Week #9 of My Liquid Diet: Two Milestones

Sure, losing weight is great ... but have you read "War and Peace"?

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash.

How I’ve been stacking up:

• 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 (current week): 199

Total weight loss so far: 31 lbs.

Twenty-one weeks to go.

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My weight has dipped below 200 (to 199, to be exact) — which is something I’d been looking forward to. But there’s another milestone I’m more excited about: I just finished reading War and Peace.

In the foyer of my mother’s apartment, when I was a child, there was a special bookcase. Unlike the copious bookcases and bookshelves in her bedroom, this one had fancy doors — indicating that these volumes had an elevated status. They weren’t just good, they were great. They were also something else: “Discards.” This was made clear as soon as you opened any of them: inside the front cover, in blood-red ink, the word “DISCARD” had been stamped.

All these books had once been in circulation at the library where my mom, Bernice (“Bunny”) Selden, worked as a cataloguing librarian. But then they’d gotten a bit frayed — or maybe a newer edition had been added to the collection — and they were taken out of service, and were made available for free to the library’s staff. My mom would bring them home by the armful.

Even before I could read, I loved to hold these books and leaf through them. Usually the index card stamped with old due dates was still there in its pouch, so I could take it out and stare at it, imagining all those borrowers, who seemed like gods to me: Readers!

But just when I got to the age when reading great literature seemed within my capabilities, I discovered comic books — and it was all over. First it was Archie Comics: I bought so many of them that the scruffy owner of the comic-book store took to calling me “Archie.” He stuck with that moniker even after I’d transitioned to Marvel Comics, especially my beloved Spider-Man (though I was also super into the Fantastic Four).

Archie, my one-time role model and namesake.

I remember one particular novel becoming a point of contention: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Mom would stand in the doorway of my bedroom, holding it out to me.

“Just try it!” she’d plead.

“No!” I’d say, impatient for her to go away so I could get back to my Incredible Hulk.

Eventually, she had to give up — and The Red and The Black went back into that bookcase in the foyer.

I still haven’t read it. But a couple of years ago, when my mom’s worsening dementia meant that she had to be moved out of her apartment, I was going through her books — and there it was. That same volume, with “DISCARD” stamped inside. She’d kept it with her through so many moves — from my childhood apartment on West 162nd Street in Manhattan, to her smaller place on West 99th Street (after I’d moved out), and then to the South Side of Chicago (after she’d fallen in love with a retired union organizer named Frank Rosen and had moved there to marry him), and later to an assisted-living apartment at the Selfhelp Home on the North Side (after Frank had gotten Alzheimer’s), followed by a smaller assisted-living apartment at Selfhelp (after Frank had been moved upstairs to a nursing-care floor). Finally, after she’d had a fall and briefly been hospitalized, it was determined that Mom might need 24-hour nursing care herself.

My mom and Frank, in good times.

There was a period of two weeks after her hospitalization when the administrators were trying to figure out whether she could be rehabilitated to the point that she could return to her apartment, rather than go into nursing care. I sat with her in her room in Rehab. I’d been told that she was still physically capable of walking (a requirement for staying in assisted living), but she just didn’t want to anymore, despite all the encouragement she was getting from the physical and occupational therapists.

At some point, sitting by her bed, I asked her, “Don’t you want to go back to your apartment?” I was thinking of how much she loved her New Yorker magazines, her massive Sunday New York Times, her desk with both a laptop and an electric typewriter (to type her endless lists on multicolored index cards). All those markers and felt-tip pens and Blackwing pencils, with their rectangular removable erasers! But most of all, I was thinking of her books.

“No,” she said. And that was that.

She didn’t have any interest in returning to her apartment. She wasn’t sad about it. There was no regret, or sense of loss. Her desire for those things was simply gone.

By the time she died, this past March, I’d packed up all her remaining possessions into boxes. Those boxes now sit in my office in downtown Berkeley. I’m not ready to open them yet. In one of them is that copy of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black — a “Discard” that has refused to be discarded.

I still plan to read it some day, after I’ve built up the emotional strength to go through those boxes. But in the meantime, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve just finished reading another wonderful old book. I’m almost certain that a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was in that bookcase in our foyer on 162nd Street, though I picked up this particular edition at a Bay Area bookstore several years ago. (This marvelous translation, by Anthony Briggs, was copyrighted in 2005.) Like many of the books on my shelves, it was an aspirational purchase: something I knew I should read but felt, in my heart of hearts, that I probably never would. It was for Future Me, that enlightened, evolved individual I hoped one day to become.

I think it was this liquid diet that finally got me to read it. I was looking for an intensely immersive experience that would keep my mind off all the foods I can’t eat right now. To be honest, the opening pages are heavy going: War and Peace starts at a lavish party for Russian aristocrats in the early 1800s. Tolstoy introduces, like, 50 major characters right away, and I had to restart the book several times. But eventually, aided by the helpful list of characters in the back pages, I got everyone pretty much sorted out. And then I was IN! Oh, what a glorious experience it’s been to imaginatively inhabit that endlessly fascinating world, with its epic love affairs and battles! I care so deeply about the ingenuous, awkward, overweight, lumbering Pierre Bezúkov and the impulsive, petite, demonstrative Natásha Rostóv — and it will never stop blowing my mind that a human being just made them up, along with literally hundreds of other indelible characters. (There’s a scene near the end of the book involving Natásha’s teenage brother, Pétya, that literally had me yelling, “No! No!”)

I plan to keep supplementing my liquid diet with big solid doses of great literature. I haven’t decided for sure, but maybe Moby Dick will anchor my drive to 165 (pounds). Or should I dip into Remembrance of Things Past? In any event, thanks to Tolstoy I feel more connected to my mother’s memory than I did some 1,400 pages ago. Bolshoye spasibo, Leo!