Week #15 of My Liquid Diet: Abracadabra!

How magic saved me and my mom.

Vanishing act:

• 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: 194.4

• Weight at Start of Week #13: 193.5

• Weight at Start of Week #14: 190.2

• Weight at Start of Week #15: 185.6

• Weight at Start of Week #16 (current week): 183.8

Total weight loss so far: 46.2 lbs.

Fifteen weeks to go.

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Photo: Irina Tkachuk/iStock.

With half of my weight-loss regimen under my belt, and the belt cinching in closer and closer to its innermost notch, I’m starting to feel kind of like a magic trick: the Incredible Shrinking 64-Year-Old. I haven’t done a David Copperfield and disappeared entirely (thank goodness), but enough of me has melted away that people who haven’t seen me in a while tend to react with exclamations of surprise: Josh, you look so different! From my own perspective, though the transformation has been more incremental, it does feel kind of magical to find myself weighing less than I have since my teens. The trick has been to skip my treats.

There was another time, nearly six decades ago, when magic entered my life — lightening some emotional burdens of my childhood.

When I was a boy my mother, Bunny, used to take me shopping with her. I dreaded these expeditions down to Manhattan’s Herald Square, as they followed a predictable pattern. Mom would promise that we’d be spending “just a few minutes” each at Macy’s and Gimbel’s, the two competing department-store behemoths of the period. But I knew better. And sure enough, those “few minutes” at Gimbel’s would stretch out into a half hour, then an hour, and sometimes hours. Mom would keep selecting outfits to try on, bringing them in with her to a fitting room, coming back out and rehanging some of those clothes, then going back in to try on different ones. And repeat. I did my best to keep my brain occupied by imagining that I was on some sort of heroic quest in a far-off land, sometimes going under one of the circular racks and pretending it was a fort. But inevitably I’d get bored and frustrated.

“Mom, you said just a few minutes!”

“I’m almost done, Joshy.”

And repeat. Ad nauseam.

Finally, with my mom lugging a shopping bag or two of new clothes, we’d head out of Gimbel’s — and perhaps even pick up some roasted chestnuts in newspaper cones from a street vendor — only to plunge into neighboring Macy’s for more “just a few minutes” that could stretch into hours.

Thus passed whole weekend afternoons. It seemed grossly unfair to me that all this time was spent on my mom’s wardrobe needs while I was left in kind of a timeless purgatory of soft goods that held no interest or purpose for me. And then, one afternoon, after venturing up a few escalators while my mom tried on pantsuits below, I discovered Macy’s magic department.

Well, it wasn’t a department so much as it was a booth. On the shiny counter were magic tricks galore — some on display, others in piles of neatly stacked boxes. And behind the counter was a salesman who’d demonstrate the tricks to any children who happened by. I was transfixed! He showed us how two large metal rings could — after being clinked together a couple of times to prove their structural integrity — suddenly become interlinked. How a dollar bill could, after being cranked through a little roller, become a five spot. How a handkerchief could, after being pulled through one’s closed fist, somehow emerge in totally different colors.

Starting that day, after I’d breathlessly told her of my discovery of that booth, my mom would give me enough money to purchase one magic trick each time we went to Macy’s. I think I ended up up buying out the guy’s whole stock. During the week, I’d practice each trick over and over, simultaneously trying to replicate the entertaining patter with which the salesman had regaled us gaping kids. Meanwhile, my mom would go to work at the library, and to her various writers’ workshops and political meetings, in the clothing that she’d so painstakingly selected on those shopping jaunts with me.

Years later, when my mother was in her 70s and I was in my 40s, I was sitting across the kitchen table from her in her apartment. We’d been chatting about this and that, and had lapsed into a momentary silence.

Out of nowhere, she blurted out a confession: “I steal.”

I was stunned. “Um, steal what, Mom?”

“Clothes. I steal clothes.”

She explained that she’d been shoplifting for years and years, from department stores and boutiques.

From time to time, some friends of mine, after meeting my mom, had remarked that she wore sumptuous clothes that seemed out of the price range of a part-time librarian and aspiring published author. It’s not the kind of thing I’d notice myself; plus, she’d always dressed that way.

“Mom,” I said, “I’m thinking about how you always used to take me down to Macy’s and Gimbel’s and spend hours there.”

“Yes, honey. I figured they’d be less suspicious if I had a child with me.”

So while I’d been learning to perform magic tricks at Macy’s, my mother had been performing her own sleight of hand! The store detective would see an innocent mother with her child — and perhaps even be distracted by the chubby kid repeatedly linking and unlinking two separate metal rings while his mom carried out hundreds of dollars’ worth of stolen merchandise.

We never got caught.

In the years after my mother revealed her shoplifting career to me, and I belatedly learned how I’d been not only a budding magician but also her unwitting accomplice, I watched her perform some high-level magic herself: falling in love and marrying a wonderful man she met via a Nation magazine personals ad, giving up her rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side to move to Chicago and marry him, and becoming his caregiver after he got Alzheimer’s. Then, after he passed and — living in the isolation wrought by widowhood and COVID — she too got Alzheimer’s, she modeled for her aging son how it is possible to accept enormous loss with dignity and grace.

Now she is gone — stolen by Time, as will happen to us all, scofflaws and store detectives alike. And I, who have re-created my indignities at her hands for countless audiences — and now for you as well, Dear Reader — would so love to perform the magic trick of pulling Bunny out of a hat. Look, here she is again — sitting just across the kitchen table from me! You look so different!, she’s saying. Well, I shrug, I have been on this liquid diet. A pause. I steal, she says. I know, I reply. I don’t care. I love you.