I remember the doctor telling Mother,
'He's off the charts again.'
I didn't feel off any chart!
I wasn't that fat,
one of those boys
whom mothers call 'big-boned'.
I wore Husky pants,
but they weren't Fat pants!

My lithe, athletic friends
made fun of me sometimes.
I always felt they'd gotten mixed up
somehow and had the wrong guy.

Fat was Ben Sterling,
who sat in the back row
and didn't fit in his child-sized desk.
But if you'd asked him, he probably
wouldn't have thought himself fat, either.

I got nicknames like 'Beef'
and later, 'Jelly Belly',

but looking back at pictures,
I see the chart of my body shape
would be jagged enough to impale you.

In junior high (when I was being
groomed to succeed JFK, haircut and all) ,
I looked thin and cute,

and it oscillated that way for decades,
like a wrestling match
between the fat and the thin me.
You could only see the guy on top.

The past few years, though,
I've expanded slowly
like a speckled balloon
being inflated by a scientist
to show the universe expanding.

In fact, I even wrote a children's myth
called 'Raymond and the Big Bang',
in which fat Raymond 'gets as big as a house'
(his Jewish mother's ever-present warning come true) ,
then explodes and BECOMES our universe!

***
Now all of that is over,
hopefully for the rest of my life,
for a salad is as delicious
as spaghetti or an omelet
or...(but let's not get going
with suggestive names that could be
like a litany of starlets to a sex addict) .

I hope to reverse directions,
get off the blood pressure pills
and the cholestorol pills,

be a vision of suppleness to my wife,
double my energy and live 20 years longer,

but now is a kind of grey limbo.
Saying goodbye to the delights of food
means saying goodbye to the whole world.
The canyons and vistas and excitement of cities—
what for, if not for a good restaurant after touring?

Like Columbus you just have to keep going.
There must be a new world
on the other side of all this,
but I haven't reached it yet,
I haven't reached it yet.

_____

(Note: you can SEE some of Max's ups and downs on his website at this page: www.realnothings.com/pictures.htm.
If you'd like to read the story, 'RAYMOND AND THE BIG BANG', go to this page: www.realnothings.com/stories/raymond.htm)

zahida