Life is Healthy

I don't know why, but this song has been stuck in my head for the last 24 hours--at least. I'll try to post again later. I'm planning on going to the gym sometime today. Enjoy.

“When I was forty and looking at sixty, it seemed like a thousand miles away. But sixty-two feels like a week and a half away from eighty. I must now get on with those things I always talked about doing but put off.” ~ Harry Belafonte

I was really looking forward to my book club tonight. I even tweeted about my excitement.

We read Run, by Ann Patchett. I really liked the book but I was especially looking forward to getting out and seeing my friends.

I really wanted a beer with dinner (we were having pizza) but I passed because there is always wine at book club. I even got my spouse to pick up a bottle this afternoon, so that I could contribute.

I gathered up my purse and my knitting. I hadn't organized a ride, so I got ready to call a cab. I looked up the host's email to confirm her address and because I wanted to make sure that I was planning on going to the right house. My memory is not what it once was.

I was right about the house but wrong about the date.

My book club is November 30th.

My kids felt bad for me because I took a shower and put on clean clothes for nothing.

I am sulking telling myself that, next week, I will enjoy myself twice as much for having had to wait.

A few more sections to go. This one’s a little long. Sorry about that. I really appreciate allowing me to share these with you. While Carlene’s project happened years ago, putting these stories out here is healing all over again.

In Part 4, the letters and email began arriving in earnest. As Carlene’s project progressed, so did my deepening awareness of my unresolved grief.

Here’s Part 5:

With every email and every letter, the 200-pound, 19-year-old me tapped at my window, begging to be let in, but I resisted. The first couple dozen responses were easy to take, and while I visited a few soft spots reading what people wrote, I was in control emotionally and physically, still DASH dieting and heading down the scale. But the girl who was widowed and left a single mother could not be silenced. She had unresolved issues that she demanded the 200-pound, 36-year-old me deal with.

Bruce’s high-school girlfriend, Mary, selected a few letters Bruce had written to her when he went off to college that she thought Carlene would like to have. When I read Mary’s initial email offering to send the letters to Carlene, I remembered a moment from the day of Bruce’s funeral, when the mortuary’s limousine was parked in front of the church and I was sitting in the front seat between the driver and my grandmother waiting for the processional to the cemetery to begin.

Mary’s family lived in a stone house near the church. I saw her leave the church and I watched her walk briskly across the street.

It could be you sitting in this car, I thought as a couple of tears welled.

I wish it was you.

I shifted in the seat to reach for a tissue in my coat pocket and felt the pull of 35 stitches between my legs. (Note: Carlene was 9 pounds when she was born and I was still recovering from her delivery 2 weeks earlier.) I caught the tears with my gloves and I thought about Carlene. I felt grace in the knowledge that she was my daughter. If Mary or anyone else was sitting in that car, Carlene wouldn’t be mine. l would never have known Bruce’s silly humor, freezing feet and balding head. I wouldn’t have warmed baby pigs born at 2 a.m. on a cold winter night or sat in a tractor in a bean field after the sun went down singing “Endless Love” at the top of my lungs.

I also wouldn’t have learned how one simple moment in a car on the way to a burial could feel as real in the present as it did when it happened 17 years earlier. I sent Mary an email thanking her for helping Carlene with her project, and in my mind, thanked her for not being Carlene’s mother.

Shortly after Mary’s envelope of letters arrived, Carlene received a package from Bruce’s high school choir director. Bruce was a talented tenor who won every choral award possible in high school. He toured Europe with America’s Youth In Concert, and was a member of the Statesman’s Chorus at South Dakota State University. When we were alone, he talked about leaving the farm and pursuing a music career. That’s what made Mr. Jones’s gift so difficult to receive and yet the most important piece of Bruce’s past anyone could give Carlene.

“You’re not supposed to have favorites when you’re teaching,” said Mr. Jones in a cassette recording. “But Bruce was one of my all-time favorites and as far as vocal music is concerned, probably my best performer. As far as his personality, Carlene, your dad…was always with a ready smile, very polite, very positive, calm and really quite unflappable. I wish I had some of those characteristics.

“Along with the program from ‘Lil Abner,’ I’m sending a very poor tape of a rehearsal we had for ‘Oklahoma!’ Keep in mind that this was a number of years ago and it was a little hand-held tape recorder and on a stage where there was a lot of activity. Much of the voice is lost, but at least you have an inkling of what Bruce sounded like. Hope you enjoy it.”

Bruce was a senior when he played the lead in “Oklahoma!” and during every performance my 13-year-old butt was planted in the second row with my eyes focused only on him. My heart flip-flopped when he sang the duet, “People Will Say We’re In Love,” and as I listened, I secretly hated the female lead. I couldn’t sing my way out of a bag, but I wanted to be Laurey. I wanted Bruce to sing to me and kiss me. But Bruce never paid any attention to me when he’d come over to our house with my older sister’s friend whom he was dating or when I’d go out of my way to walk past his locker when I wore my junior high cheerleading outfit. I was just Debbie’s little sister. An eighth-grade nobody.

Twenty-two years later, I was his widow and the mother of his child, and I was standing in a living room in western Pennsylvania holding a tape of him singing “The Surrey With The Fringe On The Top.”

All these years I’d kept Bruce’s memory comfortably alive in photographs where he was safely one-dimensional. Dead. The last time I heard his voice, I was sitting on the living room floor changing Carlene’s diaper. He got on his knees and kissed her cheek.

“Goodbye, Carlene. Be a good baby for mommy.” Then Bruce kissed me on the head and said, “See you at noon! Love you!”

Now I was in a different living room and standing next to an almost grown up Carlene. I feared the joy of hearing his voice again wouldn’t be enough to counter the dread of remembering he was dead. Holding the tape was like holding the pull cord to a net filled with grief disguised as confetti. If I played the tape, I’d release the grief and surely it would bury me again.

Then I looked at Carlene, who’d only known her father through the voices of others. Her face was beaming with excitement. She was only 11 days old when he died, much too young to remember what he sounded like. Without me, she might not know which voice was his on the tape. I thought how I’d witnessed so many of her firsts – first step, first day of school, first date, all the things Bruce missed – and decided that despite anything I feared, I couldn’t miss the first time she heard her father’s voice.

I put the cassette in the tape deck and hit play. We stood there staring at it like we were looking into the sky for a shooting star. Just as Mr. Jones said, there was the raucous sound of teenagers laughing and a pit band rehearsing. Then, like fine tuning the radio, I pulled Bruce’s voice out of the chaos. Rather than a net spewing grief, his voice spread into the room like a warm blanket. He was singing in our living room, his voice playful, animated, and for me, familiar. I was relieved that I hadn’t forgotten what he sounded like and I was grateful to Mr. Jones for helping me introduce Carlene to her father in that one, small way.

Carlene listened, wide-eyed, and hung on to every word he spoke and sang.

“I’ve never had the whole package, Mom,” she whispered.

Carlene saw images, heard stories, and handled tangible pieces of physical evidence that her father had been alive once, but in all her life, he’d not been a part of the family. She was a Bouwman. Her grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were Bouwmans. But Bruce, in his absence from her visits at Christmas or Easter or during school breaks, wasn’t. He was a face in a photo that looked a lot like her, but he was never a living breathing member of the family she’d grown up with. Then Carlene heard his voice, and in it, she heard her grandparents and uncles and cousins. More importantly, she heard herself. Finally, Bruce was more than her father. He was her dad.

In the written portion of her project, Carlene wrote about the tape, “It was by far the best gift I could ever receive! If anything happened to it, I’d be crushed.”

I'm always on the lookout for foods rich in vitamin K2 MK-4, because it's so important and so rare in the modern food system. I heard some internet rumors that marrow might be rich in fat-soluble vitamins. Google let me down, so I decided to look through the rat studies on K2 MK-4 in which they looked at its tissue distribution.

I found one that looked at the K2 MK-4 content in different tissues of rats fed vitamin K1. Marrow was rich in K2, along with testes. It contains 10-20 times more MK-4 than liver by weight, and more than any of the other organs they tested (serum, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, testes, marrow, brain) except testes. They didn't include values for salivary gland and pancreas, the two richest sources.

If we assume beef marrow has the same amount of MK-4 as rat marrow per weight (I have no idea if this is really the case, but it's probably in the ballpark), two ounces of beef marrow would contain about 10 micrograms MK-4. Not a huge source, but significant nevertheless.

Bone marrow was a prized food in many hunter-gatherer societies. Let's see what Dr. Weston Price has to say about it (from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration):

For the Indians living inside the Rocky Mountain Range in the far North of Canada, the successful nutrition for nine months of the year was largely limited to wild game, chiefly moose and caribou. During the summer months the Indians were able to use growing plants. During the winter some use was made of bark and buds of trees. I found the Indians putting great emphasis upon the eating of the organs of the animals, including the wall of parts of the digestive tract. Much of the muscle meat of the animals was fed to the dogs. It is important that skeletons are rarely found where large game animals have been slaughtered by the Indians of the North. The skeletal remains are found as piles of finely broken bone chips or splinters that have been cracked up to obtain as much as possible of the marrow and nutritive qualities of the bones. These Indians obtain their fat-soluble vitamins and also most of their minerals from the organs of the animals. An important part of the nutrition of the children consisted in various preparations of bone marrow, both as a substitute for milk and as a special dietary ration.

The condition of the teeth, and the shape of the dental arches and the facial form, were superb. Indeed, in several groups examined not a single tooth was found that had ever been attacked by tooth decay. In an examination of eighty-seven individuals having 2,464 teeth only four teeth were found that had ever been attacked by dental caries. This is equivalent to 0.16 per cent. As we came back to civilization and studied, successively, different groups with increasing amounts of contact with modern civilization, we found dental caries increased progressively, reaching 25.5 per cent of all of the teeth examined at Telegraph Creek, the point of contact with the white man's foods. As we came down the Stikine River to the Alaskan frontier towns, the dental caries problem increased to 40 per cent of all of the teeth.