Adventures in Adulthood

Thursday, Mar 26, 2009

One Bite

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Disclaimer: Please don't read or listen to this essay while eating.

One Bite

Back in my college days, partly on a dare, partly from fatigue, and partly from infatuation, I ate an entire jelly-filled donut in one bite.

Three friends and I had gone to an all-night donut shop to blow off steam during final exams week at the close of a particularly challenging semester. We weren't terribly rebellious considering a dozen bars dotted the area. We were each just beyond the legal drinking age, but who needs alcohol when there are donuts to be consumed?

As the only customers in the place at 2:30 a.m., we each munched quietly on a fourth or fifth donut. The combination of study fatigue, suddenly full stomachs, and post-sugar buzz had set in hard, so we were in danger of falling asleep right there at our table. Something had to be done to liven us up before we drove back to the dorm to continue studying.

I slammed both palms on the stained table top and announced, "I can eat an entire jelly-filled donut in one bite!"

The sleeping high school kid behind the counter startled awake.

My friends jumped about six inches out of their seats, swore at me, and then started protesting.

"No one can do that!" Maria cried.

"Impossible!" Susan declared.

"I say bullshit on your donut!" Mike ranted.

Mike was pre-med. He had taken an anatomy final the previous day and an organic chemistry final that morning, and he was dreading a physiology final the following afternoon. His head was crammed with science, and his belly stuffed with donut sugar and fat, so he moved between anger and frustration, shouts and tears, more than a few times that night.

"If you can do it," Susan said with a sudden smile, "I just might marry you."

"Why?" Maria asked.

"Think about it," Susan replied.

"Oh," Maria said.

Mike tried for a few seconds, but his brain didn't have room to work out what they meant. I had only a slight inkling, and that inkling certainly made me look at Susan in a new way.

Maria pushed a blueberry-filled pastry--the last one left on the table--toward me. Blueberry was my favorite.

"I've been saving this one," she said. "If you can eat it in one bite, I won't marry you, but I'll give you a dollar."

"Me too!" Mike and Maria each chimed. Three dollars--this was getting interesting. I was a poor college student who saw actual paper money about twice a month. Three whole dollars qualified as an academic scholarship.

The donut was about five inches in diameter and two inches thick. Powdered sugar covered the surface, and blueberry jelly oozed from a dime-sized navel on one side. The thing looked pretty darned big as I examined it. Under normal circumstances, I would have needed maybe seven or eight good bites to get it down. But then I'd probably think, Wow, that was small. How about another?

I picked up the donut. It seemed to weigh a pound because, I guess, blueberry jelly is heavy stuff. Three pairs of eyes darted back and forth from my mouth to the donut, measuring. Their doubtful looks gave me the impression that the math didn't add up.

I turned the navel toward myself to prevent spillage and brought it to my lips. On the first push, a third of the donut easily entered my mouth. But then I encountered resistance and had to shove first from the left side and then the right side to keep it advancing, a fraction at a time, beyond the corners of my mouth.

This trundle method worked pretty well until the donut encountered my epiglottis, the little flap of flesh at the back of my throat. I began to gag. It took all of my self-control to keep from yanking the thing out of my mouth. At this point, the first tear plopped out of my eye and flowed down my cheek.

But I kept pushing.

The donut crammed up against the back of my throat and started expanding upward into my pallet and downward around and under my tongue. By then, it had lost most of its structural integrity, becoming nothing more than a fused blob of pastry and jelly conforming to the inside of my mouth.

The tears began to flow freely now, and some sort of liquid threatened to spill from my nose as well. I sniffled as forcefully as I could, snorting up a big dose of powdered sugar in the process. If the sugar had been cocaine, I would have overdosed. Every force in my body urged me to get the thing out of my mouth.

But I kept pushing.

A few more tucks at each corner, and the donut was inside. I clasped my teeth together and sealed my lips.

"Jesus," Mike gasped.

"He did it," Maria said.

All I could do was blink at them.

"Not yet," Susan cut in. "I won't marry him unless he swallows."

The three of them began chanting, "swallow, swallow, swallow." They started in a whisper, then built to a low moan. "Swallow, swallow, swallow."

For human beings, chewing usually precedes swallowing. I parted my teeth and closed them again, then repeated the movements a few times, being careful not to open my mouth--not out of politeness, but to keep donut paste from spraying across the room.

Normally, the tongue is used to roll the food around the mouth so that it gets ground up by the teeth. But this takes lots of open space, something I had none of in my mouth, filled as it was with donut. My chewing efforts managed only to mush up the small fraction of food stuff directly between my molars.

In short, the whole mess was stuck in my mouth with no real way for me to chew it. To my dismay, it was actually expanding as it soaked up my free-flowing saliva at an alarming rate. To keep my cheeks from bursting open, I had to do something fast.

"Swallow, swallow, swallow," they chanted.

My gag reflex came to my rescue. As I involuntarily tightened the back of my throat, I could feel those muscles smashing a small portion of the donut back there. In desperation, I clamped down harder and found I could actually do some primitive "chewing" with my throat muscles.

After a few more contractions, the back-of-my-throat donut was soft enough to get some down. I swallowed a small portion, freeing up enough mouth space to guide more donut to the back of my throat where I muscle-chewed and swallowed a bit more.

"Swallow, swallow, swallow." By this time, the high school counter kid had come over and joined in the chant.

I then discovered that I had just barely enough room to do a little traditional teeth chewing. This was tough going, but it began to work. Bit by bit, I managed to swallow more and more of the donut until the task didn't seem quite so daunting.

"Oh my God," Maria muttered, breaking the chant. "I think he's going to do it."

It took another full minute, but I was able to get the rest of the thing swallowed. My throat burned. My face was streaked with tears. Sometime during the process, I had lost control of my nose. The results were not pretty.

Susan grabbed a handful of napkins and mopped my face. "That was amazing!" she said, leaning in to kiss my cheek. When she pulled away, I saw tiny flecks of powdered sugar on her lips. I had never really looked at Susan's lips before, but I was having trouble looking anywhere else at that moment. Her tongue slipped out to lick the sugar from her lower lip, the fuller of the two.

"I don't believe it," said Mike. "Make him open his mouth."

Susan gently grasped my jaw, and I opened my mouth to display its lack of donut.

"Ugh," Maria moaned. Apparently, she had glimpsed some donut residue still in there. I took a swig of hot chocolate (now cold), rinsed it around my mouth, swallowed, and opened again.

"I'll be damned," Mike gasped.

"He did it!" Maria cried.

The three of them broke into applause. The counter kid offered us each a gift certificate for a free donut of our choice. Susan gathered up the three one-dollar bills from the table and tucked them into her shirt pocket.

"I'll just hold onto these," she said. "My abnormal psych final is over at noon tomorrow. If you meet me at the student union, I'll buy you an ice cream cone."

She winked at me. "I'm dying to see what you can do with that."

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Posted by John Sheirer at 3:16 PM | 1 comments

Sunday, Mar 22, 2009

Spring Break, Middle-Age Style

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Spring Break, Middle-Age Style

When my wife Betsy and I scheduled a trip to Florida for March, little did we know that we'd end up experiencing an American tradition that passed us by a quarter century ago. To us, Florida was just that nice, warm state with weird elections where we would visit Betsy's mother and sister, and mid-March was simply the best time take a few days off work. But to the great masses of college students who flock to Florida in mid-March, we were on our way to Spring Break at the beach.

Our first clue was the flight from New England to the Sunshine State. We noticed that nearly everyone else on the plane looked to be floating just to one side or the other of the legal drinking age. Several who floated slightly above downed a half dozen beers while we nursed ice cubes from our diet colas and munched stale peanuts. A six-pack in one sitting is quite a feat any time, but our flight departed Hartford before dawn and arrived in Orlando around ten. These kids staggered off the plane with a morning buzz and a head start on their week of sun-baked oblivion.

After a couple of days visiting our relatives in their quiet east-coast town, Betsy and I crossed central Florida (cattle ranches, orange groves, sod farms, and little else) to watch a Red Sox's spring training game at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers. We arrived at 10 a.m. for the 1 p.m. game, thinking we would be ridiculously early. But this is "Red Sox Nation South," so the place was a sea of red and blue Boston jerseys. (Mine was red and Betsy's blue.)

We were smart enough to order our tickets online way back in January, the first day they were available, so we weren't worried when we saw the line of about one hundred people waiting to buy tickets for a game that was already sold out. All we had to do was go to the "will-call" window (no line) and pick up our tickets. As we walked toward the entrance, all one hundred people in line glared at us. One ticketless fan called out, "Who the hell are you people, Pedroia's parents?" If we were, we would have had better seats.

Game time was delayed because the Sox players were protesting a management decision not to pay the expenses of some lower-paid coaches and team employees for the upcoming trip to Japan, where the Sox were planning to play some exhibitions against Japanese teams and open the "regular" season against the Oakland A's. I'm a proud union member, just like my dad, so we tried to be sympathetic to the "labor" side of the mini-strike, but it was tough to sympathize with "workers" who made approximately one hundred times our annual income. Other fans with cell phone access to the internet kept us informed as the drama unfolded, and, ultimately, the players prevailed--another victory for Manny, Schill, Big Papi, and the other "little guys" against the monster corporations.

The game finally began more than an hour late, and we were only a slight sunburn worse for wear. The one time I looked away from the action, a foul ball nearly decapitated me before I ducked at the last second. Our beloved Sox lost the game, but we didn't care because this was just spring training for the reigning World Series Champs. And besides, Dustin "Junior" Pedroia played well.

We left before the last inning to beat the crowds, but we still needed two hours to snake our way through ten miles of snarled traffic on the way to Fort Myers Beach. We had reserved a hotel room right on the ocean to enjoy our break from late-season New England winter as fully as possible. The dinner hour was approaching by the time we arrived.

While checking in, we noticed a droning reggae beat from the bar and dozens of pixie-faced revelers who bore a striking resemblance to the ones we saw on our flight south.

"It's really crowded here today," I said to the desk clerk, barely out of high school herself.

"Well," she replied, as if telling us a fact everyone else already knew, "it is Spring Break." Betsy and I exchanged a look that said, Let's not confess that we didn't know.

"Just out of curiosity," I asked, "what's the ratio of adults to college students at this hotel?"

"You don't want to know," the clerk said. "But we did put you at the quiet end of the building."

The "quiet end" turned out to be one floor directly above the bar where a live band supplied the reggae we'd heard before. The music wasn't exactly loud, not in the way that a firecracker in a broom closet is loud or an alarm clock at five in the morning is loud. But the sound was everywhere. The plastic cups in the bathroom vibrated. One of my fillings felt loose.

"How late do you think they'll be playing that music?" I asked Betsy. We've evolved into early-to-bed middle-agers, partly because our alarm clock actually does go off at five a.m. so that we can get to work early.

"Late," Betsy said. "Really, really late."

"What the heck," we said to each other. We could make the best of it. After all, we were at a beautiful white-powder beach during a cloudless evening just before sunset. We had both missed out on spring break celebrations when we were in college. Betsy worked extra hours at the three part-time jobs that helped pay her tuition, and I went back home to help my dad get our farm ready for planting season.

But here we were, all these years later, in Florida for Spring Break. We could experience a small taste of what we missed all those years ago. Betsy put on her stylish skirt-and-halter bathing suit while I donned my hiking shorts and t-shirt for a walk on the beach.

The first sight to greet our eyes as we stepped onto the sand was a girl roughly the same age as our own children, clad only in what looked like three postage stamps held together by dental floss. A pirate's eye patch is expansive by comparison. A shoelace has more fabric.

The girl's bare butt stood out for all to see--and all did see, including a man my age who stared openly and nearly slobbered onto his flabby, fish-belly-white gut. I had the good sense not to stare, and only said, sounding like a parody of a middle-aged man, "Oh my, my goodness, oh my." Regrouping, I managed to add, "I hope she's using sunscreen."

The beach behind our hotel was filled with similarly attired youngsters chasing Frisbees, chatting in high-pitched voices, or milling lethargically while downing beers. The girls had way too much flesh hanging out of their nearly nonexistent bathing suits, while the guys wore shin-length trunks with a foot of plaid boxer shorts sticking out above their drooping waistlines and an inch or two of pale butt crack visible above those boxers. I had the urge to offer the girls large beach towels to wrap around themselves and to tug up the guys' shorts and knot the drawstrings to keep them up. I wanted to offer each of them a good book and send them to their rooms. It was almost too much to absorb, so I took on the persona of an anthropologist on a distant island conducting ethnography. These kids were citizens of another culture whose strange customs I might not understand but could learn to accept and even respect.

Betsy and I made our way through the youngsters and kept walking along the beach toward the flawless sunset. After a few hundred feet, the median age of the beach population doubled. It seems our hotel, the least expensive in the area, was the only one filled with teeny-boppers. Farther along, we met people our own age and older, intrepid souls speed-walking with knee braces, dipping their canes into the surf, sweeping metal-detectors across the sand. We hadn't quite returned to our native culture, but we felt a bit closer to home.

To these people, however, we may have looked like the bare-butt girl looked to us. My lower body still resembles the athlete I was in college, thanks to frequent hiking and occasional "old-guy" basketball games. (The resemblance ends and the waistline, so my shirt stays on.) I could spike a beach volleyball on any of the young studs, were it not for my surgically reconstructed pinkie finger … and ankle … and knee ... and other knee … and shoulder. I still have my own hip joints in original condition and fine working order.

Betsy is far more an object of envy than I am--even at more than twice the age of the college students. Thanks to daily doses of yoga, pilates, and the elliptical machine, she has kept a figure any of those college girls would be proud to display in one of those "girls gone wild" videos. We even got a few harsh looks from the older beach folks who seemed to ignore my gray hair and focused on our fit legs. To some of them, we were a couple of crazy kids out showing ourselves off. They probably wanted to send us to our rooms.

If we were going to be labeled as part of the youngster crowd, we decided we might as well act like it--at least to a limited extent. On the way back to our room, we detoured from the beach to the street and stopped at one of the many liquor stores to pick up a four-pack of wine coolers, our small contribution to the festivities. We sipped our drinks on the balcony as night fell across the Gulf of Mexico before retiring with a slight buzz at 11 p.m., two hours past our usual bedtime. We watched the TV news and got tomorrow's weather forecast before drifting off to sleep. Amazingly, the pulsating music from the bar below us faded to silence around midnight, and we slept until seven, two hours beyond our normal waking time. That morning, the beach was ghost-town silent, and the only other people at the hotel restaurant were the bleary-eyed cook and waitress who prepared and served our pancakes.

We had one last spring break tradition to explore. To paraphrase the kids I knew in college all those years ago: Did we "get lucky" on our Spring Break trip to the beach? Oh yes, we got lucky! What could be luckier that knowing that we would soon return home to the last of New England's melting snow, to our dwindling number of student loan payments, to our low-fixed-rate mortgage, to our rewarding careers, to our comfort-of-the-living-room televised Red Sox games watching our newly adopted son Dustin Pedroia on our new high-definition TV, to our own real kids' college accomplishments and tuition bills. And, best of all, we're lucky to have each other and the memories of our middle-aged-style Spring Break trip to the beach together at last.

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Posted by John Sheirer at 3:31 PM | 1 comments

Wednesday, Mar 18, 2009

Wrinkled Facebook

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When I mentioned to one of my students that I had just started a Facebook page, she rolled her teenaged eyes.

"Another old person ruining Facebook!" she moaned.

I laughed but she didn't. Approaching fifty doesn't make me "old," just middle-aged. To my surprise, she kept going: "Facebook is for us. It's not for spying on us or for your stories about what happened in the Depression or pictures of grandkids and kittens. My mother wants to be my 'friend.' My uncle just 'poked' me. Can't you geezers get your own place? Maybe you should call it 'Wrinkled Facebook.'"

A friend (in "real life," not online) suggested I start a Facebook page to promote my recent book. As a newbie to this social networking site, I entered my name and some very basic information. Work demands quickly intruded, and I forgot all about Facebook for a couple of weeks. Then my sister, another "oldster" around my own age, e-mailed me: "Put something on your Facebook page!"

So I uploaded a recent photo and fleshed out my information--five minutes work. What could be the harm? I thought. Before the end of the day, I got a "friend" request from a college classmate I hadn't talked to in nearly thirty years ... and then another ... and then ten more ... and then five people who work with me ... and then a writer I admire who lives on the other side of the continent.

I took my laptop to bed that night. While my wife slept peacefully, I looked at pictures people had posted of themselves and their families, their dogs and cats, even shots of themselves from back in college, looking fresh-faced and innocent. I even saw myself in the background of a few of those college pictures, all skin-and-bones and floppy hair, barely recognizable even to myself. In other shots, I saw college girlfriends, still pretty nearly three decades later, and read gushing reports of the successes of their near-grown children.

I was piling up friends by the score and searching for more to add to my total. Before I realized what was happening, I had taken the laptop to bed every night for two weeks. This wasn't healthy. My wake-up call finally came when I took my tenth Facebook trivia quiz at two a.m. on a night when I had to get up at five to grade papers and plan classes.

What could be the harm? The harm is that Facebook can be addictive. We "old people" are sometimes fond of complaining about how our kids will spend sunny days glued to video screens instead of getting fresh air. "Back when I was young ..." we sometimes lecture. When we were young, something called "facebook" was a pamphlet we got at freshman orientation with names and postage-stamp headshots of our classmates. The only reason we weren't addicted to today's Facebook as a teenagers is that, back then, the internet was just a dim idea in the mind of a scientist at some government think-tank.

I've been active on Facebook for a month now, and I'm starting to learn the balance needed to keep it under control. I post a few new photos sometimes to keep my page fresh. My online friends update their status regularly, so I feel like I know them better--the ones from my past as well as the ones in the next office. And I check out pet and grandchildren pictures when my "real" work is done.

And I still find some nice surprises. In fact, I've even gotten an unexpected "friend" request from the student who originally suggested I join "Wrinkled Facebook." Guess what? She's got some cool pictures of her really cute cat.

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Posted by John Sheirer at 10:32 AM | 2 comments

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John Sheirer

John Sheirer (pronounced Shy-er) is the author of the new memoir Loop Year: 365 Days on the Trail, which received the Connecticut Green Circle Award for environmental activism, as well as the 2005 memoir Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere, a finalist for the Sante Fe Writers Project Literary Award. He teaches English and Communications at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut, where he has been honored multiple times by Who's Who Among America's Teachers and recently received the Distinguished Service and Educational Excellence Award. John lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wonderful wife Betsy Barone, terrific stepkids Danielle and Daryl, and Daisy the amazing hiking dog. John's website is www.johnsheirer.com, and he can be reached at jsheirer@acc.commnet.edu or (860) 253-3138.
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