What's for dinner?

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more that clothing?" -Matthew 6:25 NRSV

I understand worry. Everyone understands worry, don't they? We're out-of-control people, and that's necessarily unsettling. We have no sway over anything, yet we desperately wish we did. The best we can make of that is worry. It's natural. Like breathing.

I've spent a lot of time worrying about my place in the world, whether my life will amount to anything. Worrying if I'll perform well enough, what people will think of me when I fall on my face. Worrying if my family will self-destruct, leaving literally everything broken. When I read that passage in Matthew, those are the things I think of. "Don't worry if you'll ever amount to anything, Emily. Don't worry if your life appears to be spiraling into a pit. I'm taking care of everything," says the Lord. But lately, I'm reading that passage more literally.

A couple weeks ago, I made radical changes to my diet after a couple of very informative medical consultations. I decided to stop eating several things and also told myself I needed to eat more consistently. The things I eliminated are at the core of a modern American diet, so all of the things that are convenient, that my diet has rested upon my whole life, are no longer available to me. Thus the subject of food has become paramount to my brain. That's the first trouble.

But it's not much unlike trouble I've had before. In our sparsest times, I would allow myself to eat once in a day in order to preserve food for later, because I wasn't sure where else I would get anything to eat. I know what it's like to not be rolling in food. So that in itself does not bring a fresh perspective to Matthew 6.

My second trouble does, however. All the time in my past when I've intentionally plowed on without food, I was rarely distractedly hungry. Quite often I wasn't hungry at all, but when I was, it was easy to ignore. Thus food, although I lacked it, did not keep me preoccupied. But these changes in my diet have rendered me ravenous. I don't know why, but I have never been so hungry before. Even when I eat, a lot, it's only a short while before I feel like eating again. I had fashioned my lifestyle, my self, abound being as close to indifferent to food as I could be. If I wasn't hungry, I didn't eat. If I was a little hungry but it wasn't convenient to eat, I forgot about it with very little trouble. Physical urges did not rule my days, my brain did. But lately, I can't forget about being hungry. I'm frankly tired of eating.

Which brings me to my last trouble. I was told I'm in the prime position to develop diabetes. One of the greatest enemies of a glucose level is fasting. Self-denial has always been one of my greatest virtues, and, I'm finding now, weaknesses. No matter how hungry I am, I could still press on and not bother myself with food whenever I don't want to deal with it. But I really don't need to do that. Ugh.

For the first time in my life I have genuinely worried about food., what I'm going to eat and drink, and when. This is not a #firstworldproblem. Even at my poorest, it still wasn't much of a problem. There's so much food in this country that sooner or later I've always come across something to put in my mouth to keep me alive. I would eat it posthaste, then move on.

But imagine if we didn't live with so much food that it rots in dumpsters. I think there would be a lot less worrying about where one has to be when, who's mad at them, who they're mad at, and how well they're going to do on their chemistry test.

Although my recent scrambling for food has not been motivated by poverty, it has helped me more thoroughly realize how cushy my culture is. We really miss out on so much.

"The Misadventures of Emily Lynn: Locked Out" by Emily Lynn

This is a story about a girl who usually has her head on straight, but watched it turn sideways this afternoon.

I set out to make a few stops today as the sun was still high in the sky, but had already begun its descent. Less than a mile from my house, I realized my phone was still charging in my bedroom. “It’ll be fine,” I thought. “I won’t be gone long enough to miss it.” Onward I drove. First stop: done. I reduced $45 of product down to $0.99 at CVS in a matter of minutes. Second stop: over just as quickly. Two books purchased in my favorite thrift store for a total of $0.49. Then the third stop. Two cans of pineapple and a pint of coconut milk ice cream purchased at Publix. Everything was going swimmingly.

I walked back to my car, in one of the grandest moods, and saw my keys sitting in the seat on the other side of the locked driver side door. I laughed, and exclaimed “Noooo!” through my giggles. I took a moment to process wonder and appreciation at the reality that my first reaction to trouble was amusement. I then smilingly shook my head at the fact that the first time I lock my keys in the car is also one of the rare days I don’t have a cell phone. Irony rules my life. Coming out of my head, I then began trying to address the problem in front of me. I forcefully yanked every door handle, hoping one might miraculously pop open. I pressed on the windows, hoping one of them might be loose and move down even a fraction of an inch. I had been driving with the windows down, so I longingly thought, “Why didn’t I leave at least one of them cracked? Just this once?” At a loss, I even tried pressuring the lock with a coin. I simultaneously hoped it would and wouldn’t work. If it worked, I would be ever so grateful to have my keys back in my hand and avoid further frustration. If it worked, then any prowling miscreant could quietly open my doors. I felt both disappointment and relief when it failed. I then began formulating a plan of action.

As I considered what to do, the owner of the vehicle on my driver side came walking back to his car. Before he pulled off, he noticed my look of helplessness.

“Did you lock your keys in your car?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Do you happen to have a wire hanger handy?”

“No, I don’t.”

“If you have a wire hanger, I can get into your car.”

“Yeah? Well, I wish I had one.”

“The store down there at the end probably has one.” He pointed to the thrift store I had just visited.

“Yeah, they probably do.” Why didn’t I think of that?

I retrieved a hanger and passed it to my would-be rescuer. He set to work bending it and carefully squeezing it through the door seal.

In his car, poking his upper body out of the open passenger window, was his grandson, a boy who looked to be about four years old. He was a chatty young man, and we had a congenial conversation as grandpa worked hard to rescue me. We talked about hair cuts, his stuffed dogs, Spiderman, and cars. If only it was that easy to talk to everyone. “Pawpaw,” as my new young friend called him, worked doggedly for at least 15 minutes, but was meeting no success. I thanked him for trying, and he lent me his phone to call my parents, who were an hour away. There was no answer, so I left them a message, trying to work out what I was going to do while I talked. I spotted a McDonald’s across the street, and figured that would be a good place to wait. I told them I’d go over there and try to find another phone to call them again.

“Pawpaw, are we gonna take her home?”

“No, but maybe we can take her to McDonald’s. Would you like a ride across the street?”

He delivered me safely, and I thanked him again. I didn’t ask him his name, but he told me he was a retired police officer, and my simmering cynicism was quelled just a little more by finding that, even in retirement, someone had taken the pledge to serve seriously.

The manager inside let me borrow their phone, and this time my dad answered. He said they were heading my way, so, since I couldn’t eat anything they serve, I bought a sweet tea, and turned my attention to my melting coconut milk ice cream. It wasn’t going to be meeting a freezer anytime soon, so I was just going to have to eat it. I settled into a booth, and dug into my pint of vanilla bean with a straw. I may have imagined it, but there was a gentleman across the room that kept looking at me with a puzzled expression at my choice of utensil. The whole pint took me about a half hour to eat, and by the time I was done, I indubitably had surpassed my sugar limit for the day. The rest of my time there, I amused myself by drafting this story on the table with my fingers. I’m not in the habit of carrying a purse, but as a writer, I really need to figure out some way to always have writing instruments handy. Thankfully, though, my imagination has not died, and with only the aid of forming the letters in front of my face, even without a lasting mark, the words appear clearly to my mind and I’m able to organize my thoughts. Things it did not take imagination to clearly see were gazes other patrons gave me, obviously wondering if I believed my fingers were genuinely making marks on the table. Not all who look insane are.

My parents finally arrived, my dad’s spare key helped me retrieve my own, and although my short outing turned into the opposite, my story ended well.

And for this I am grateful, for as much as I love telling stories, I grow tired of using personal pronouns, and am determined that the next story I tell will about someone else. Even if it is about me. I don’t know how David Sedaris does it.