The Twinkie Diet

I am going on the Twinkie diet. No, I'm not going to start eating Twinkies, something I have never done. Nor Hostess HoHo's either, even someone dear to me confesses it has been her occasional junk food fix since childhood.

Yesterday I was perusing one of my favorite online news sources, which is 75% serious news and 25% supermarket tabloid items. My eye catches man loses 27 pounds in two months  on a self-designed Twinkie diet. Not quite ready to get to work on a writing project, I checked out what I thought must be either a joke or a gimmick.

No gimmick. A nutrition professor from Kansas State was seriously conducting an experiment with himself as the subject. BHE (before his experiment), he ate a healthy diet of whole grains, vegetables - you know, the whole healthy food routine.  His intent was to create a tool to use with his students.

He restricted his caloric intake to 1800 calories and ate junk food such as Twinkies, a daily protein shake and a can of green beans. He added a multivitamin to the mix. The results were unexpected. His weight dropped quickly (always knew there was no food value in snack food). But the biggest surprise came as he monitored his vitals over the two months. His cholesterol dropped. His good cholesterol went up and the bad stuff went down. His BMI decreased and put him in the normal zone.

The end result? On all counts, he was healthier at the end of his experiment than when he started. The conclusion - it's the calories stupid. We are all eat too much - and weigh too much.

So I said to myself: this is the diet for me. The Twinkie diet (minus the Twinkies). Eat less food. Stop trying to always eat healthy foods and guilting myself when something is not. The multivitamin is easy. I am already one of the superstitious, who take multivitamins under the belief that a pill a day keeps the doctor away. The green beans do have to go - a can of green beans has enough salt in it to make me gain 27 pounds due to water retention.

Going on a diet just before the holiday season starts is a good strategy. This way I will be ready in January for the new Congress to assemble and do their own attack on consumption by cutting taxes and big government (just don't mess with my entitlements). Who knows, I may be bikini shopping by spring!

The Color Blue

It's funny how those odd bits and pieces lodge themselves in some crevass in your brain, only to show up later in some entirely different form. When I was a child, my favorite color was blue. Not the sort of startling thing I would expect to turn into anything that matters later in my life.

But it has. Spread out like jigsaw pieces waiting to be noticed as having a pattern. The color blue is embedded in my present life.

There is the blue of New Mexico's sky, one of the few places in my traveling life where I return. Once when I was there, I struck up a conversation with a woman painting at an easel. I asked where she was from. Florida she said. I then asked her why she came all the way to New Mexico to paint. Her reply was that it was the particular blue of the sky, so different from Florida's blue sky.

Hmmm. I hadn't noticed. But she was right. Most of New Mexico is over a mile high, some parts a mile and a half above sea level. The air is thinner - and the sky is dramatically more blue. Just like the blue sky on the images on my earlier blog of Snows and Blues. (No photoshopping and the kind of film here - it is what my digital camera "saw.")

Salinas National Monument

And there is the blue ice of the glaciers that so intrigue me. Alaska's tidewater glaciers slowly traveling into the sea. 



Alaska

And there were those icebergs in Greenland, pieces of glaciers that have broken loose to flow toward open water.

It's bigger than it looks!
Iceberg in Greenland

And at the other end of South America, there is the remoteness of Chile's Avenue Glaciers.   

Glacier melt in Chile

Or perhaps blue continues to capture my attention because it is the color of my dear love's eyes.

Taking a snooze in the sun while waiting for the next glacier 

Now that I have begun thinking about those pieces of blue scattered throughout my life, I imagine I shall find many more!

Snows and Blues to Give Me Perspective

When Clem and I were growing up, we lived in the Mississippi flyway, one of the great migration routes for waterfowl. Every spring swans, Canada geese, and snow and blue geese would fly overhead in great clouds. It is a precious memory that sustains me when I begin to slip over the edge and become too caught up in political and world drama.

I did not have a camera then, which was capable of capturing these images on film - only my boxy Brownie camera. Now thanks to the digital cameras of today, it is possible for me to capture some of the essence of these wild creatures, who seem all but oblivious to humans, awed by their flight northward into Canada.



Wintering Snows and Blues

 

Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge
New Mexico

 One of their wintering places is in central New Mexico. Smart snowbirds!

Today, Minnesota waits to see who their next governor will be. A county by county map of the state reflects the disparity of election results across the county. The margin in each county is 10-20% for either candidate, even though less than 1% separates them statewide. Either folks in each county clearly liked one candidate or the other.

Another "throw the bums out" election, the third such election in four years, awaits the pundits' attempts to understand what the results mean. While Senator John Boehner tries to discover a strategy to herd cats in a coalition labled Republican, but consisting of Tea Party-ers and the ever present Sarah Palin. While bombs worldwide explode and children die of treatable diseases and malnutrition.

My perspective? I have grandchildren in public schools and the university. My neighbor across the street was laid off and my heart aches for their frantic fears. Arts and music disappear from school curriculums, affecting children I know personally and those who would teach them. My middle-class peers grow poorer. Stores where I sometimes shop are filled with goods for which my friends and I have little need, prolonging a stalled economy while people examine their consumer lifestyles.

An older friend once related what she experienced when her 90-some year old mother died. She looked out the door four days after the funeral. The mailman was making his rounds as if nothing monumental had happened. She had to resist the urge to holler at him, "don't you know my beloved mother just died."

Then I remind myself of the great flocks of birds who are flying southward to wait until the snow season passes. Some will not survive the journey. But the great flocks will fly north again in the spring and hatch new chicks. Huge flocks will swirl across the skies and I will listen for the deafening sound of them calling to one another. Wheeling and turning as if the whole flock is one giant organism.



Scary Times

Happy Halloween! The dark forces will prowl the streets in the disguises of little children dressed in costumes and begging for candy. And if you believe that, you are in big trouble.

And happy voting. On second thought, that doesn't sound right, given the climate of these midterm elections.

The world does not need any more political commentary, including mine. All I hope for every one of us is that we don't confuse Halloween's dark forces with the realities of what we are voting for.

See you at the voting booths - and leave your candy at home. I understand an overdose does weird thing to children and the adults who care for them.

Check It Out In MinnPost!

If MinnPost.com isn't a part of your regular online reading, You might consider adding it to your regular routine. It describes itself as: "a nonprofit journalism enterprise that publishes MinnPost.com. Our mission is to provide high-quality journalism for news-intense people who care about Minnesota."

If that is not enough incentive to whet your curiosity, call up the site and click on Community Voices. My article is today's (October 25) featured reading. Bill Moyers is one of my heroes and I still miss his Friday night Journal on TPT (public television). In this election frenzy, I have wondered who he might have interviewed. With the airwaves awash with political commentary, some of it good and some of it verging on grounds for libel, I suspect he would have invited some thoughtful voices for us to consider.

I'd like to think and hope that all of this vocal election expression is part of a process that leads us somewhere. Some years in the future we will have the advantage of a long view. I suspect we will see more than the Great Recession and political polarization. We are going somewhere new - into uncharted territory without GPS and reservations at our favorite campgrounds.

I remember a colleague years ago who had become very vocal about the prospects of nuclear war.  I asked her why, since the rest of her life had been focused on advocacy for children's mental health issues. She said if nuclear war happens, no other issue matters.

I wonder what would happen if our culture could leave behind all the rhetoric and the distortions. What would we name as what really matters?

Pelicans and Sparrows!

Two of my poems were published recently in Kingfisher, the newsletter of the Minneapolis Chapter of the National Audubon Society.

I had been driving along I-694 in Fridley and caught sight of a large flock of large, white and black birds. Paying attention to my driving . . . I exited and pulled to the side of the road and found the flock again.

They were flying in formation. White Pelicans, sailing and flapping in unison. I had seen pelicans before but never in an urban area. Then I thought . . . hey . . . Moore Lake is near by. Perhaps they stopped temporarily in their migration south.

What an incredible sight it was! Here is the poem:

Pelecanus erythrorhychos

Black-tipped whites set sail

glide, flap, turn – in unison

Silent symphony

∞

White-throated Sparrows are certainly staying around a long time this fall. Usually they slip through quickly on their migration south. Not so this year. But, I’m not complaining.

Their fall traveling songs are nothing like their spring clear whistles that sound like the words “Old Sam, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.”

They aren’t too bad as vocalists even in the fall. After all, they are the national bird of Canada!

Fall Mumblers  

  Muffled mumbles –     

    inside the forest’s edge.

       White-throated Sparrows 

are passing through.  

Almost reluctantly,    

a full, clear, whistled 

 signature-call sounds.

Just once.

     Then, back to mumbling.

Saving the best

for spring.

The Cranes are Congregating

Sandhill cranes are fiercely territorial. Every year when they reach their nesting site, they drive out every other creature from a broad area around their nest. But in the fall, something triggers their migratory instincts and they gather together in large flocks in spent cornfields. There they fatten up for the long flight southward. Just as in the spring, they congregate along a sixty mile stretch of Nebraska's Platte River on their way north. True snowbirds!

Several days ago we went to Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in Wisconsin, near the St Croix River. In farmers' fields south of the refuge, the cranes were gathering. We watched them - and they watched us. Small groups would rise up in the air, a picture of grace par excellence. I think there is nothing more beautiful than the sight and sound of them, churrrring to each other as though they live year-long in large flocks.

Wheeling overhead, they practice for the journey. The first-year chicks have become adolescents, still "living at home" with their parents. They are trying out their wings to go somewhere they have never seen, trusting their two protective parents will guide them across the miles.

Their migration remains a mystery although research has given some tentative explanations. A combination of cues passed on from generation to generation guides them south in the autumn - and north into the Canadian and Siberian tundra in the spring. This year, the lingering warmth of one of the warmest Octobers ever has meant the cranes are late to migrate. As are the geese - "late to come down," as one local man put it.

How like us are the migrating birds. We live by regular patterns in our lives, scarcely aware of cues that guide us through the days and the months. Sometimes abrupt changes remind us of those cues, such as shift-work or jet lag that disrupt our body rhythms. Or people in our lives behave unpredictably.

And we like our weather patterns to be regular. How many times this past month, have I heard people remark about the glorious autumn we have had - and then follow it with either the we-will-pay-for-it-later comment or say something about their fears of climate change.

I'm not a migratory being. My travel is more erratic and the cues come from schedules of conferences or available experiences. At the same time, as the last leaves swirl down from the trees and the light softens, I respond to old rituals. Washing windows. Cleaning out closets. Making sure evergreens and shrubs get thoroughly watered in preparation for below-freezing temperatures.

Perhaps that is why when the sandhill cranes fly overheard, constantly calling to each other, I am stirred in the deepest part of my soul.