As usual at the start of a blogfest such as NaBloPoMo or Holidailies, this blog has seen a spike in visitors. But they’re not all coming from NaBlo’s randomizer or my notification efforts. Many are coming from a mention my Margaret of Cortona piece, written by Marsha Tole,  a columnist who writes about weight loss from Albuquerque. She called the piece, which I wrote in 2006 in the earliest incarnation of this effort, “interesting” and “entertaining.” (Ms. Tole’s own work is interesting and entertaining as well. You should check it out. She uses the same strategy I do to get rid of leftover Halloween candy.)

I mentioned Margaret of Cortona briefly today at Markings, my other blog. That piece was mostly about my visit to a local church to view the relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. I’ve always been drawn to mentions of my name. There were two other Margarets in my grade school class, but the only famous Margaret I knew was Margaret Hamilton, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West. In eighth grade I learned about Margaret Mitchell, who wrote a thick novel because she was confined to her house while a broken leg healed. (“In a weak moment, I have written a book,” she said in 1935.) That was the year I read that book. The next year, ninth grade, I came under the influence of Sr. Margaret Loretta, my English teacher for half the year, and then my math teacher, and I began to like my name a little more.

In 1968 I became a devotee of Richard Brautigan, carrying around volumes of his work as if they were sacred texts. My favorite piece, from In Watermelon Sugar, is “My Name,” which ends with the haunting line, “And I wish Margaret would leave me alone.”

As I mentioned in the Markings post, I am not named for St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, nor for St. Margaret of Cortona, but for my maternal grandmother. She was 69 years old when I was born. Here you see her on my parents’ wedding day. She’s the one on the right, and she is 68 years old there. My paternal grandmother, younger by 15 years, stands with her. To me, they look alike, as if they are the same age, and that age is old. I am today barely three years younger than my grandmother Margaret. At right you see a full body shot of what I look like today. It makes me wince, and I post it with some trepidation, since I don’t think I look like that. Evidently, though, I do look my grandmother’s age, only dumpier.

So, back to work on that weight loss stuff. See you tomorrow.

Father McKenzie ran the spatula hard around the inside of the peanut butter jar. There was barely enough for his breakfast this
morning, and there wasn’t another jar in the cupboard. “Peanut butter” was written in Father Henry’s crooked hand on the list they kept for Helen. He wondered how long ago Father Henry had done this, fixed himself something with peanut butter and noticed they’d soon need more. It was unlike Helen to let such a necessity run so low.

He walked over to the toaster, the peanut  butter-loaded spatula in his right hand and a salad plate in his left. You couldn’t let these 100-calorie sandwich rolls complete a full cycle, even at the lightest setting. He put down the plate and pushed the CANCEL button. The pop-up action was so strong it propelled the thin rounds out of the slots. He caught them both, dropped them on the plate, and smeared the peanut butter on them, trying to divide it equally between the halves. The peanut butter softened enough to spread easily, although not so much that it oozed through the holes in the bread. He added a dollop of black cherry spreadable fruit to one of the halves, and then fitted them together to make a sandwich, pressing lightly with his fingers in several places so there would be both fruit and peanut butter in every bite.

Before lifting the sandwich to his mouth he closed his eyes and prayed the way his four-year-old niece prayed: Thank you God for this good one-protein, one-bread, low-point, high-nutrition breakfast. Amen.
— Margaret DeAngelis, b. 1947
American fiction writer, from a work-in-progress

I wrote the passage above in June of 2010. Father McKenzie was then a minor character in Perpetual Light, the novel I have been writing since 2002 (with no work done on it in 2003, so, for those who are counting, it’s only been almost nine years, not ten). Back then he was something of a prop character, someone who acted as a mediator between the central character (his childhood friend) and Helen, the friend’s much older sister. As of last June, he’d made a brief appearance in only one scene, written in 2002.

The first weekend in June I had dinner with an old friend. He is an Episcopal priest who was in town to give the baccalaureate address at the high school he graduated from. Another friend and I attended the service together, and then the three of us went out to dinner. Barry is out of parish ministry now, lives alone on a farm that has been in his family for a number of years. He writes, facilitates support groups, does some volunteer work. Our friend also lives alone and pursues a variety of interests, and I’m the empty-nester with a haphazard schedule and no need anymore to provide regular meals and positive family interaction at mealtime for a growing child. As we enjoyed our elegant meal, “plated”attractively (restaurant-speak for “arranged artfully and served to a seated guest”) with a panoply of utensils and a crisp linen napkin, we talked about what we eat when we eat alone, and Barry described the sandwich above.

The next day, I wrote in my project journal, “Give Barry’s PB&J to Father McKenzie.” Before I wrote the scene, of course, I tried out the recipe myself.

A photo of an almost finished McKenzie is at left. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Father McKenzie (whose first name has not yet gelled for me) since October 1. That morning I read “Beefless,” an essay by Deborah Thompson in the spring issue of Creative Nonfiction, in which several recent widows gather at a women’s exercise salon and work out their grief. One of the women has a somewhat awkward relationship with food that I kept thinking about, imagining what it would be like to have that particular compulsion. I thought about her as I drove to my Weight Watchers meeting, twisting and shaping her eating quirk and imagining a reason for it, until I had a character.

Before the meeting started, I got out my notebook to write down a few thoughts, and suddenly, there was Father McKenzie, clearer than he had ever been before, five years after the events of the novel, 39 years old now and concerned about the state of his health as well as the state of his vocation, and I knew that he and the woman I had just imagined as a young widow who can no longer eat at the dining table her husband built would have to meet and work out their problems together.

And here we are, a month from that moment. It keeps drawing me back, and I work on it every day. There is an eating scene or a reference to food in every piece of fiction I write, but this story is saturated with it. Before this I was never a fan of the PB&J, but I have a McKenzie for breakfast a lot these days. And when I note it in my Weight Watchers food journal, I no longer break it out by its elements, 3 points for the English muffin, 2 points for the spreadable fruit, 2 points for the peanut butter (if you use just one tablespoon of peanut butter, 5 if you use two), but just jot down ”McKenzie —7.”

As you can see from the new badge in the sidebar, this is the start of National Blog Posting Month. I’ve done this several years, wobbled out of it last year when the format changed and I found it confusing and time-consuming to stay connected. I made a decision yesterday to use NaBloPoMo as motivation to write in this space, my Eat, Pray, Walk chronicle, about food, hunger, weight loss, walking, and the spirituality of it all. So, then, every day in November, a note, a recipe, a picture from a walk, an update on Father McKenzie.

The recipe for The McKenzie is given pretty clearly in the excerpt from the manuscript. Try it yourself, I thank my friend Barry for it, and Deborah Thompson for her compelling essay that gave me the seed for a character. And I thank you for reading, so much, so often.

Did you miss me? It’s only been 3 years, 8 months, and 19 days since I posted in what was then called Refiguring. I went online with a journal in 1999, before the terms “blog” and “blogger” were the words we used to describe these collections of personal essays. I called my site “The Silken Tent,” drawing on the image in Robert Frost’s poem concerning a woman whose many roles are like the gossamer wires attached to tent pegs and keeping her anchored. I had three sections then: the general section, which went by many names and is now called Markings, a section about my spiritual life which I called Sursum Corda (the phrase in the Latin liturgy of my childhood that is rendered in English as “Lift up your hearts”), and the weight loss section. I didn’t keep at the journal of the spiritual life very long because it felt too intimate (and I am not shy about sharing things about myself!). In 2001 I pulled all the weight loss material after someone posted in a discussion about the word “stout” that she, having visited my blog, she could certainly see why I was sensitive about the word!

I’m not sure I still have any of the material I wrote and posted between 1999 and 2001. I came back to this endeavor in 2006, have started and stopped and started again several times. And now I’m back again.

Actually, I began almost three weeks ago, with this:

September 26, 2011
Monday

On this day in 1985, I weighed 185 pounds. I know this because in the morning I went to the doctor, was weighed and examined, and then told to go directly to the hospital. “This is your baby’s birthday,” the doctor said, and indeed it was. Sometime around 10:00 that night (I heard the music for the beginning of Hill Street Blues as I was wheeled into the operating room for my emergency Cesarean section) I was delivered of a 7-pound 1-ounce baby girl.

I called that post “The Day I Left Egypt.” I took the title from a faith-based weight-loss program originated in the 1980s by Gwen Shamblin. I never followed that program — Ms. Shamblin’s theology is too narrow and too conservative for me — but I did look at some of the materials. She likened the decision to embark on a “weight loss journey” to the decision by the Israelites to leave bondage in Egypt. Considering the fact that I joined Weight Watchers for the first time 39 years ago, the image seems accurate.

I can give you the numbers: 149 pounds when I joined Weight Watchers for the first time in September of 1972, having gained about 25 pounds over a summer of mourning a broken romance; 151 pounds at my first prenatal exam in January of 1985; 157 pounds at my daughter’s first birthday; 165 pounds six years after that. Things really got out of control in the late 1990s, and I zoomed into the 200s.

I can’t say that this new effort, born of something my leader said that I can’t even recall now, will succeed any more than all my past efforts. But I’m back, with a new name and a new concept for this journal: Eat, Pray, Walk — A Weight Loss Year. Come follow me, if you are so inclined.

And, as always, thank you for reading, so much, so often.

January 9, 2009
Friday

I almost titled this piece “Oops, I Did It Again, AGAIN!” but I didn’t just now rejoin Weight Watchers today. I’ve been a member off and on since September of 1972, when I was 25 and weighed 149 pounds, having gained 25 pounds since my college graduation three years before, most of that in the emotional turmoil I let myself descend into over a broken romance. The whole sorry saga of my love-hate off again-on-again relationship with Weight Watchers is at Refiguring. It starts with February 1, 2006. I don’t remember how many of those I transferred to this site. I keep that area going so I have a throwaway version of this set-up to play with. If I try to monkey with the code and something breaks, I really haven’t lost anything. I tried out inserting the Blog 365 and The Hunger Site badges there first.

Oh, yeah, The Hunger Site logo. I carry a fair amount of guilt and uneasiness about my social and economic situation, especially regarding the ways I am able to (and choose to) address my obesity. I have never experienced what hunger researchers call “food insecurity.” When I say I am hungry, I mean that it has been a few hours (or maybe only twenty minutes) since I had anything to eat. I can eat anything I like, from the best balanced nutritionist-designed menu to a loaf of bread the size of a Honda Civic. I am certainly not a wealthy woman, but I am better off than a whole lot of other people, maybe even most other people. I am so well-off that I can afford to join a club that every week tells me the same thing — eat less, move more.

The title of the latest incarnation of the Weight Watchers plan to eat less and move more is called Momentum. All of the materials are redesigned (which means they don’t fit into the carrying cases members may have bought as recently as Thanksgiving), although the program is tweaked only a little. Some old concepts are going by new names. In fact, I don’t think there are any new concepts. Nothing beats eat less, move more. The problem is that the directive to ”eat less” can be a challenge for some people with different-from-average hormonal and metabolic systems, so that the amount of food allowed to avoid weight gain or even weight maintenance can be un satisfyingly small. And to “move more” can be difficult for people with different-from-average musculoskeletal and orthopedic factors.

The thing I noticed most about the new materials is the absence of pictures of people’s faces and bodies. It’s mostly food and hands holding food. That seemed odd.

I’ve been attending the meetings instead of weighing in and ducking out. It can’t hurt and it might help. I like to go on Thursday or Friday evenings to meetings that Sandra leads. She’s a teacher (high school art) and so has good presentation skills. Tonight there was a woman in the row I was in who had some official-looking badge on and was taking notes on a yellow pad. I heard her tell someone she was an area supervisor, and suddenly I remembered all my tension-filled sessions with a principal sitting in my classroom (such as the one who counted the number of times I said “um,” calculated how many ums a minute that was, and recommended a reduced ratio). “Sandra’s super,” I said to her quietly on my way out.

I did manage to lose .6 pounds this week. (Yes, it’s measured in tenths of a pound, A stick of butter is .25 pounds. I lost the equivalent of two sticks and a little for your English muffin.) And I spent four hours today on my fiction work (not writing my own, but reading manuscripts for workshop next week, which can be as important for my own advancement as actual creation is). So I guess I am back to normal, finally.

And back to keeping The Hunger Site logo prominent on my blog and in my mind. The hungry and the homeless are the social outcasts I care about most. Right now my reluctance to leave my comfort zone means that clicking a corporate logo and helping without getting my hands dirty is about all I can do. It can’t hurt and it might help. I pray for the day when I will finally do more.

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January 2, 2009
Friday

“Oprah Confesses! She Weighs 200 Pounds!”

The headline on the cover of the TV Guide caught my eye while I stood in line at the supermarket. My cart was filled with a combination of righteous good nutrition (a sweet potato to bake and have with a raita of fat-free yogurt, mango chunks, and hot pepper flakes) and some of the stuff you just can’t seem to do without in this season of indulgence (more chopped walnuts and honey for another batch of Ron’s sfratti). And I already knew about the state of Oprah’s weight. The latest issue of her magazine was also in my cart. The cover shows Oprah as she looks right now, definitely pear-shaped in a purple velour sweatshirt set, standing beside a photo of her several years and about fifty pounds ago.

While Oprah’s weight gain is regrettable for her, is it something to “confess?” Has she committed a sin or a crime of some kind? In the article she does talk about how she let sound nutritional practices slide in favor of the easy, quick satisfaction that indulgence in high-fat low-quality foods provides. I mean, she is busy and all, with all those love stories to pursue and all those books to read, and if she’s going to be vigilant about something it should probably be the quality of the material she hangs her powerful endorsement on.

But confess?

Okay, I’ll confess something. I weigh 221.4, officially tonight at the Weight Watchers weigh-in. As usual (I know because I’ve been to a lot of them) for the first week of a new year, the line of people signing up and getting all their new materials wound around the small lobby area and extended into the meeting room.

Does that number say something shameful about me, say something that, if you didn’t know it about me before, will change your opinion of me? Will it make you drop off my list of readers, unfriend me on Facebook, reevaluate the importance of my place in your life?

If it does, well, farewell and Godspeed. I don’t need you.

Back in November, when I thought I might have a serious illness that would take more than minimal effort to manage, I did some reshaping and updating of an area of this site where I have from time to time written about my weight loss efforts. I thought I might need a dedicated “getting back my health” journal. It turns out that, although I do not have that serious illness, I do wish to get serious, again, about weight loss, not because I have anything to confess or to feel ashamed of, but because I need to do everything I can to make the ten years that began yesterday (and the ten years that will begin January 1, 2010, and January 1, 2011, and on and on) the ten best years of my life.

I am not ashamed of my numbers. I weigh in on Fridays, and I’ll more than likely post my results, here, or there, or somewhere. And if that changes things for us, dear readers, then I guess maybe you have something to confess.

*********

A year ago, I wrote about a lot of blog projects I didn’t follow through on.

Two years ago, I did not post on this date.

Three years ago, I wrote about trying to get back into “normal” life again in the new year.

Four years ago, I wrote about some teenage party guests next door stealing a yard sign from our house.

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This is our fourth year as recipients of a share of the weekly distribution of organic produce grown, harvested, and packaged by the friendly folks at Spiral Path Farm in Loysville, Pennsylvania. When I wrote about our participation in 2005, I said of our first delivery:

There’s something about that box of stuff, about taking apart the components and washing the fresh earth of a local farm off the spinach and the radishes that made the salad more satisfying than it might have been had I gotten all of the ingredients from the supermarket.

I spent my childhood in a city neighborhood of double houses set close together with no real yard and my teen years in a suburban tract development. I have early memories of itinerant produce vendors who walked down Fifth Street on summer afternoons, calling out “Peaches! Tomatoes! Straw-bear!,” their wares packed in boxes that they carried on their shoulders. I also remember going with my mother to “The Orange Car,” a shack at a railroad siding downtown where we bought fresh oranges and grapefruit. We bought coffee and peanut butter at Zimmerman’s, across the street from the junior high school where my father taught, but most things came from the supermarket, an Acme about two blocks from where we lived that my grandmother called “the American store.”

On my own, I repeated the pattern, living first in city apartments and then a suburban tract development, where I’ve been since 1976. The first summer Ron lived here, 1984, he planted black seeded Simpson lettuce, the absolutely best lettuce I have ever eaten. Defending the patch against rabbits, groundhogs, and deer was an heroic effort, and the crop failed in 1985. Mostly I shop at the Giant, a supermarket about a mile from my house, because it’s handy, they have a wide variety, and I see my friends there.

I was initially uncertain about committing to these weekly deliveries. I can’t remember now what gave me pause. The risk of too much stuff I didn’t like or didn’t know how to work with? The concern that there would be too much, especially in the peak of the season?

The Spiral Path season begins in mid-May, and lasts this year until Thanksgiving. So far the only thing we’ve ever gotten too much of is garlic. We’re heavy garlic users, but the little bulbs pile up. I think we still have some from last year!

Today’s box has cucumber, lettuces, some yellow squash, some fresh cilantro, a few tomatoes, and a fresh garlic bulb. Tomorrow I’m making the season’s first batch of Thai cucumber salad, a concoction I first made last year from a recipe that came with the newsletter inside the box.  Bring a cup of water, a cup of rice vinegar, a cup of sugar, and a half teaspoon of salt to a boil and simmer for five minutes. Pour over thinly-sliced cucumbers and sweet onion. “The rice vinegar does the taste trick in this recipe,” notes the newsletter.

I lift the vegetables out with a slotted spoon. This leaves a lot of the liquid behind. I make a double or triple batch of the brew and keep adding fresh cucumbers and onion until there’s not enough to impart any taste, and then make some more.  Easy, refreshing, and low in Weight Watchers points!

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Today is my birthday. I am entering the best years of my life. It’s going to be a mango bango year!
                — from my paper journal, March 9, 2005

I came upon the line above while searching through my notebooks for something else. I’d pulled out a short story to work on for an August deadline and couldn’t believe that the last note was dated August of 2004. Surely I’d worked on it since then! It’s my best story! My workshop leaders had told me that when this story was examined at Bread Loaf!

In 2004.

So I spent yesterday paging through the material I’ve amassed over the last four years. Sure enough, I found nothing about that story, but along the way I found other bits that reminded me of ideas I’ve let languish, projects I’ve allowed to remain stalled. I knew that the theme for NaBloPoMo July was “food.”  I’d dropped out of posting every day, too. There is an eating scene in every piece of fiction I write, and my turns through my notebooks had shown me that I do indeed write a lot about food, that I like writing about food, and that what I write is some of the freshest and liveliest stuff I produce. Why not put everything together, resurrect Refiguring,  and join the NaBlo fun again?

I was happy to open the administration panel and see that my last post in this section was at least in 2008. It was in January, and it was one of two. They, in turn, had followed a few I’d posted a year before, which followed some brief remarks I’d made the year before that.

And here we are again. I’m still a member of Weight Watchers, I still have a push-pull love-hate relationship with that organization, with my weight and appearance, with cultural norms and societal expectations about how we look and how we interact with food. I have written elsewhere about my feeling that I have just entered a period of remarkable calm and productivity. So for at least thirty days, I’m here.

The title of this piece comes from a recipe in Weight Watchers’ Quick Meals, a cookbook I have used a lot.  It has a lot of feathers (Post-It bookmarks) sticking out of it, some of them placed there by Lynn in 2003. She’d expressed dismay at the prospect of whole wheat fusilli with ham in walnut cream sauce for dinner, and I asked her to go through the book and find things that might suit her better.

Mango Bango (Spicy Mango Cream) is on p. 186. It calls for fresh mango, lime juice, and hot pepper sauce to be pureed with some vanilla frozen yogurt and served as a dessert (2 points, or 1.5 fruits and 35 optional calories, not a Core recipe, depending on which Weight Watchers algebra of intake accounting you follow).

The food I grew up on lasts a long time — apples and raisins, potatoes and onions, rutabagas and turnips. I want bright juicy fruit now — mangoes and papayas, pomegranates, peaches, nectarines, cherries.

I did have a mango bango year in 2005, and things just got better from there. I haven’t lost any significant amount of weight, but I haven’t gained any either. In body size and shape I’m about the same (though my hair is much better now!), but in terms of my optimism and my personality and the way I’ve grown and changed and gotten closer to who I really want to be, I’m way ahead of the somewhat fearful woman of February 2005 who thought she might now have neither the physical nor the emotional strength to go to Wyoming.

That was two Wyoming trips ago.

There are some fresh cherries and some fresh mango in the refrigerator.

I’m at the beginning of a mango bango summer. See you tomorrow!

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“I’ll make something for you to eat, honey. I’m not too hungry myself.” She grins. “This whole business has helped my figure, at least.”
                       — David Michael Kaplan, b. 1946, American fiction writer
                            in “Feral Cats,” from Skating in the Dark

The dialogue above is from a later part in the book I referred to on Saturday. In this story, set about fifteen years later, Frank goes to his family’s summer home at the behest of his father, to check on his mother. She has gone there alone because she wants to get away for a while and think. She is about sixty-five years old, and “this whole business” that she refers to is a bout with cancer. She has finished the course of treatment considered appropriate. She tires easily and is often irritable. While it is not stated explicitly, the reader knows the implications. This reader was not surprised to learn in the next story that she died about six months later.

Some years ago I was in the narthex of my church just before the service began. A woman who had not been in church for a long time was there, and I overheard another member greeting her. The long-absent member, in her mid-fifties, had been, for as long as I’d known her (about five years) moderately overweight. I guess “matronly” would be the best word to use to describe her, if you had to use an adjective to convey her appearance. The woman who was doing the greeting was gushing over how good the long-absent member looked. “Wow! You’ve lost a lot of weight. You look terrific!” What the gushing greeter didn’t know (I hope, although how could she not know) was that the long-absent member had about a year before been diagnosed with cancer. On that morning, she had about three months left.

When I read the passage from Skating in the Dark, I couldn’t decide, exactly, how to regard it. As a characterization it is spot on. There are certainly thousands upon thousands of people who see weight loss as a good thing in and of itself. The mother is a minor figure in the stories and I don’t know enough about her to tell if this is self-deprecating, ironic humor or if she really is happy that her figure appears to be “improving,” that is, conforming to some external societal standard, no matter the cause of the improvement.

The idea that people will assume a weight loss they observe is, without question, something to be celebrated, and remarked upon, just makes me sad, given my current state of mind. I continue in my love-hate relationship with Weight Watchers, which wants to see less of me next week and encourages me to stop dieting and start living while enjoying a snack of half a banana and a teaspoon of peanut butter.

Half a banana.

What, exactly, do you do with the other half?

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The guide extracted a wedge of cheese and a thick slab of bread from his rucksack. He pulled a large jackknife from his pocket, cut three wedges from the cheese and three slices from the bread, and solemnly handed cheese and bread first to Jena, then to Frank.
        — David Michael Kaplan, b. 1946, American fiction writer
from “Tombs,” in Skating in the Dark

Skating in the Dark is “a novel in stories,” a popular form right now. The components are standalone short stories, but they are all about the same set of characters and, read together, give a narrative arc more complex than each has alone. I plucked it from a stack of unread books three days ago because I wanted to read some fiction with my morning coffee, but the book I was part way through was in my study and on Day 9 of The Cold That Won’t Bow to Zi-Cam I could not face going upstairs again just for a book.

It was a good choice. It’s held my attention and entertained (the primary purpose of fiction) as well as given me insights and ideas about craft (the other reason I read anything). In the passage above, Frank (the main character) has returned to the village in Greece where he spent (or misspent) the summer he was twenty-four trying to write a novel and trying not to make a commitment to his girlfriend, Jena. Neither endeavor was successful, and now he and Jena are vacationing there about five years into their marriage (which will itself prove not successful).

When I got to the passage above I immediately stopped thinking about how certain I am that Frank and Jena are headed for heartbreak and started thinking about the cheese and the bread. I copied the passage into my journal. Wow, I wrote underneath. They ate wedges of cheese and hunks of bread, no counting points, no weighing portions, no checking off on their food diary the amount of milk and carbohydrate they’ve consumed. They just ate it.

It was exactly one year ago that I wrote about joining up with Weight Watchers again. “I was so not going to do this, ever again,” I wrote, but I did, posted four more pieces about my adventures (and annoyances) with Flex Points and Activity Points, and then abandoned the project once more. Without benefit of weekly meetings and little silver Bravo! stars to stick on my 5-pound award bookmark (which I didn’t get anyway because I didn’t even lose five pounds) I just lived what turned out to be the best year of my life, turned sixty, won a writers’ residency, gallivanted about Vermont and Wyoming and did everything I wanted to do there. Or did I just do the things I could do, given my physical condition?

Just after I came back from Wyoming I found myself once again yearning to get serious about weight loss. Wouldn’t I look better, feel better, be able to live this wonderful life I have better if there was less of me? The day I joined was also the day Maria, my best girlfriend from eighth grade, joined, and, just like last year, the leader greeted us by name, and that sealed the deal.

Today was my Week 5. When I finished the Kaplan story I went out to the meeting Maria and I have been attending, even though I knew she couldn’t be there this week. I learned that I’d gained .2 pounds (that’s less than four ounces). The woman who weighed me consoled me over those scant four ounces, said I probably needed whatever comfort foods I was shoveling into myself as I wrestled with The Cold From Hell.

In the meeting I sat behind a young mother whose short spiky hair had a first-rate color job. She had pretty hands that she was using to distribute snack bags (apple wedges and celery sticks) to her two little girls, about four years old and two. The older child had on some well-worn sparkly ruby slippers not unlike the ones Lynn had at that age, and looking at the two children I thought wistfully about what an adorable big sister Lynn would have been. The young mother didn’t appear to be overweight, although it would be hard to tell with only seeing her sitting down in jeans and a gray hoodie. She was studying her materials carefully (she’s on Week 4), and as I watched her and her daughters I listened to the leader encouraging us to establish an eating plan for the week and eliminate thoughts of deprivation while you are measuring out exactly fifteen miniature M&Ms for a point value of . . .

And I thought, miniature M&Ms? You can miniaturize something that is already barely an object? I looked around and saw that I was sitting in a room full of beautiful beautiful women who don’t like their bodies, don’t like their lives, who maybe don’t like themselves. Here was this beautiful young mother wrangling her wonderful little girls to a Weight Watchers meeting instead of sitting in the kitchen with them finger painting.

And I felt very very sad. Because after I went home from the Weight Watchers meeting (after stopping at the market for a hunk of Armenian string cheese and a loaf of French bread), I had to get ready to attend a memorial service for the former teaching colleague who died so suddenly in December. She had been overweight all of her life, and in the thirty years I knew her we had talked often about weight loss and appearance and strategies for coping with each. There is some mystery and drama surrounding her death, and rumor has it that she underwent gastric bypass surgery not long ago, that people were saying how good she looked. We don’t know, of course, what contribution, direct or indirect, this expensive and dangerous surgery made to her fate. All I know is that I attended a memorial service for her today instead of wishing her a happy birthday. She would have turned fifty-six today.

The string cheese and the bread? I didn’t write down a bite of it.

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There is no doubt about it today. There is a connection between my writing and my cooking, two ways in which I express myself, define myself. I went to the draft of the story I wrote this week, reading it after I’d let it cool for a while. I realized that in that story and in another well-received one, a man observes a woman cooking and falls in love with her.

Yesterday I made pizza from scratch. (Well, almost scratch — I did use a prepared Boboli crust and canned sauce.) I browned sausage and spread mushrooms on it, put some pepperoni on my half, and then lavished shredded mozzarella and provolone all over it. It didn’t look like a Pizza Hut item (no folded over edge with cheese oozing out), and you had to eat it with a knife and fork, but it was really good. (7 Weight Watcher points, for those counting.) Today I alternated cooking and writing. Before I went to church I made sticky rice, a Thai dessert of jasmine rice sweetened with coconut milk and served with mango — 9 points). During the afternoon I made chicken breasts with spinach and fresh basil (another Thai dish — I do not know how or where I acquired my love for Thai cuisine — 7 points if served with rice) and apple pie for dinner (the apple pie decidedly the American variety but kept to 7 points by using a crumb topping instead of another full crust), and tortellini en brodo (prepackaged tortellini in a broth flavored with scallions and hot sauce — 5 points) for tomorrow.

I was planning on a writer’s field trip tomorrow, but if I have to stay home to wait for the garage door repairman, I’ll make Italian bread to go with the soup and 1-point chocolate bites.

Still unexplained is why my mood is so sunny during a February, a time a friend once described as twenty-eight dark, horrible, unnecessary days, especially a February when the temperature has been below freezing for ten solid days.