Primal With A Side Of FABULOUS page 72

[Gay Panda]

UPDATE: (in explanation of *)

* The Random Acts of Footwear began when Lady Friend took off her shoes one day in their presence. She had a small hole in her sock. I did not, but since Lady Friend did, Grandmother Friend decided I must, too. So that is why she sent me socks, since Lady Friend’s had holes. It was wonderfully bewildering.

Part Three Tomorrow.

[Debdoub]

Relatives that you got to pick, how excellent is that! It is very normal for grandmas to focus on socks, or undies, or some other what the heck item. I know mine sure did.

My grandparents were great, if rather kooky. I noticed on my last road trip home that I'm turning into the goofiest one - Bargain Billy. (Really, that's what we called my grandma. She called herself "your old fat granny"; she signed every card with that.) She had an annoying habit of reading signs out loud and here we were, less than five miles from home, and I hear myself say "Great Burgers". Oh my Lord, when did I turn into her? My daughters don't remember her as she died when they were little but you can bet my sister and mom made fun of me when I told the story. Thanks to primal living, I'm not planning on signing any cards with "your old fat granny", though.

[Gay Panda]

PART THREE: After the funeral, I drove over MDA. I believe that I had rolled over the site once before, but I dismissed it as a bunch of loonies who wanted to live in caves and paint buffalo on the walls. But what did I have to lose? My weight rose defiantly no matter how stringent I was with food, how excessive I was with exercise. I could go down but only so far; it would bounce back up out of control leading to shopping for fat pants the day before Grandfather Friend’s funeral.

You know the rest. The 217 in mid-March was 211 by mid-April, I slipped under 200 at the end of June. In August I lived at 195, for most of October around 189. It is now November and my body is still a little pissed* about a recent Happenstance of Potato, but I’m weighing 185. Those black pants I wore for Grandfather Friend’s funeral in March hang perilously, because the 32 extra pounds of panda that existed back then have taken a trip down the Fat Vortex. I have to buy new black trousers, because now Grandmother Friend is dying.

We do not know how long it will be, but we know it will not be long. Tomorrow I’m making chicken pot pies that she likes for my visit and I will be near the same store where I bought the fat pants in March. I do not want to be in that same situation where the day after she dies, I’m out shopping for thinner pants. Yet it seems so morbid to buy them in expectation, even though it is inevitable. I don’t want to be prepared for that day, because I do not want that day to come. But avoiding it won’t hold at bay a swiftly approaching horizon.

Just this summer I was driving her to her radiation appointments and gossiping about her synagogue. We were eating meatballs and watching Bones, and I bought her socks since she liked the ones I was wearing. It seems sick to buy pants in anticipation of her death, that when she asks me what I’ve been doing, I’m going to think today I bought pants for your funeral. Making it worse is that Grandmother Friend is not ready to go. She wants to continue trundling down the freeway miles under the speed limit, seeing movies and visiting friends; her mind is charging ahead but her body has simply said no.

I wish that my weight loss were not going to be bookmarked by deaths; I wish that their funerals were not going to be associated with clothes shopping. Perhaps I struggle because I am unfamiliar with the rituals of death, its pain and its absurdities pressed side to side. I went to none of my grandparents’ funerals; one of the Panda Siblings died when I was too young to remember. I gave CPR to a dying man at my gym, so death is not a stranger to me, but its rituals are.

I will buy trousers for her funeral while she is alive, and one day when we are both in Valhalla** I will tell her how utterly weird that was. And I know exactly what reaction I will receive: Grandmother Friend will brush off my complaint about the weirdness because what matters to her is if I got them at a Half-Off sale. One should never pay full price for clothes.

[Gay Panda]

UPDATE: (in explanation of * and **)

* You know what? I didn’t care so much this time that my body got all bent out of shape over a lousy plop of mashed potatoes and two sips of Lady Friend’s beer. I weigh in the mid-180s, at 5’9” this means that I look chubby but not fat, and some of the agitation has faded. It inspired cravings but they are not unbearable. So go ahead and freak out, panda body. I’m too tired to care since Eye of the Storm’s new dog Shelob is a night barker.

** Ah, but whether I get admitted to Valhalla depends on which grandparent’s afterlife mythology, if any, proves true. Maybe I’ll have unfinished business and float about causing minor mischief like Benign Poltergeist. If Gay Panda can’t be on Animal Precinct in life, then maybe Ghostly Gay Panda will guest-star on one of those paranormal shows as a floating orb hiding everyone’s car keys.

[Griffin]

FWIW - I believe that everyone gets into Valhalla, no matter what their whack-job grandparents think.

I'm glad you found some grandparents to love you! There's nothing like a grandparent's love. I'm sorry for your impending loss.

You may want to call some authority about the night barking too. That can get old mighty quick.

[ottercat]

Buy pants because you need them and they are Half Off (ha ha). Maybe Grandma Friend doesn't want you to show up dressed for mourning and would rather you come in snazzy purple clogs and fabulous new skinny pants!

[Uncephalized]

Panda, I am for you.

But also because you continue to become a healthier Panda and will thus likely be around for many more Panda-years to come.

[Sigi]

Dearest Panda, I am terribly sorry for your sadness. You are brave to share your thoughts with us so eloquently through this difficult time, and I hope in some way it helps you.

Electronic hugs for Panda: [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[Panda]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] (NB, e-hugs are blessedly germ-free, so can be shared with abandon).

PS – I do like the idea of a mischievous Ghostly Gay Panda, wreaking Ghostly Gay Panda-monium upon the likes of Poo Hurler, Mr Magazine Time or (*squick*) Rod …

[beachrat]

Like Booth, you must buy some outrageous socks to wear with the new black pants. Socks and Grandmother Friend go together so well, and you can tell your Grandmother Friend about shopping for FBI black pants and outrageous socks, and it will make her smile remembering the meatballs and watching Bones together.

Then if you happen to wear your Seely Booth homage outfit sometime later this fall or winter, to celebrate her life and journey to Valhalla, you can tell the socks and pants shopping story to Lady Friend, and you can both smile and think how wonderful that you all made your own family together, and how lucky you have been.

[Gay Panda]

PART ONE: Gay Panda does not have moves like Jagger.

This is a fantastic understatement. Gay Panda has no moves at all, despite years of cubhood dance classes including tap, ballet, and ballroom. In the line-up of graceful boys and girls moving crisply over the glossy floors of studios was Young Gay Panda tripping and stomping and moving to a beat not emanating from the stereo or piano in the room. I was a blunt force in a sport defined by the acute.

Put me in a pool and I could slam out a beautiful butterfly; it was the only dance in which I could keep a beat. I could belt a ball across the field (and once a line drive directly to a sticky Panda Sibling’s stomach) and charge for first base like a bowling ball of determination. My body is a singular object, not a plural. I love to watch dancing but I almost never engage; my body wants to stay together, not come apart. Trying to get one foot there and then the other here while the arms move this way and that and doing all of this while keeping a beat? You might as well expect Gay Panda to fly.

The joke is that I was a musician. I can still hear the heartless tap-tap of my metronome, which I struggled mightily to match to the piece that I was playing. By four years old, I was in music lessons, by eight I was playing for pay at old folks’ homes. By eleven I was performing at weddings and garden parties. Later came funerals and orchestras and competitions and fairs and theaters. I played a very complicated instrument that involved both hands and feet in a veritable frenzy of activity, and seventeen years of daily practice made me proficient only. I have no gift for music, neither its production nor the activity in which it inspires.

But Mother Panda was determined that my genius be uncovered. One more lesson, one more year, one more wedding . . . go to Oberlin Conservatory, a spotlight in the L.A. Philharmonic, farther and farther her dreams reached over the head of a cub who forgot the music in the middle of a recital in front of forty people*. I would play for movies and commercials! I would be in magazines! I would dazzle the world! Except that I had no talent, and on top of that, no interest.

I made audiotapes of me practicing and then I would play them at full volume to make her think that I was hard at work on my music while I was really reading Babysitters Club, Hardy Boys, and the Oz series. When I had to practice, I did it with a cat sitting on my shoulder. The balancing act distracted me from the boredom, and my left hand always played harder than my right because I had ten pounds of squirming feline weighing it down. I loved how it sounded, the diddle-tinkle-diddle of my right hand followed by the THUNK-THUNK-MEOW of my left. I weaved paper between the strings to make horrible rat-a-tat-tat sounds while I played enthusiastically; instead of my horribly complicated artsy-fartsy French pieces that I had been assigned, I tapped out cartoon theme songs and composed my own music. Or I played Christmas songs in July and slapped the soundboard to hear the echoes and looked out the window thinking about elves and rips in space-time and Cup o’Noodles. The drive that I have to write, which has consumed me since I was four years old, never appeared in music at any point in the seventeen years I played.