_On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores_
That night on the sleeper a splendid resolution sprouted within me. Next
morning when we arrived home it was ready and ripe for plucking. I would
trim myself down to more lithesome proportions and I would start the job
right away. It did not occur to me that cutting down my daily consumption
of provender might prove helpful to the success of the proposed
undertaking. Or if it did occur to me I put the idea sternly from me, for
I was by way of being a robust trencherman. I had joyed in the pleasures
of the table, and I had written copiously of those joys, and I now
declined to recant of my faith or to abate my indulgences.
All this talk which I had heard about balanced rations went in at one ear
and out at the other. I knew what a balanced ration was. I stowed one
aboard three times daily--at morn, again at noon and once more at
nightfall. A balanced ration was one which, being eaten, did not pull you
over on your face; one which you could poise properly if only you leaned
well back, upon arising from the table, and placed the two hands, with a
gentle lifting motion, just under the overhang of the main cargo hold.
Surely there must be some way of achieving the desired result other than
by following dieting devices. There was--exercising was the answer. I
would exercise and so become a veritable faun.
Now, so far as I recalled, I had never taken any indoor exercise excepting
once in a while to knock on wood. I abhorred the thought of ritualistic
bedroom calisthenics such as were recommended by divers health experts.
Climbing out of a warm bed and standing out in the middle of a cold room
and giving an imitation of a demoniac semaphore had never appealed to me
as a fascinating divertisement for a grown man. As I think I may have
remarked once before, lying at full length on one's back on the floor
immediately upon awakening of a morning and raising the legs to full
length twenty times struck me as a performance lacking in dignity and
utterly futile.
Besides, what sort of a way was that to greet the dewy morn?
So as an alternative I decided to enroll for membership at a gymnasium
where I could have company at my exercising and make a sport of what
otherwise would be in the nature of a punishment. This I did. With a group
of fellow inmates for my team mates, I tossed the medicine ball about. My
score at this was perfect; that is to say, sometimes when it came my turn
to catch I missed the ball, but the ball never once missed me. Always it
landed on some tender portion of my anatomy, so that my average, written
in black-and-blue spots, remained an even 1000.
Daily I cantered around and around and around a running track until my
breathing was such probably as to cause people passing the building to
think that the West Side Y.M.C.A. was harboring a pet porpoise inside.
Once, doing this, I caught a glimpse of my own form in a looking-glass
which for some reason was affixed to one of the pillars flanking the oval.
A looking-glass properly did not belong there; distinctly it was out of
place and could serve no worthy purpose. Very few of the sights presented
in a gym which largely is patronized by city-bred fat men are deserving to
be mirrored in a glass. They are not such visions as one would care to
store in fond memory's album. Be that as it may, here was this mirror, and
swinging down the course suddenly I beheld myself in it. Clad in a
chastely simple one-piece garment, with my face all a blistered crimson
and my fingers interlaced together about where the third button of the
waistcoat, counting from the bottom up, would have been had I been
wearing any waistcoat, I reminded myself of a badly scorched citizen
escaping in a scantily dressed condition from a burning homestead bringing
with him the chief family treasure clasped in his arms. He had saved the
pianola!
From the running track or the medicine-ball court I would repair to the
steam room and simmer pleasantly in a temperature of 240 degrees
Fahrenheit--I am sure I have the figures right--until all I needed before
being served was to have the gravy slightly thickened with flour and a
dash of water cress added here and there. Having remained in the steam
cabinet until quite done, I next would jump into the swimming pool, which
concluded the afternoon's entertainment.
Jumping into the cool water of the pool was supposed to reseal the pores
which the treatment in the hot room had caused to open. In the best
gymnasium circles it is held to be a fine thing to have these educated
pores, but I am sure it can be overdone, and personally I cannot say that
I particularly enjoyed it. I kept it up largely for their sake. They
became highly trained, but developed temperament. They were apt to get the
signals mixed and open unexpectedly on the street, resulting in bad colds
for me.
For six weeks, on every week day from three to five P.M. I maintained this
schedule religiously--at least I used a good many religious words while so
engaged--and then I went on the scales to find out what progress I had
made toward attaining the desired result. I had kept off the scales until
then because I was saving up, as it were, to give myself a nice jolly
surprise party.
So I weighed. And I had picked up nine pounds and a half! That was what I
had gained for all my sufferings and all my exertions--that, along with a
set of snappy but emotional pores and a personal knowledge of how a New
England boiled dinner feels just before it comes on the table.
"This," I said bitterly to myself--"this is sheer foolhardiness! Keep this
up for six weeks more and I'll find myself fallen away to a perfect
three-ton truck. Keep it up for three months and I'll be ready to rent
myself out to the aquarium as a suitable playmate for the leviathan in the
main tank. I shall stop this idiocy before it begins making me seasick
merely to look down at myself as I walk. I may slosh about and billow
somewhat, but I positively decline to heave up and down. I refuse to be
known as the human tidal wave, with women and children being hurriedly
removed to a place of safety at my approach. Right here and now is where I
quit qualifying for the inundation stakes!"
Which accordingly I did. What I did not realize was that the unwonted
exercise gave me such a magnificent appetite that, after a session at the
gymnasium, I ate about three times as much as I usually did at
dinner--and, mark you, I never had been one with the appetite, as the
saying goes, of a bird, to peck at some Hartz Mountain roller's prepared
food and wipe the stray rape seed off my nose on a cuttle-fish bone and
then fly up on the perch and tuck the head under the wing and call it a
meal. I had ever been what might be termed a sincere feeder. So, never
associating the question of diet with the problem of attaining physical
slightness, I swung back again into my old mode of life with the resigned
conviction that since destiny had chosen me to be fat there was nothing
for me to do in the premises excepting to go right on to the end of my
mortal chapter being fat, fatter and perhaps fattest. I'd just make the
best of it.
And I'd use care about crossing a county bridge at any gait faster than a
walk.
Now this continued for years and years, and then here a few months ago
something else happened. And on top of that something else--to wit: The
Great Reduction.
Of the Great Reduction more anon.