The vast silent weight of limitless darkening clouds weighed on my ears; the throbbing spume of sunset sliced the undulant Andaman sea, piercing my eyes, tugging the freshly corrugated golden sugar beach with bloodied fingers. The lawn, beyond, seared to sisal by the blasts of July, crackled under my feet.
March 29th is my baby boy’s birthday. He’s 42. So much life has happened since then. Good, bad, ugly, beautiful. Yet, I can still recall with razor clarity that he was born at 12:40 p.m. (because I was hungry and they wouldn’t let me eat anything but ice chips and jello). It was bitterly cold but brilliantly sunny outside, with that pale high blue sky signaling the cusp of spring and the wind has blown the air clear of clouds. He was my second child. I remembered only too clearly 18 months before when his sister was born, and all of the prodding and poking various people in white uniforms and lab coats did when all I wanted to do was sleep and forget…
Looking back at those curly-edged black and white photos pasted in my family albums, I note that I was thin until I hit my thirties. Until I hit my teens and discovered the glory of after-school french fries, gravy and cherry cokes at Diana Sweets, I was actually skinny. That’s mainly because we grew up on a farm in Beamsville. It was ostensibly a fruit farm, but what sticks in my memory is my younger brothers and I picking up rocks from the orchard and piling them in rows along the fringes of the fields. We worked hard. We played outside every daylight hour. We didn’t have much to eat but I don’t recall being really hungry, except for sweets. Getting a fat Jaffa…
Tagged: Burn the Fat, eat right, poverty eating
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