One choice at a time

April 2, 2009

Dear Amy and Frank,

I told DC I wish we could go to your house for dinner every night, Amy, because I know you eat healthily. You are one of the few vegetarians I know and introduced me to quinoa, the South American treat.

I imagine you stir-frying fresh vegetables most nights and avoiding the supermarket aisles most of the rest of us frequent. Once in a while at the gym you guiltily admit to eating a brownie, but fat seems like a foreign country you've never visited. Fitness is your business, but you'd surely be just the same way if you were a truck driver.

By contrast, our dinners often seem to be from the OCD-ADD Diet. On good nights we stir-fry frozen vegetables with a rotisserie chicken provided by the supermarket. The next night we're building a meal around instant mashed potatoes.

When dinner is takeout, the chicken soup with avocados from our favorite Mexican restaurant or Thai salads are our healthiest choices. On other nights whatever's fastest is the answer.

Geneen Roth, author of the best-seller "When Food is Love," says our belief in our ability to make decisions to enhance our well-being reaches into every part of our lives. "You live the way you eat," she writes.

The fault is not busy DC's but mine. I have more time to think about food, to embrace the notion that nourishing ourselves well is a commitment.

DC and I dream you will adopt our backyard, Frank. Yours is so carefully arranged, the mosaically stacked woodpile works of utilitarian art, rainwater from your carport roof falling into a wooden barrel. The scene is as perfectly composed as an Andrew Wyeth painting. He might have painted you and Robyn sitting in chairs around a fire in your yard, bundled in coats and drinking wine in the sunset.

The broken limbs from last winter's ice storm finally have been removed from our own backyard, leaving us to ponder what became of the patio we started to build years ago. The rocks are still there, just a bit overgrown.

It's curious to me that our front yard is a still-life of flowers and mulch. We try to put on a good front. One peek over the fence reveals the real us, a repository of garden tools, garden gewgaws and patio furniture that look as if they were scattered by a real big wind.

Each of us suspects everyone else has their life together better than we do. Usually we're wrong. Usually.

Watching Frank help us by replacing the rotting boards at the back of our fence, I know this is how a house is put in order: Plank by plank, nail by nail. I know fitness is attained and maintained the same way: One healthy choice at a time.

In the spirit of healthy living, I am determined to plant a garden this year. It will be small and not far from where our beloved beagle Alvie rests in peace. I imagine us in our own painting, on our patio eating fresh vegetables from our garden while Hank and Lucy beg at our feet.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.