Eating Under the Influence

Carolyn J. Rose

 

When the bathroom scale flashed a number I’d love to see for the stock I bought last year, I stepped off and tried again. (Right, you never did that.) When the same number flashed again, I slunk away, admitting my crime—eating under the influence. EUI.

 

I don’t mean the influence of drugs or alcohol.

 Sure, those substances can stimulate appetite while suppressing good sense, but plenty of other things can trigger an episode of EUI. Little mundane things. Broken shoelace. Stuck zipper. Bad horoscope. And then there are the huge and scary things. Like . . . well, I’ll leave those to your imagination. Whatever causes stress, it’s a major contributor to EUI.

 Stress can manifest suddenly, perhaps due to an accident, a relationship break up, a letter from the IRS, or the outcome of an election. It can develop slowly due to grinding educational and career pressures, the whiplashing demands of a boss from hell, or the strain of sustaining a marriage made in the same place.

 But there are other factors contributing to EUI. And studies conducted right here in my home office have revealed benefits to snacking. For example, aches and pains may subside after ingesting a few chunks of chocolate. Self-doubt frequently fades with each bite of quality mac and cheese. And munching popcorn brings clarity to sorting the pros and cons of everything from picking a paint color to donating a kidney.

 Finally, without doing a lick of scientific research, I’ll hazard a guess that there are genetic and environmental components contributing to EUI. If your parents had the tendency toward EUI and were frequently engaged in EUI during your formative years, it could seem normal.

 Of course, there are those for whom stress doesn’t lead to EUI. I’ve known people who lost their appetites when stressed. Those people couldn’t understand how a gob of peanut butter soothed my clenching gut. (Simple: it gives the gut something to clench around. And since it’s sticky going down, it’s more likely to stay there.)

 Unlike driving under the influence of controlled substances, there are no legal penalties for stuffing your face while impaired. So if you’re using a soup ladle to gorge on ice cream from the carton, don’t look over your shoulder for flashing lights. Don’t listen for the throb of a siren or a gruff voice ordering you to step away from the freezer.

 What you might hear is your conscience suggesting you try exercise instead. But if you’re like me, you’re a pro at ignoring that pesky little voice in your head.

Fog

 

Carolyn J. Rose

Awakened in the middle of the night, I didn’t need to open my eyes to know what the streetlamp would reveal. The fog horn on the Columbia River clued me in.

The sound took me back to my early childhood and a visit to relatives somewhere on Long Island. The deep and mournful fog horn was like nothing I’d ever heard. 

Not like the Woodstock fire siren that screamed every day at noon. Not like the beeps and honks of cars and trucks and tractors. Not like the throb of a police siren.

It was dark when I heard that fog horn years ago, so I didn’t see the fog. To my disappointment, it had lifted by morning. But I felt it must have been something spectacular to require a horn, something more than I saw in the Catskills. 

Fog there skulked through the trees, rising and falling and sifting to the ground again as if it had been scattered by a feather duster.

I can’t recall seeing fog when I lived in Arizona. And the fog I recall in Arkansas had a uniform quality, more like gray smoky air. Fog was rare in Albuquerque, but once appeared at the base of the Sandia Mountains in a thick band like a giant snake slithering along the foothills. “Smoke,” excited callers told emergency dispatchers. “Something is on fire.”

When we moved to Eugene, I experienced fog with a vengeance. In the Pacific Northwest, fog only occasionally comes in on those poetic little cat feet. Usually it rolls over us like a tsunami. In Eugene a tide of fog filled the valley, and stayed. And stayed.

It slid up the hills like an avalanche in reverse. It was dense and cottony and cold. It frosted limbs and lawns and reduced visibility to a few yards. 

Driving home from work along a road without striping was disorienting, surreal. Signs and side roads were invisible. Until they weren’t. Headlights appeared as blurry blobs floating in milk. Sounds were distorted. Distances uncertain. I’d roll my windows down and creep along, listening for the crunch of gravel indicating I was on the shoulder, monitoring any tilt from the horizontal that meant I’d steered too far toward a ditch.

The first few evenings I viewed the drive as an adventure. Then as an endurance test. Then, after two weeks or more, as a form of physical and psychological torture.

I still dream about that experience and wake up in a cold sweat. Especially on nights when the fog horn moans.

You Gotta Be-Leave

 

Carolyn J. Rose

Ever walk by a tree in autumn and wonder what leaves say to each other as they cast off from their home twigs?

Needless to say, I have. I’ve actually stood in a shower of yellow and crimson leaves with my head cocked, listening.

I heard only a faint flutter, a slight wisk of sound. Probably the breeze.

Undaunted, I lingered, imagining what I might hear if I was a lot more in tune with nature and—to be honest—if I possessed an inner voice that shut up once in a while.

Here, for your reading pleasure, are utterances from the treetops as I imagined them.

“Hey, watch me do my helicopter impression as I fall.”

“Not bad. But how about this swan dive?”

“Swan? That looked more like an overweight penguin. Now, get a load of these moves. Branch to branch to branch and a final twirl. Ta da. Olympic quality, right?”

“Just like Simone Biles. If she was wearing a straitjacket and had concrete blocks on her feet.”

“And you can do better?”

“You bet. I’ll make you so green with envy you’ll think your chlorophyll is back. I’m waiting for just the right updraft so I can sail into the sky.”

“Sail until gravity grabs you, you mean.”

​“Gravity, schmavity. I’m aerodynamic, baby. I be-leave in myself. Get it? I’m gonna ride the wind.”

“Ride it for a fall.”

“Maybe, but I’ll see the world first.”

“If you see the next block you’ll be lucky. And you might land in the street instead of on the grass or in a garden.”

“So what?”

“So, the street sweeper’s coming tomorrow. You’ll be sucked up and ground to bits with dirt and trash from the gutter.”

“Huh. Well, I’m not afraid of a little dirt and gutter trash. But, uh, maybe I’ll just hang on for a bit and enjoy the sunshine.”

“Not behind me you won’t. I’m not a windbreak.”

“Hey, don’t push. I’m losing my grip. I’m fall—”

“And there he goes.”

“Oooh. Smack into the trunk. That’s gotta hurt.”

“And a faceplant on the lawn. So much for the power of be-leaf.”

“Yeah, it’s sad. But you know, now that the blowhard is gone, I’m feeling the power of re-leaf.”