Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  Of course not everyone requires a national organization to lose weight. Americans are notorious for their do-it-yourself diets. All this self-starting can lead to trouble, however. “People tend to go on these crash diets,” says Dresel. “They fast for a week. That’s not going to work. You need to change your lifestyle.” To make matters worse, dieters often gain more weight back than they originally lost—weight loss literature refers to this as the “yo-yo effect.” And then there’s this passage, a warning from another national weight reduction organization to amateur dieters everywhere: “Most dieters who achieve significant weight loss lose far too much lean body mass (muscle and organ tissue). This not only diminishes strength and agility but also affects appearance. With less muscle, pleasing curves flatten, chests sink, arms and legs look spindly.” That does it. Pass the chicken-fried steak.

  None of this is helped by the Wisconsin winter. Not only does the miserably cold weather make us want to eat, it makes us want to hibernate. Activity levels drop with the mercury.

  So why fight it? Is thin all it’s cracked up to be? You have to believe that the members of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) were heartened by the recent Kate Moss controversy. You remember Kate Moss. She’s the supermodel who looks like she just gave blood—all of it. Eyes like two vacant lots. A belly you could use to scoop bird seed. Kate caused a bit of controversy when a handful of social commentators commentated that her popularity places unrealistic pressure on American women to seek acceptance through thinness. Diane Dresel is all for thinness, but within reason. “We’re not talking about making Twiggys [Twiggy was Kate Moss, circa the ’60s] out of everybody. We’re talking about a healthy lifestyle. Size acceptance is important. You need to accept people at any weight, like any height. Persons with weight problems are treated like second-class citizens. As a clinician, I’d like to see greater understanding of obesity. It’s a chronic disease of lifestyle, the same as alcoholism. It has a high rate of relapse. If the alcoholic relapses and goes back to treatment, we say, ‘good for you.’ With weight, we tend to say the person has no self-control or willpower. That’s not the issue. We tell people you can like yourself but you don’t have to like the weight.” Perhaps some of this thinking is gaining a foothold: Lately, Kate Moss has been elbowed off the runway by wide-shouldered women with actual hips—not just hip bones. (It is interesting to note the part the weight loss industry plays in the Twiggy/Kate drama: Of fifteen people pictured in the brochure of one national organization, fourteen were women. The implicit message appears to be that it is less socially acceptable for a woman to be overweight than a man.)

  So. You don’t want the waif look, but you would like to fend off the ten pounds brought to you by Wisconsin delicacies and Wisconsin winter. What’s the answer? Well, I’ve done all the research for you. I called experts, I read brochures, I looked in my refrigerator. Heck, I burned enough calories punching my way around the endless loop of the automated Weight Watchers phone-mail system alone to earn myself a banana split (with a big white dose of that whipped cream in a can—a marvel of modern culinary engineering). But after all that work, I’m afraid what I have to say is less than thrilling. Whether you do it yourself or with the help of professionals, winter weight maintenance boils down to five words: Eat less and move more.

  There you are. Plain and simple. Surely after all that talk about empty calories, you didn’t think I’d sugarcoat it. ’Course, if I could get my hands on some chocolate…

  1996

  P.S. I saw my aunt yesterday. She was serving up a nice bowl of three-bean salad. I haven’t seen Kate Moss for years. And this just in: EAT LESS. EXERCISE MORE.—front page, USA Today, July 19, 2004

  Manure Is Elemental

  In what I have come to count as my earliest memory (these things are never certain), I am backing away from a dog. It is a shorthaired dog, a herding dog, and it has backed me down the dark end of a barn. The dog is likely just curious, but her eyes are steadfast, and she advances with her nose extended stiffly. There is no sound but the flat-footed scrape of my heels as I edge them behind me like curb feelers. Far away up the concrete walk, the barn door is an open rectangle of light, but the dog is yielding nothing.

  I am a farm boy, but this is not my barn. It belongs to a farmer from our congregation. It is a summer Sunday, and his wife has invited us to dinner. Church is over, but I remain dressed like a little Mister: trousers, dress shoes, a clean button shirt. The dog moves in, chesty and intent. I edge back again, and this time there is nothing beneath my heels. I tumble backward into the gutter. The dog spooks at the sudden movement, dipping her haunches and flaring to one side, but shortly her nose is poking along the gutter edge above me. I can see whitewashed rafters.

  The manure is mud-bath soft and blackstrap dark. Above all, it smells sweet. It is not so deep that I am in any danger, but I am well over three-quarters marinated. I don’t remember any panic or fear, perhaps because I had broken the spell of the dog, but I must have called out, because my father appeared and pulled me from the muck. I was soon stripped of my togs and shivering under the garden hose. I assume the smell tarried well into the week.

  It is a persistent scent. Years later in high school, I demonstrated a commitment to personal grooming so avid my peers saw fit to vote me Biggest Primper, Class of 1983. Despite my dedication, I found it impossible to cut the cow scent below levels detectable out of context. Beneath the English Leather the sweet note of dung did linger. I was one of those well-scrubbed small-town boys who sat beside you at the basketball game, and upon removing a coat donned in a porch hung with chore clothes, released a layer of trapped air that rose warmly to your nose, and you thought, farm kid.

  When you are raised on a dairy, manure is elemental. Lactation cycles wax and wane, but cows produce manure full-time. Once a day we ran the barn cleaner, a motorized device that drew heavy iron paddles along the gutter bottom. The cows stood with their rears to the gutter but tended to undershoot. We used a wooden-handled scraper to clean up the misses. In winter, the firm, high-fiber pats scraped neatly, like ginger cookies off a baking tin. In spring, when the cows were on fresh grass and clover, the experience was more analogous to troweling prune smoothies.

  Sometimes, if viscosity allowed, my brother and I went manure surfing. We adopted a hang-ten stance, standing sideways in the channel, booted goofballs being towed around the barn on a mile-an-hour hillbilly thrill ride, jumping off just before the manure passed through a hole in the wall and up an elevated chute. At the apex of the chute, the paddles swung into open air, leaving the clods and straw to fall into the manure spreader parked below.

  I often volunteered to spread the manure, as this meant I could drive the tractor through the fields rather than stay behind to sweep the walk and shake out fresh straw. The manure spreader was a simple and spectacular machine. I’d gauge the wind (spread manure with the wind and you will come home speckled), engage the power takeoff, hit the throttle and let ’er rip. The beaters flung the manure in a skyward arc. What you had was a portable sludge fountain. In the winter, I’d look back and see the wide brown stripe and feel like I was finger painting a forty-acre canvas. December through February, we never stowed the spreader in the shed until it had been scraped down fore and aft, the beaters flossed like so many snaggled teeth. Too much residual manure would freeze up around the mechanisms, and the next time you engaged the power something snapped—a shear pin, a worm gear, the apron chain.

  I can’t say I miss the manure. I spent enough time on the wooden end of a pitchfork to view it primarily as something to be shoveled. Years of kneeling down to milk cows only to get smacked across the face with an excrement-drenched tail plume tempered my affection for the medium. As did having the bad luck to pass behind a cow just as she sneezed. The effect is jaw-dropping, although that would not be your optimal response.

  I have a buddy who has watched his farm become a suburb. He gets hassled now when he runs his spreader. People obj
ect to the smell. Things change. I am not going to get elegiac. But I’m glad cow manure is one of the trace elements of my existence. It inoculated me against everything to follow. Gave me an organic sense of calibration. Wherever I am, whatever I face, I think of me looking up and that dog looking down. What a delightful place to start. As children, my siblings and I crossed the pasture using cow pies as stepping-stones. We pressed through the crust with our bare feet and relished in the squish. Certain self-regarding health spas in New Mexico will charge you one house payment for equivalent pleasures.

  2004

  Hirsute Pursuits

  Despite what this piece says, I’m not twenty-eight anymore. I’m also still a ways from bald. But things ain’t gettin’ any thicker.

  Over ten years ago, while clambering over an oil drilling rig, I fell headlong down a flight of twenty-five steel steps and knocked myself unconscious. While I sustained no long-term damage, the event was marked by a small scar just inside my hairline.

  Recently, while peering in the mirror, I made a relevatory discovery: For future retellings of the “I-fell-off-an-oil-rig” story, it is no longer necessary that I part my hair to reveal the scar that verifies the tale.

  Yep, at the relatively tender age of twenty-eight, it has become clear that I am losing the hair war. For nearly a quarter of a century, my scalp was protected by rank legions of hair. Then came the thinning of the ranks—followed by a general retreat from the front. These days, I don’t so much comb my hair as harvest it—can complete surrender be far behind?

  Bald. The word itself drops flat and ugly from the tongue. It has no bounce, no redeeming phonic personality. Worse yet, it is employed in the description of items past their useful life; e.g., tires and old carpet. A simple lie becomes an outrageous prevarication when characterized as “bald-faced.” Even its association with the regal fowl symbolic of our great nation has failed to lend any dignity to this monosyllabic utterance.

  Ahh, but never has there been a better time to go bald…after all, this is the age of the infomercial, and for my money, nothing is more amusing than watching a rollicking half hour of hair replacement therapy (which usually features a celebrity whose hairline and career are both in a state of recess). Just try to beat the entertainment value of watching a rather delicate gentleman “thickening” hair with sprinkles of colored powder from what appears to be a pepper shaker. Lots of on-cue oohing and aahing occurs, and each sprinkle is accompanied by a series of dainty “pats” on the head. As entertaining as this is, it’s not for me. I’d probably show up at parties looking as if I were afflicted with brown dandruff. Furthermore, I don’t fancy spending a lot of time patting myself.

  In another infomercial, a fast-talking gent spray paints bald spots, racing gleefully from pate to pate, insisting all the while that he’s not spray painting. Again, a lot of patting is involved, and despite strategically lit “before and after” pictures, a little voice inside my head continues to suggest that the emperor has no hair.

  Then there’s the one where an earnest trio of folks in expensive clothing offer to relocate chunks of the hair you have left into the places your hair left from. Seems a little too much like gardening to me. Yet another company actually weaves faux hair into place. Weaving: Isn’t that how they make rugs?

  A major pharmaceutical company offers a hair-sprouting ointment that actually works, with two qualifications: Don’t expect hair like Fabio; do expect a monthly pharmacy bill the size of Fabio’s pecs.

  And so, short of getting sprinkled, sprayed, plugged, woven, or refinanced, what is a balding man to do?

  Support groups are available, but who wants to sit around moaning about hair loss with a bunch of bald guys? If I need someone to hold my hand while I go bald, what will happen when I start to get liver spots, or develop an arthritic thumb? No thanks. I shall call upon my reserves of Scandinavian stoicism and tough this one out on my own.

  I suppose I could start wearing hats. I have noticed that a certain famous country music star (who is able, with a simple twist of the hips, to reduce groups of normally well-behaved women to screaming throngs of lingerie-tossing fanatics) is more likely to whistle a medley of Barry Manilow jingles than remove his Stetson in public. Methinks he is keeping something (or nothing) under his hat.

  But I’m not really a hat guy. Oh, they’re nice—and if I thought by wearing one I could reduce groups of normally well-behaved women to screaming throngs of lingerie-tossing fanatics, I might give it a shot—but I’ve never really gotten used to them. For one thing, when I played football, I had the biggest helmet on the team. When we were measured for our high school graduation caps, yours truly topped the circumference list. Same story in college. So finding headgear that fits comfortably is a challenge. Adjustable caps offer an option, but most of these are emblazoned with team logos or mildly profane aphorisms…not my style.

  And so, as my forehead continues to expand (leaving me to savor the scintillating humor inherent in statements the likes of “Say there, Mac, yer forehead’s turnin’ into a five-head, yuk, yuk”), I think I’ll just get on with life. After all, it’s not as if something really critical were falling out—like my pancreas, for instance.

  As in nearly all things, if you look hard enough, there is a bright spot to be found amidst all this hair loss. Unfortunately, it happens to be the reflection of my bathroom light.

  1995

  P.S. Ten years later, I can tell you a man never forgets his first sunburned scalp.

  Catching at the Hems of Ghosts

  It all ends in death, thank goodness for that. The hurly-burly winds down slowly or ends abruptly as a bug on a bumper, and we leave it to the living to mark our departure. Generally, they will arrange a funeral. I use the term loosely, and inclusively. Any sort of celebration will do.

  My sister died when she was five. I remember the funeral home gathering seemed a crush, and I remember resenting that my family—stoics, all of us—had to weep with all those people watching, but then out in the sunny country cemetery, the hot breeze smelling of soil, my brother and I handling the tiny casket, the weeping came in a cleansing rush, and this time, it felt very near to joy. A high school classmate put his arm around my shoulders, a gracious gesture for a teenage boy, and I smiled my thanks, but he couldn’t know my tears had gone from bitter to sweet. At that moment, mourning was comfort enough.

  We humans have long held that someone’s kicking the bucket deserves commemoration. We dance, we wail, we shoot their ashes from a shotgun. Whatever our funerary customs—be they acoustic or baroque—we are grappling to draw conclusions from the dead on behalf of the living.

  As a celebration, a funeral isn’t necessarily a party. Tears are not confetti. But could there be a more glorious celebration than the tear-soaked funeral of Miller McDermott? Miller lived up the street from me. He was a short, bald man with eleven children. He installed furnaces, and I never heard him speak a word. Such was his reticence that his legion grandchildren and great-grandchildren called him Grandpa Shy. The local Catholic church was wall-to-wall with his neighbors and descendants, and choked-up children came to the front of the church to tell Grandpa Shy stories. A picture emerged of a man who quietly found a way to make half the people in this church feel like his favorite. Looking on from the backmost pew, I was swept by the thought of this unassuming man as the nexus of so much love, and I cried a little. I felt self-conscious later, afraid someone might think I was appropriating the family’s grief for a man I hardly knew. But I was not bereaved. I was simply grateful to witness the legacy of this man. Tears seemed the only worthy offering. One by one, Grandpa Shy loved his broad family. Then he died, and they all loved him at once. Is there a finer reason for a funeral?

  It took a funeral for me to see my father without the usual filial opacities. He was a city-bred factory refugee when he bought our little farm. A Czech neighbor gave him his first milk cow, told him when to plant his corn, and helped with the haying. The Czech was still milking cows
and going strong at seventy when a Holstein kicked him in the head, triggering a bleed that killed him in short order. By the time we buried him, he and my dad had a twenty-five-year history of more days spent together than apart. The preacher had finished up graveside and I was walking back to my car when I stepped around a shrub and discovered my father standing apart and alone, his face tight with grief, his eyes stark. For the first time in my life, I saw him simply as a man missing his friend. I have been better with him ever since.

  Funerals can be punishing and bleak. But they are also an opportunity to reset the bar, to rub cold shoulders with mortality. To look in the mirror and see ourselves gone. We view the body at the front of the room and wonder if the fled soul knows The Secret. Even a fuddled agnostic like me associates death with transcendence. Transcendence is forgiveness with wings. And so we sit in the pew, and we mourn, but we also long and hope. We are catching at the hems of ghosts.

  My father’s farm adjoined land owned by two Norwegian bachelor brothers named Art and Clarence. My brother Jud and I used to like to help them with the haying because their hay baler made smaller bales than ours, which made us feel stronger and taller. After we unloaded the wagons, we were served weak lemonade from a blue mason jar. Art always referred to my brothers Jed, Jud and John as “Yed, Yud and Yon.”