower.  And ate.  Breakfast.  Honest.  And I’m pretty well done here now.  What a relief.  All that thinking out of my head.  So I won’t be knocking on your inbox for a while.  Maybe.

G sent me this link.  It’s one of those pundit blogs, and it concerns home education, and I found it—provoking.  So you might have fun looking at it.  I want you to keep in mind that I was a little miffed when I wrote my comment on the thing.  And my position may not be something you agree with at all.  That’s the wonderful part—my friendships are not based on political opinion, but on people.  You are allowed to disagree with me all you want (ad hominem attacks the exception) and I will love and admire you just as much.  HURRAH AMERICA!!!

So: What I learned on TV. This morning. On the treadmill.

I was watching The Biggest Loser (Do TV shows really rate italics, I wonder?), which is great motivation.  These poor gigantic people (this season, the biggest people EVER) are working their tails off, and me?  Running hard without feeling a thing (read: walking uphill really, really fast).

What do I love best about the show?  When they say, “This forty eight year old grandmother . . .,” talking about a woman who looks twenty years older than I do and is actually ten years younger.  Yeah.  I’m shallow. But very, very happy when that happens.

This morning’s talking points:

1)  New-age-ish Trainer Bob was talking to the largest man ever on the show—a nice guy who weighed in at about 546 pounds.  When they got on the scale after the first grueling week of workouts, the guy had lost a whopping 54 pounds (I think.  That’s what I remember.)  Of course, that huge loss was the result of all those cells dumping their reserve H2O (along with a week’s huge and totally unaccustomed calorie deficit).

“How did you get this way?” Bob asked the guy, looking at all that weight with wonder.

The guy teared up.  “All my life it was two steps forward, then three steps back.  I can’t believe I let this happen.  I had no idea I was over five hundred pounds.”

“But you’ve lost over fifty now.  Being here. Doing this,” Bob said, referring to the week  of literal sweat and tears and pain.  I saw the footage – a huge, screaming man, soaked with sweat— trying to lift weights, trying to run on a treadmill—suffering, being pushed by relentless trainers.

“This is a gift,” Bob said.

And that is what caught me.

A gift.

Don’t you think of a gift as something you get for free? A Wii, maybe.  Or a cruise.  Or a box of dark chocolate.

The only free thing about being selected to go that the Biggest Loser Ranch was the opportunity.  The opportunity to actually work your butt off.  When you open that gift, there’s nothing but strict education and bald, scalding work inside.

And I started thinking—that’s what real gifts are, the chance to do something, the opportunity to make something happen.  Real gifts carry a price tag; they aren’t about passive pleasure.

I think that’s what a blessing is.  You take the opportunity, and you work your back end off to turn that into something real. Freedom, love, family, education, a lovely life—you have to do the work to get them, and you have to do the work to keep them.

Anyway, it was interesting to me, that sudden deepening of the concept: gift.

2)  To make a point, they’d brought the man to the courtyard and had him face Bob—who they then loaded up with vests and straps full of the weight difference between the two men: over three hundred pounds of extra weight.  Bob could hardly stand up under the weight.  For all his strength, Bob staggered, and said that his legs hurt.  And his shoulders.

“How do you do it?” he asked in amazement.  “How do you carry all of this?”

Later, the doctor showed the man scans of his inner-self.  “This,” the doctor said, outlining the broad, light colored balloon around the skeleton and muscle, “is your fat.  This—“ he outlined a tiny triangle, high in the chest cavity, “is your lung.”

The man was amazed. “How does it supply oxygen for all of that?” he wondered.

It really was amazing.

And I thought two things:

Here is a man carrying a burden he has taken on voluntarily.  He walks upright.  He isn’t quick or supple, but he has to have developed tremendous strength, just to hold himself up.  All that strength, to deal with a totally unnecessary burden.  I wondered, if all that hydrated fat suddenly disappeared, would he be one of the strongest men in the world?  That strength, but in a normal, unburdened, totally oxygenized body?  He has had to develop this strength, but he is totally unaware of it.  It’s barely equal to his trial.   He has cloaked it with helplessness.

And I thought about those lungs of his—so valiantly doing the work of three sets of lungs.  How sturdy a body this man must have, to have stayed alive this long – his organs, some of the best: still working, even under these conditions.  What quality of life might he have had if he had not made things so hard for his body?  The best equipment, wasted.

So I thought about those things, and about what they might mean as metaphors.  There are no MRIs that can show me what burdens I put on my soul, or even on my brain, burdens that misuse the tools I’ve been given, waste my time, my strength.  I can feel them—my pride, my tendency to moral outrage, my problem with arbitrary authority, my lack of focus.  Nothing wrong with hating injustice, unless you let your anger remove you from the things in life that you can control.  Unless your anger renders you useless – or worse, counter productive.

Anyway.  There you go.  The Biggest Loser, a treadmill, and the moral of the story.

Posted in Epiphanies and Meditations, Just talk | 8 Comments