By Jim Hagarty
2014
I have to go for diet counselling again on Monday. This is my fourth lap around this track, dating back about 20 years. But, a lot has been accomplished in those 20 years. I now use corn oil margarine and skim milk. That’s about it.
A lot of breath and energy wasted on my behalf and yet, we all persist in this messed-up idea that someday I will change my dietary ways. My doctor, dietitian and I, are all actors in this little passion piece. Guess who plays the villain?
I think they think they’ve got me this time, however. I have to keep a detailed list of absolutely everything I eat and drink for the three days leading up to my appointment. And the precise times when I eat and drink that stuff. This assumes some level of honesty on my part and more than a few people over the years have made the mistake of making the assumption that I am honest, which I am not.
I’m a bargainer. Not in the marketplace of goods and services, where I am hopeless (I once sold a house for less than I bought it for. Who does that?) but in the superstore of truth and lies. This dates back almost 60 years to my childhood in the Catholic Church. When I came of age and had to start going to confession, I started to see how much trouble the truth could get me into. However, I was not quite prepared to start dealing in outright lies (that would come later). So, I well remember kneeling in a pew at the back of our church, preparing my list of sins for the priest. I used a little booklet which helped me to calculate the frequency with which I had committed such moral failures over the past month. I would scroll down through the 10 commandments and see which ones were tripping me up. Fortunately, I didn’t have any problem with most of them. In fact, I wasn’t sure what it might mean to covet thy neighbour’s wife. So I stuck to the mainstream errors such as keeping Sundays holy and the biggie – using the Lord’s name in vain.
As a teenager, I had quite a lot of trouble with this one. I don’t mean to excuse myself but my high school was one big factory of foul language in those days. It was either swear or be sworn at. Cuss or die!
Always one to fit in, I did my best to keep up. This was not usually a problem except at my monthly encounters with the confessional. It was very important, for some reason – well, the reason was we needed to be forgiven – to tell the priest not only the nature of each sin but exactly how many times we committed it. So, drawing on my math skills, I would calculate up how many times I had sworn in a typical day and then multiply that by the number of days in that particular month. I might, for example, arrive at the not unreasonable number of 20 swear words that escaped my lips per day that month. But in a typical month, that was at least 600 times. I knew that if I told the priest that, he’d scream, rip off his collar and go get a job selling used cars.
So, I had to compromise. Ten words a day. That would be 300. Still too many. Five times a day. One hundred and fifty. I could live with that. When asked by the priest how many times I had cursed since my last confession, I would produce the number 150 and there was no ministerial meltdown on the other side of that screen in the big box with the curtains. This was when I realized the potential efficacy of a little larceny, even while kneeling there supposedly confessing the truth.
Lying in a booth dedicated to not lying was having it both ways. And don’t get me started on that. How many lies had I told in the last month? Well one big one right there in the confessional, for starters, when I lied about my swearing.
Now, I would have to calculate my lies and come up with a reasonable number I could sell. And then go tell the priest a big fat lie about my number of lies.
This problem was exacerbated many times over as I got older and strayed from my monthly confessions. Now, it might be three months since my last confession. So, all my sins would be tripled in number. That was hard to sell and I would spend a long, long time on my knees in the pew running the numbers. And this was before the calculator was invented.
Later, doctors and I would get on a similar merry-go-round except the doctors didn’t seem to care how much swearing I did or whether or not I was coveting my neighbour’s wife, which by then I probably was. Now, it was how many cups of coffee was I drinking a day. I had no time to calculate that in advance because the question came out of the blue right in the examination room with the doctor standing right there. So I would just spit out a number and lowball it as far as I could without being totally unbelievable. Five, I would say, when the number was 10 or 15.
But, the chickens come home to roost. I know that they do from having grown up on a farm with not one, but two chicken coops. So on Monday, I will have to turn over a list showing every single thing I ate and drank, the quantities, and the times I ingested all this stuff.
I am currently engaged in these very intricate decipherations (I think I just made up that word) but now I have the benefit of a calculator. Now and then, however, I get a little frustrated, and I swear. Ten times today, so far. No, seven. Did I say seven? It was just four.
Good grief. (Is that swearing?)
