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February 22, 2009

wake up, smell the cat food

Every year Moo and I observe Lent. I don't remember when we started, or why. When I was a kid I dreaded Lent because I usually gave up something, and that "something" was usually candy or dessert (though one year my goal was to "be nice to everybody," which was really frustrating because nobody noticed). Forty days of no dessert or anything sweet was usually too hard for me to manage; I'd generally succumb to desire the day before Easter, then feel guilty about it on Easter Sunday. The perfect Catholic!

In fact neither Moo nor Herself have been baptized, and I have not been a practicing Catholic for all my adult life. Though the nuns and my mother told me, "Once you are baptized Catholic, you are always Catholic," making Catholicism kind of on a par with the herpes virus ... once exposed, you never really recover. The idea of "always and forever a Catholic" used to both thrill and alarm me, the way the idea of "God sees everything you do" used to, back when I was still on speaking terms with God instead of strenuously avoiding all attempts at contact.

Nevertheless every year before Ash Wednesday comes around, Moo and I decide what it is we should Do Without, to acknowledge, at least, Christ's forty days and nights in the desert and his triumph over the ultimate temptation and in successfully raising the bar impossibly high for the rest of us.

Herself refuses to play. One year I gave up swearing and she said, encouragingly, "Mom, that's going to be so hard for you!" And it was. One year I gave up dessert, but soon realized that for my body, dessert signals "stop eating now," and without it I just keep going. I gained ten pounds by Easter. Last year I thought about giving up wine but was afraid I'd turn to child abuse instead, so I gave up biting my fingernails, the ultimate Bad Habit.

One year Moo gave up soda. If left to his own devices Moo would drink Diet Coke at every meal, including in his cereal at breakfast, so it was serious. I don't remember what he did last year, but this year he has decided to become a vegetarian for Lent. Forty days without Five Guys, without ham sandwiches for lunch, without meat-lovers pizzas. Forty days without Buffalo Philly chicken wings.

I applaud his desire to mortify the flesh, so to speak, but I cannot imagine how I'm going to feed him for the next month and a half. Jesus fasted, though somehow I don't think that idea will fly with Moo. Chicken is out, obviously, and he will not eat fish. Nor does he care for salad and most vegetables. Spaghetti five nights a week? Vegetable-stock soup? Beans, done a thousand ways? Soy protein shakes?

Stay tuned.

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)