Banned From The Buffet

I'm on the outs with my cousin Dave.

I fed his steak to the coyote who haunts the woods where our family holds it summer barbecues.  Now Dave is mad at me.  He says dieting has turned me into a jerk.  That's true, but only around him.

I used to eat anything I wanted.  My appetite was so  voracious that all things edible that could stay out of my reach, did.

In fact I wolfed down so much I was banned from every buffet in the Twin Cities.  Old Country Buffet had my mugshot plastered to the wall next to the register.  Lee Ann Chin's ranked me first among their Ten Least Wanted.  Even Saint Luke's had to hire bouncers to keep me out of their Friday Fish Fry.

Now I diet. 

These days for supper I'm allowed a leaf of lettuce half the size of what could sustain a gerbil.  If I am a good boy and don't insist "this is not food, it's what food eats", I'm rewarded with a dollop of cottage cheese hidden beneath the greenery.

And every bit of this is the fault of my cousin Dave.

Dave and I have always been close.  Too close.  Of all my one hundred first cousins, Dave lived the closest, so we grew up like brothers and just like brothers we fought all the time. 

In our early twenties, we used to drink beer and fish for carp on a sandy stretch of the Mississippi.  It wasn't much of a beach, in fact it was just down river from the Pig-Eye Waste Treatment Plant but that was the point.  It meant a lot of carp and little competition.

 One Saturday after polishing off half a case of my beer, Dave said it tasted used.  It was something only a mindless drunken twenty year old would take offensive to which is why (being all those things) I tossed him in the river.  In the process of wrestling Dave into the foamy water, I caught my foot on a rock and snapped a toe.

A couple trips to the liquor store later, we stopped by an emergency room to have my foot looked at.  The physician (a man whose name I couldn't pronounce sober)  confirmed it broken then instructed me avoid booze, tape the toe to its neighbor (the big one), and forget the whole affair.

I knew what the last part was about.  He was an observant guy and noticed how I had been eying Dave.  Dave noticed too.

This was during the fitness boom of the 1970's and Dave was a runner.  He hightailed it out of the ER and every time I saw him after that he was sprinting.  To get my revenge, I had to catch him, which required I too become a runner.

By the time I caught him, the toe incident was far behind us but I kept running.  Eventually, I was doing a marathon every spring and fall and racing triathlons all through the summer.

Running and racing became a big part of my life.

The cool thing about being a runner is you can eat anything you want.

Then one clear day while running on a path around Lake Calhoun with my cousin Dave, I put my foot down in the same manner as countless times before and SNAP!, the bone I broke on the beach twenty years earlier shattered. 

The emergency room physician (the man whose name I still could not pronounce) soberly examined the toe and delivered his diagnosis.

"That gotta hurt", he said without the slightest trace of accent or irony. 

I told him it did and asked what to do.  He said, "avoid alcohol, tape it to your big toe and forget about it."

I asked, "so when can I get back to my training?"

"About two months after you get a new foot", he replied.

So that was it.  My running days were over.  I tried to keep fit by sitting briskly for an hour a day but that just doesn't burn the same calories.  The trouble was my eating habits didn't change.

My weight skyrocketed then mercifully stabilized, or so I thought, until my wife ordered an industrial scale for my bathroom as a hint that I had topped out the one in her's.

So finally it came down to -- dieting.

And I blame it all on my cousin Dave.

He still runs and eats everything he wants, but if he thinks he can shove that in my face at the family barbecue, let's just say, I'll continue to be popular with the wildlife.

© Greg Schiller, 2008

Author: Greg Schiller