Slow Eating

Slow eating. 

I am not referring to the Slow Food movement, which was started in the 1980s to counteract the loss of local food cultures and traditions, including preserving, restoring, and promoting heritage stock from apples to turkeys. 

No, this is a movement of one, founded (out of necessity) in our home. I'm the one.

A week ago, meaning to have a healthy snack after a superb walk, I eschewed the easy carbs of cookies and crackers, and made myself a small bowl of popcorn. About seven bites in, I heard a crack. 

I had bit a kernel.

I spit out what I had in my mouth. No tooth bits, no anything. I touched my finger in my mouth. Okay, no blood either. So must have just been a very loud kernel, right?

Two more small portions of popcorn and I realized something just didn't feel right. I went to the bathroom and opened my mouth wide. Everything looked okay. But when I put my index finger on the tooth in the area that felt different, I was able to move the tooth. 

That's never a good sign.

I saw my dentist the next day. He made the very same comment: never a good sign to be able to wiggle a tooth, April. One x-ray later and we had the verdict: I had broken a tooth. Given that I had no pain, no bleeding, and no sensitivity to hot or cold, my dentist concluded that the tooth was dead and this had just been waiting to happen.

Because of the years of treatment and variety of drugs I have had for my myeloma, I have to go to an oral surgeon for any extraction. Fortunately, we have a superb one in town who has worked on my mouth off and on since 2005. While I was still in the dentist chair, my dentist had called and made an appointment for the extraction. It was a week later. In the meantime, he said, watch how you eat.

"Watch how you eat" translates into slowing way down and eating slowly. Really, really slowly.

As I just shared in a letter to my friend Katrina (spoiler alert, Katrina!), eating slowly has been a revelation. First, because I am chewing my food so slowly, I am paying more attention to what it tastes like and what its texture is. Second, because I am eating slowly, I am aware of the feeling of fullness when it arrives. All those nutritionists and dietitians are right: your brain gets the message of fullness from the stomach after you have eaten more than enough, so many people tend to overeat (a little, a lot) because of the delay in the messaging. Having to eat more slowly made me aware that I felt fuller on smaller portions.

Who knew?

The third revelation is a combination of an old memory and embarrassment that it took a broken tooth to drive the point home. I eat fast. Period. I "knew" that, but I had tucked that knowledge away. The old memory is a long-ago lunch with my then boss and mentor at my law school job back in Portland. Don treated me to lunch at a nearby cafe. We talked, our food came, and we started eating. Don looked at me after a few minutes and said, more or less, "Slow down, April! You're not a starving college student anymore!" I turned bright red and we both laughed.

That's the memory, one that makes me smile because I thought the world of Don. (Still do.) The embarrassment is that it is has been 40+ years since we had that conversation, and here I am (or was up until last week) still eating quickly.

The tooth came out this morning in one gentle twist as it was undeniably and reliably dead (and had a very shallow root to boot). I am on soft foods only today and limited in what I may eat for the next few days. 

After that, my goal is to not return to my hectic eating pace in the days and months to come. There is always enough food; I just need to slow down and savor it.

The Slow Eating Movement. You read it here first, my friends.

Fitzgerald Was Not Wrong

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his later years

 Poor F. Scott. Decades later, he is still misquoted. 

We all think he wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." But he didn't write that. What he actually wrote was, "I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days" in a 1933 story called "My Lost City." 

And apparently some version of that line about no second acts showed up in his working notes for The Last Tycoon, the novel he was working on at the time of his death at age 44. Some Fitzgerald scholars see The Last Tycoon as Fitzgerald's own second act to regain his stature as a major American novelist.

I know the feeling of the next act. I'm easily now on my 8th or 9th act, maybe more, depending on where I count from and what I count as an act. And 2023 has, for a variety of reasons, made me wonder what my next act is. 

Last week, at an appointment with my PCP, I said to her, "Don't get this wrong, but I never intended to live this long. I mean, I am truly grateful, but I didn't plan on this!" 

We both started laughing at the same time. What a great problem to have!

But that realization—that I never planned on this given the myeloma—has been on my mind all these first 18 days of 2023.

So what does 2023 look like? 

I have stepped away from most (almost all) of the Legal Clinic, a volunteer effort I have spent much of the last decade and a half deeply involved with. I stepped off the steering committee, I stepped away from the day-to-day operations as of the end of the year. Because of some unexpected December problems. I spent several hours in the last days of 2022 working with my friend Mel (who is Executive Director at Andrews House, which has hosted the Legal Clinic for its 19+ years of existence) cleaning up the mess. I left that meeting with a short list of items to take care of by the next day. Later that next day, Warren and I were driving somewhere and I told him I had finished the list and everything was wrapped up with Clinic. He asked me if I felt okay about that. 

Okay? I felt more than okay, I told him. I felt good and I felt done. I knew it was the right decision to step away finally.

One thing that not planning to live this long has done is make me take a long look at my finances. I'm okay financially. I have a small monthly pension from OPERS (Ohio Public Employee Retirement System) from my years at Juvenile Court and, laughingly, my years on the Civil Service Commission (for which I took the modest honorarium as annual pay, causing my years of service to count as OPERS credit, to my advantage when I got hired at Juvie). By my personal standards, I have a good amount in a savings account, mostly funded by my retirement payout and a bequest from a longtime client and friend who died in 2021. I have not started to draw my social security (I am full retirement age) and this is where the "not planning to live this long" financial planning we did several years back comes into play. Warren will switch to my spousal benefit after my death because it is larger than his. If I continue to live on and delay taking it until 70, he will get the largest benefit due me, which would be about $400 more a month than if I start drawing it in this year at any time. When we discussed this several years about with a financial advisor, I had no doubt I would not be here this long.

 Well, here I am. Now what?  

Not the most immediate problem, but definitely a note in the back of my mind. 

 I do not make resolutions when January 1 rolls around. But I do think about goals, as do some of my friends. What do we want to try to do in this coming year? The same words keep coming up: pay more attention to our health, exercise more regularly, gardening (well, of course!), more reading (the same), working on personal projects (sewing, painting, writing). 

On that last one, looking at the changes in my days without the Legal Clinic, I took a deep breath and told myself to start writing. Not "Oh, I'll think about that and get to it later" and certainly not "I'll wait until inspiration hits." Finally, finally, after years of shutting my eyes to it, I am writing every day. Every. Day. I set my alarm for 15 minutes and write. (As I type this at my study desk, I can look sideways and see the words of Richard Wagamese, an Ojibway writer, taped to my wall. "Just write. Every day. Fifteen minutes." Wagamese was right.) Most days, I continue writing after the alarm goes off, but I make sure I get those 15 minutes in.

I have now outlived F. Scott Fitzgerald by almost 23 years. I'm quite sure he did not expect to die at age 44. And I never expected to see 60, let alone be pushing 67. 

Let's see what this next act brings. 

Fourth Quarter Pennies Review: Wrapping Up 2022

 

Well, 2022 is at an end, I have tallied the numbers, and we are both looking ahead to what 2023 holds on the grocery front. Let's just say there were some surprises.

In the 4th quarter of 2022, we spent $704.29 on groceries. $644.70 of that was on food, $59.59 was on household items (toilet paper, dish detergent, parchment paper). Average per month in the 4th quarter? $234.76.

Average monthly spending on groceries for 2022? $240.62.

Food prices continue to fluctuate and baffle. After oatmeal jumped to $3.49 at Aldi earlier this year, it was down a dollar when we did a stock-up shopping in December. A dollar. That was not due to shrink-flation either; those were the prices on a 42 ounce container of old-fashioned rolled oats. Mayonnaise is up another dollar since midyear; it is up over a dollar and a half since early 2022. Flour, which rose 50¢ midyear for a five pound bag of unbleached Kroger brand, came down 20¢ by year's end. Milk has leveled out from midyear highs. On the other hand, eggs continue to be staggeringly expensive.

The egg prices reminded me of a long-ago colleague who took the California bar exam unsuccessfully four times in the early 1980s and finally shelved her dream of practicing law. A single mom, she told me that when she was trying to pass the bar and would have to cut back on her work to study for it, her kids had to live on ramen and eggs because money was so tight, and it just wasn't fair to her kids to do that for her to pursue the lawyer dream. Fast forward 40 years and I'm thinking she wouldn't begin to be able to feed her kids the eggs she relied on for protein during those lean times.

There was a 4th quarter goof that, in the name of transparency, I have to share. In too much of a rush during one morning shopping trip, I reached for and bought not the Kroger ground turkey one pound in the tube (with the special coupon driving its price way down) but the Simple Truth (Kroger's "pure" brand) ground turkey ($5.99) and (again, reaching far too fast and not paying attention) the organic Simple Truth ground turkey (($7.99). I did not realize my error until we were driving home. (Warren to me: Should I turn around so you can go in and fix it? Me: No, I'm embarrassed and it's my own fault.) That was a $9.00 error. (So what did I do the special ground turkey? Divided it into half-pound portions, which I then froze, and have been doling out very slowly since then, that's what.)

Moral of that story? Match the sale coupon item with the RIGHT product!

We (well, especially me) had a much bigger grocery buying discovery (well, shock) that happened just this weekend on the very last day of 2022. The shock came at home, not at the store, and it is all entirely our (again, primarily my) doing. We had gotten several free bread items that would need stored in the freezer so as to not go bad before we could eat it all. I asked Warren to help me with the basement freezer (an upright, 10 cf freezer); I would reorganize the kitchen freezer (the refrigerator freezer) before we tackled the one in the basement. 

The basement freezer was in pretty good shape in terms of organization. We had rearranged it a few months earlier, so much of what we did was just move some items around to free up some space.

The kitchen freezer? Oh. My. God. As I excavated it, I learned just how much GOOD FOOD I had squirreled away in there. Yes, I knew I had hot dogs in there. And some other items like popcorn and buckwheat flour. But bean soup? Diced pork frozen in meal-sized portions? Grated orange peel that I could have used in making biscotti this past holiday season? 

What. The. Heck?

I follow Hope and Larry Ware of Under the Median on YouTube. Inventorying your pantry, cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer regularly is a directive Hope often gives. I always credited myself with doing a mental inventory, although I knew I should be better as our pantry sometimes reveals surprises after we have bought a replacement at the store, but I didn't think I was too bad. Having now gone through my kitchen freezer, I now have Reasons #2931208 as to why Hope says to inventory what you have. 

Facepalm.

After all these, ahem, discoveries, I said to Warren, "Except for perishables, we should be able to go ALL of January with no groceries." That was yesterday. This morning, after thinking about it some more, I said, "Heck, we may make it through February without buying anything except perishables!"

On the bright side, as food waste rightfully gains more attention, we continue to keep ours to a minimum. Except for a very recent loss of about six celery sticks that had gone too long in the fridge to salvage (they hit the compost), and two opened, three-quarters empty jars of salsa that managed to mold, our food waste due to spoilage is about zero. And our food waste due to boredom ("Oh, let's not eat that again...") IS zero. In this country, residential (home) food waste is about 39%, or 21 million tons, of the total food waste a year. In addition to the savings of not wasting food, it really does make a difference. 

Goals looking into 2023?

One is the short-term challenge of getting through January without any grocery purchases except perishables. Looking into the refrigerator right now, that would be milk (me) and maybe orange juice (Warren).

The year's challenge is to bring our monthly spending down to $200.00 a month despite the higher food costs. There will be a garden, of course. And knowing now what I do about my squirreling-away tendency, and knowing that we are well-stocked on all fronts, I think that is doable.

Here's to 2023.