Week #11 of My Liquid Diet: Lost in the Reeds

A tough scrape.

Whittling down:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at start of Week #5: 215.1

• Weight at start of Week #6: 211.2

• Weight at start of Week #7: 208.1

• Weight at start of Week #8: 204.3

• Weight at Start of Week #9: 201.9

• Weight at Start of Week #10: 199

• Weight at Start of Week #11: 196.8

• Weight at Start of Week #12 (current week): 194.4

Total weight loss so far: 35.6 lbs.

Nineteen weeks to go.

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A box of cane tubes: the raw material.

It’s been dawning on me that this diet regimen isn’t just about losing weight — it’s about doing kind of a reset on my sense of myself. This has involved not only a break from old patterns of behavior — most notably, of course, my long-enjoyed habit of eating whatever I want, whenever I want — but also an attempt to establish new routines, including some that aren’t directly connected to food.

In my last post, I told you about how I’m trying to practice my oboe every day. But I left out an important element: making my own oboe reeds — something I have managed to avoid doing until very recently.

It was inculcated in me from my earliest days of learning to play the oboe, when I was nine or so, that real oboists make their own reeds. Reed-making is an incredibly elaborate process. You start with tubes of a species of cane called Arundo donax. You split the tubes into these little curved planks, which you then gouge (in a “gouger,” natch), shape (with a, yes, “shaper”), fold in half, tie to a metal tube (a “staple”) that’s partially coated in cork (for sticking into the top of the oboe), and then split open at the top (the moment a single piece of cane becomes a double reed) — at which point you have a “blank.” In terms of playing, the blank (as its name suggests) is useless: you can’t make a sound with it. That’s because you still face the most important, maddening, and delicate part of the whole reed-making process — the scraping. You scrape and scrape and scrape, getting under the shiny bark and sculpting minutely defined nooks and crannies, until eventually you have an actual working oboe reed.

In theory.

In practice, you fail. You fail at every stage, for any number of reasons. You fail over and over and over again. The rule of thumb is that, before you can begin to make playable reeds on even a semi-regular basis, you need to fill up the equivalent of a laundry basket with your failed reeds. Here is a laundry basket with all the unplayable reeds I have made so far:

So yeah, still a ways to go.

But in my temporarily altered state from being on this diet, I’m hoping — praying — that I can prove myself capable of the patience to keep at my reed-making. I’m not sure I’ll succeed. Okay, in all honesty, I’ll be shocked if I end up becoming a competent reed-maker. Because, as a therapist once described me, I’m an escape artist. (She didn’t mean it in a good way.) And when it comes to reeds, I do have an escape hatch: I can buy them.

Right now, I’m playing on reeds that I bought from one of my oboe teachers, Peter Lemberg. Like every great oboist I know, Peter is an obsessive. He’s been known to stop his car so he could run out and harvest Arundo donax growing along the freeway. Some professional oboists do buy their reeds, but most make their own. Their reed-making workplaces are little shrines to diligence, craftsmanship, and suffering. Their tools are beautiful, numerous, and impeccably maintained. And they tend to spend even more time reed-making than they do practicing. This is mostly because (and I feel like I’ve buried the lede here) reeds don’t last very long. The moment you start playing on your brand-new, miraculous reed, it’s begun to die. And it’s you who’s killing it: enzymes in your saliva steadily break down the cellular structure of the cane, until — after a few hours of use — it becomes too mushy to make Mozart on.

Some of my reed-making tools.

The reed’s fragility actually appeals to me — I find it beautiful, even. Not just in its short but spirited life, but also in the delicacy of its final structure. The tip of a finished reed is thinner than paper: nick it with your teeth (as I have done, repeatedly — aughhh!) and you can easily obliterate it. The two slender blades are held together by stretchy, but breakable, thread. (In my experience, the color of thread that oboists choose is intensely personal; perhaps due to the politics of my upbringing, or maybe because I’m so passionate, I’ve been going with bright red.) Like us, reeds have a heart and a spine — either of which can be destroyed by a stray knife-stroke (My own achy spine has become a troublesome issue during reed-making: I think I may need to take up yoga. I wonder if they give discounts to oboists.) The measurements of a reed’s anatomy are crazily precise, and the tiniest deviation can sink the whole enterprise.

Can I really do this? Well … maybe? As I wrote earlier, I’m in the process of rethinking what I can and cannot accomplish. This has been going on for about a year.

Last fall, when my mother’s dementia forced her out of her assisted-living apartment and upstairs into Skilled Nursing, it was left to me, her only child, to handle her affairs — including the crucial task of getting her long-term care to be covered by Medicaid. If I failed to do so, the wonderful facility she was in would begin to charge us fees that we’d have no hope of paying. I am, to put it mildly, not a person who is good at dealing with complicated, multi-step applications. But this had to be done. I was staying in my mom’s soon-to-be-vacated apartment, alternately sorting through her things and working on the Medicaid application. And to comfort myself, I was eating a lot of junk food — a lot! I think this is when I started noticing myself kind of blowing up — starting in my legs and my feet, which were getting harder to squeeze into my shoes.

At that time, up on the nursing-care floor, my mom was herself suffering from edema in her legs, causing them to swell. This, the nurses explained to me, had something to do with the congestive heart failure she was suffering from along with her Alzheimer’s. After spending the mornings and afternoons sitting at her bedside, in the evenings, after sorting and applying, I’d lie on her old bed and stare at my own aging, swelling legs. As my mom, an inveterate punster for most of her life, might once have remarked: we made for a swell team.

Eventually, our Medicaid application was accepted, meaning that my mom could continue to stay where she was indefinitely. So now I overate out of relief! I ordered a larger size of pants, along with a cheap new belt. Then an even larger size of pants, and a bigger belt. And compression socks — lots of compression socks. But I’d handled a difficult, bureaucratic thing, meaning that she would remain safe and well-cared-for, and my happiness about that outweighed (so to speak) my physical discomfort.

Still life with belts and compression socks.

It’s possible that this diet — which I began a few months after her passing — is part of the mourning process, somehow. As could be the oboe-playing. I first took up the oboe to impress my mom, who loved classical music. I’d asked her what was the hardest instrument in the orchestra to play, and she’d said she thought it must be the oboe. “Then I’ll play the oboe!” I proclaimed. I’m not sure whether I would have displayed such bravado if I’d known all about the reeds.