ever-fixed mark

The Newburyport Literary Festival, co-directed by my friend J., concluded this weekend — another wildly successful outing, and one of the very best things about living in this community. (I’ve covered past years here (Richard Russo), here (Tom Perrotta), and here (Julia Glass, Andre Dubus III), and have also discussed my great disappointment that John Updike passed away before being honored at the festival here.)

In addition to fabulous talks by notable authors, the festival always offers a smattering of regional history, and I always learn something new. This year, for example, Andre Dubus III, who spent part of his childhood in nearby Haverhill, alluded to this bit of local lore during the reading of his memoir. Yikes! How did Hollywood and my third-grade history textbook miss this tale of a vengeful, ass-kicking mother of twelve? Lizzie Borden wasn’t the only woman in New England who could wield an axe.

A less violent but still interesting piece of history was raised during a discussion of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Newburyport author John P. Marquand. One of Marquand’s books, Point of No Return (unfortunately out of print), lampooned a sociological study of Newburyport conducted by William Lloyd Warner. Warner and his team of sociologists, according to Wikipedia, “occupied Newburyport for nearly a decade,” producing a five-volume study of the community known as the “Yankee City” series.

I love the image of Warner and his intrepid band of egghead academics “occupying” sleepy little Port City, tracing in minute detail the landscape of who-talks-to-whom (as in, “The Lowells talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God”). How did the town take to this kind of scrutiny? Did people cross the street when they saw Warner coming, or were they as eager to be interviewed as today’s reality-show contestants? Did Warner’s researchers approach the populace with anthropological detachment, or did they get assimilated into small-town life, perhaps falling in love, marrying, settling down here? Were the natives scandalized or gratified by the way “Yankee City” was immortalized by Warner? (Apart from Marquand, of course — we know how he felt.)

I think either of these anecdotes would make a great story (the first, a violent thriller; the second, a charming little comedy of manners). Every year at the Lit Fest, I think, “You know, if I just buckled down and finished my novel, then next year that could be ME up there.” I can never get past the concept of a year’s worth of unpaid labor, though.

So, what’s YOUR unfinished novel about?

I’m already behind schedule. Where was I? Skiing!

So, sometime after Christmas I decided that I wasn’t going to let another winter pass without getting the whole family on skis. Husband and I like to ski — we met in a ski club in Chicago, in fact — and we’ve missed it. Sadly, neither of the boys was very enthusiastic about skiing, and Aitch outright refused to take lessons. I decided to concentrate my efforts on Minor, who was a bit more tractable. Reader, I bribed him. Over the course of five ski lessons the kid ate so many nacho cheese Doritos that his sclera turned orange. Finally, weary of standing in the rental line, I bought Minor his own skis, and as soon as Aitch saw them he decided he wanted to ski, too.

Well, once Aitch twigged to the concept — speed! bumps! Teenage ski instructors, like Gods walking among us! — this huge self-satisfied smile appeared, as if he were thinking, “I have found my métier, and it is SNOW.” Oh, he was a total diva, and refused to take direction from anyone, and threw a fit when the ski school wanted to move him up a level, because he wanted to stay with the hot instructor, but the kid could ski. He basically taught himself; he fooled around— first pizza, then french fries, then crouching at full speed; now edging, now flat-footed, now skiing backward down the hill, now leaning back his butt perched on his skis— until he found what worked. He distinguished not between downhill and freestyle; it was all kif-kif to him. Within a few weeks he was carving parallel turns (wide-set, but real parallel turns with edges) down black diamonds and doing tricks in the terrain park. At one point he went off a jump and over the side of the slope into a ravine; his skis came off and none of the adults noticed he was missing until he had climbed out of the ditch and walked down the mountain. His ski name was “Hot Dog.”

Minor’s progress was more stately. His ski name was “Ketchup.” At one point Husband begged me to ski with him, because “no human can ski that slowly.” Minor, in fact, skis a lot like me, making numerous, slow, cautious turns, resorting to snowplow in hairy terrain. (My ski name is “Escargot.”) At first, he rarely experimented with anything he hadn’t learned in class; as Shakespeare might have said, he skied by th’ book. He was a surprisingly good sport, though. Minor is doughy, uncoordinated, and overly sensitive to changes in temperature, spatial orientation, and atmospheric pressure, but he was wonderfully game. When Aitch was intimidated by the chairlift, he begged to go first (”I want to go on the snow rollercoaster!”). A few times we ventured beyond his abilities, taking him on longer or harder runs than he could handle, and he frequently fell and ended up crying on the mountain. Yet the next time we said, “Hey, you want to try that slope again?” he was up for it, as long as we threw in a package of Doritos. He may be the only child who ever gained weight skiing.

On our last weekend, we had the two boys ski a few green runs together, and as Minor followed Aitch he started imitating his movements. Something clicked, and he started skiing better and faster. We took him to the top of the mountain, and after a few runs I was suddenly the slowest skier in the family.

The northeast got a huge dumping of snow mid-season, which was fortunate because the snowpack lasted through the subsequent monsoon and heatwave:

If there’s anything better than spring skiing in a t-shirt with the scent of sunscreen in the air, I don’t want to know what it is.

(I’m right in the middle of a post about skiing, but on the spur of the moment I decided to take the boys away for the long weekend, and a new topic presented itself. A detour, if you will.)

I have always considered my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers to be more siblings than friends. You probably love your siblings; you may occasionally hate them; you may talk every day or not see them for years on end. Nonetheless, when one of them shows up at your door, you have to feed them. Right?

On that principle, I decided that I would stop to see a former Peace Corps volunteer who runs a bed and breakfast near the farm/inn where I took the boys this weekend. It’s been over twenty years (OH MY GOD, has it really?!) and, not having been best of friends during our sojourn in Tunisia, we haven’t written, e-mailed, phoned, or communed telepathically in the interim, but I thought, why the hell not?

The episode of “The Office” where Pam and Jim visit Dwight’s beet farm/B&B springs to mind as a potential reason.

Anyway, it was good if a bit awkward. We caught her just as she was returning home, and she was certainly surprised to see me. The two of us exchanged life stories while the boys tore up the house. Before any real damage was done, I hustled them out of there to the more boy-friendly confines of our destination.

The farm was so much fun. Aitch promptly declared himself an expert on the rural arts, and I smiled indulgently at him until he proved his worth, wrangling some rabbits, hunting down eggs in the chicken coop, and milking a cow.

He also saw two pigs rutting, which is how we found ourselves in the indoor pool (”Let’s go.” “No, I want to stay and watch this.” “Hey! Who wants to go SWIMMING?”)

Minor was very popular with the goats.

I have a roll of artsy black-and-white medium-format film of similar scenes all ready to be processed, but I recently got a new Blackberry and have been seduced by the siren song of the instant snap.

In October, right about the time I joined Weight Watchers, I accepted a new role at work managing a small group. About the same time, I got into a scrap with a nurse practitioner in my pediatrician’s office, a Facebook “friend,” who was posting inappropriate (in my judgment) gossip about parents who called on her on-call overnights. After I switched pediatricians, I vowed that I would never, ever, ever, ever post anything even remotely related to work on-line. Not only am I prevented by law from disclosing details of my work, I can’t even imagine the horror if my direct reports were to stumble upon a chatty blog post by me about the darnedest things they did or said at work that day. They would feel just like I did when I read about the craaaazy parents on Facebook bothering the nurse practitioner with their stupid problems: Sick and betrayed.

So, I’ll try to keep it general. I’ve gone from project management to people management. I inherited four people, hired two, brought in one contractor, and am actively looking for another person. Since I’m not that experienced in people management, I’ve been relying on my strengths, treating the department business as if it’s one giant project and I’m the uber-project manager. So far, I’m doing OK, but I can sense that it’s not a sustainable paradigm — too many details for me to keep track of. I know I should be working more on people development, but I’m struggling with the right level of oversight. Does anyone know of any good books on management? It’s not exactly a genre known for its deathless prose, although you can usually count on a nifty two-part title, separated by a colon. Or can you recommend some entertainingly bad ones?

Back in October I joined Weight Watchers at work. The premise is pretty simple: you get so many “points” (assigned by calories, fiber, and fat content) per day, with some extra weekly points, and you tote up your daily points, subtracting “activity” points, trying to stay under your target. Counting one’s food is abhorrent, but so is eating yourself sick, so there you go. It also works, but only because under the WW regime I ended up eating only a fraction of my typical daily intake. For example, on WW I got 20 points a day. Here’s what I would normally eat, pre-diet:

• Bagel: 8 points
• with peanut butter: 4 points
• 3-egg omelet: 8 points
• with cheese: 3 points
• actually, more cheese than that: 3 more points
• large orange juice: 4 points

Already 10 points over the daily limit, and that’s just breakfast! (And, you know, I would have considered that a perfectly healthy breakfast because there was no donut.) I’ve gone from wondering why it’s so hard for me to lose weight to marveling at the speedy metabolism that’s been keeping me from reaching “morbidly obese” for all these years.

It’s an unpleasant and somewhat terrifying experience, feeling your body consuming itself. There is a sort of panic that sets in when you’re burning more calories than you’re eating, not to mention a kind of anhedonia when you realize that there will be no joy in breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the foreseeable future.

Did I mention the TIRED? I didn’t exercise at all the first four weeks because I was just too damn exhausted to drag my butt anywhere. Then when my energy started to revive, I thought, hey, I’ve just lost x pounds; why should I go for a run? (I’m sure Doctor Mama would have a good rejoinder, but lalalalalala…I can’t hear her.)

I also suffered a strange kind of body dysmorphia that prevented me from realizing that my clothes were now far too big. I had been the same clothing size since high school (of course, the sizes have grown along with me since then). I kept visiting the mirror, wondering why 25 fewer pounds didn’t LOOK better on me. I finally twigged to the fact that one’s trousers weren’t supposed to sag in the ass like that, and I bought some pants a size smaller, but they still seemed baggy. Then I decided, just for grins, to try on the next size smaller and, incredibly, the next size. I am finally clad in something that does not make me look like a hobo (although Aitch says that my new red Converse make me look like a clown).

Another odd effect: I am now continuously COLD. I’ve lost some insulation, it’s true, but I’m still on the higher end of a normal BMI; I’m adequately confit‘ed. I’m convinced it’s my body slowing way down in a panic over the lack of incoming sustenance.

Happily, over the last month or two, my metabolism seems to have revved up a bit. During ski season, I added a weekly bagel and ice cream sundae to my menu, with no ill effects. I no longer record every bite, but I do weigh myself every day, and when the scale starts to creep up, I cut food or add exercise. Sounds like a fun existence, doesn’t it?

A disclaimer: I don’t think there’s any particular virtue in being thin, nor any great vice in eating recreationally. Both are the result of habits, and once a habit is entrenched, it’s pretty easy to follow. I’m happy now to have some habits that have pulled me from the brink of pre-diabetes.

Unfortunately, arteriosclerosis still has me in its sights. A few months ago I went to a new primary care doctor (more on that later) who tested me for Vitamin D (the hot new deficiency) and cholesterol. The Vitamin D was fine, but my cholesterol was over 250. The doctor sent me the lab result and wrote on it, “Modify diet and retest in 3 months.”

“Modify diet”? I’ve MODIFIED, baby. That ship has sailed, with an all-night buffet loaded with everything I’m no longer eating.

I certainly have taken a long hiatus from this here blog thingy. What’s my excuse? A hint: it’s one of the developments below, each of which I’ll treat at length during my first week back-to-blog. In no particular order:

• I’ve lost twenty-five pounds. As it happens, lots of things taste better than being thin feels. More on Monday.
• I took on a new role at work. What happens when an erstwhile “individual contributor” becomes a “people manager”? Not much that’s bloggable, if you’re at all ethical, but I’ll attempt some general musings on Tuesday.
• I got both boys skiing. It sounds like an afternoon’s amusement but was actually a months-long campaign against their apathy, bizarre weather, and my better instincts. Details on Wednesday.
• I got a Kindle. On Thursday: the good, the bad, and why I won’t be trading it in for an iPad.
• I got cancer. That will have to wait until Friday, but no worries; I’ll still be around.