How to Get It On

There is a song by the Nigerian band BLO, which Kevin McDonald used effectively in the move about Idi Amin and Uganda in “The Last King of Scotland,” called “It’s Gonna Be a Good Day.”  Today, Saturday, was slated to be that kind of day.  It’s beautiful outside.  I got a bunch of work done yesterday and there is nothing pressing too hard over my head today.  Most decisively today is a day I will break a four-day fast around 5:00PM. 

A twenty-four-hour fast was hard the first time I tried it till it became something I could do without much thought.  A three-day fast sounded torturous.  I was warned about how rough the second day was.  It wasn’t at all.  Surely, at the end of any fast of more than a normal eating cycle you’re quite ready to eat.  But I’ve fasted three days straight each of the last two weeks and this week I decided to try for a fourth. 

How do I feel?  No hesitation about exercising, no apparent aches nor any wild, uncontrollable cravings.  I did dream about breaking the fast last evening which certainly suggests it’s the topic du jour and the topic du noir.  Why am I doing this?  Obviously to lose weight.  Paunch be gone!  It’s dawning on me as I enter my fifty-fourth year that it can’t be good for my poor legs to have to carry around an unnecessary fifty pound sack for the second half of life.  I feel my stomach tightening but a quick glance in the mirror brings me down to earth.  Many more days of such deprivation will be required before anyone’s calling me lanky. 

I called my pop.  He’s been asking me to join him on a walk in the trails behind his place for a while now.   “How about today?”  And soon we’re treading along, down passed one pond to another which the beavers have built.  Everyone knows what beavers do but it isn’t every day you consider their efforts in the now.  Tree after tree stump gnawed in the familiar conical shape.  Out in the pond a proper home which apparently has different beaver rooms.  The main dam, which they painstakingly built must be over fifty feet long.  I grant that they built all this, but why?  I suppose I figured they were likely to eat some of the new aquatic life they’d created a habitat for but apparently, they eat the trees they fell and are strictly herbivores.  Neither of us are quite clear on why so much remarkable effort was expanded this way. 

He suggested we might see a heron an indeed we saw two.  Later we spy what I assumed was a frog.  As I adjusted my camera to see if I could get a positive identification on these fella, I realized a few things:  He was a fella.  He was atop another member of the species, presumably not a fella, and that there were indeed not frogs, but rather “European Toads” with the comically appropriate Latin name of “Bufo bufo,” showing all the Americans in the pond how to get it on in public.  My father and I could take a hint.  We moved on.

Later, I was shopping at Tops, and I bought me a steak and some other things too.

Saturday, 5/02/20