It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age (3 page)

You Can’t Keep a Good Man
(or Woman) Down

There are some things in life that just can’t help but put a smile on our face, no matter what kind of a mood we happen to be in. Take, for instance, a Mexican mariachi band. Have you ever tried to stay down while listening to the music in a Mexican restaurant? It’s impossible. You may have walked in humming ‘‘Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,’’ but after a couple choruses of ‘‘La Cucaracha,’’ you’ll be donning a sombrero and tapping your flatware to the beat.

Have you ever watched a group of preschoolers sing at a Christmas program while their teachers hover over them, praying against disaster? If you can do so without smiling, you have bigger problems than two humorists can fix.

Here are a few other things it is impossible to do and stay feeling down.

The Hokey Pokey

Be tickled

Eat cotton candy

Wear a clown nose

Juggle
1

Play with a yo-yo

Yodel

Speak pig Latin
2

Hold a puppy

Chew bubble gum

Carry a balloon

Swing on a swing set

Ride a carousel

Blow bubbles

Fly a kite

Skip

Listen to banjo music

Ride a stick horse

Listen to a polka

Play the harmonica
3

Help someone else

A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad,
The more he cast away, the more he had.
John Bunyan

¹
Unless you’re severely down, in which case we wouldn’t recommend juggling chainsaws.

²
Though listening to someone else speak pig Latin may be the ticket to send you over the edge.

³
Phil once had a Sunday school teacher who played the harmonica professionally and carried a beeper—which was a little optimistic of him.

In Pursuit of Your Passion

Why does SeaWorld have a seafood restaurant?
I’m halfway through my fish burger and I realize . . .
I could be eating a slow learner.
Lynda Montgomery

Some people live to eat. Others live to cook. And some of us (like Phil) live to eat other people’s cooking. But even Phil doesn’t take it to the extremes that some people do.

At the World Hot Dog Eating Championships held each Fourth of July on Coney Island, New York, Takeru Kobayashi’s passion for eating has helped him set the world record. This competitive eater (how come no one offered us that choice on career day at our high schools?) polished off forty-nine hot dogs in just twelve minutes. That’s more than one hot dog every fifteen seconds. Though he weighs only 131 pounds, this lean, mean, eating machine has held the hot dog–eating record for five years straight. The reward for eating enough hot dogs to feed a small army? A trophy, a championship belt, and far more important—a year’s supply of hot dogs, which at the rate he consumes them, could be enough to feed the Super Bowl attendees.

But Takeru is passionate about the consumption of hot dogs. His nearest opponent was Sonya Thomas, who set the American record by eating thirty-seven hot dogs before the buzzer (and probably her esophagus) sounded.

Nicknamed the Black Widow, Sonya can chow down more in one sitting than a family of eight. Who knows, she might even be able to eat a family of eight if the stakes were right. Sonya is ranked ‘‘the number one eater in America.’’ Even more amazing is the fact that she weighs less than one hundred pounds. But she has developed her skill and isn’t letting anything get in the way of her goal.

‘‘I am always trying to stretch my stomach,’’ she said in one interview.
1

How does someone train for eating events like these? According to Sonya, she runs on the treadmill for close to two hours a day and, as a manager of a Burger King, she gets a good workout being on her feet and overseeing the fast-food operation. Sonya also goes to all-you-can-eat buffets whenever she can, which can’t help but stretch one’s stomach. No one can eat at an all-you-can-eat buffet on a regular basis and not end up with a stomach more stretched out than the national budgets of both America and Canada.

Sonya holds twenty-seven other world eating titles. She has eaten eight pounds, two ounces of fries in ten minutes; devoured eleven pounds of cheesecake in nine minutes;
2
and polished off sixty-five hard-boiled eggs in six minutes, forty seconds. At yet another contest she ate over eight pounds of baked beans in two minutes, forty-seven seconds.
3
But the record she should be most proud of is for oyster consumption. She ate 432 of them in only ten minutes. And was she full at the end of those ten minutes? Amazingly, no. She said she could’ve eaten even more! This is not someone you could take to a seafood restaurant unless you’ve just taken a second loan out on your home!

We’re sure Takeru trains for his competitions, too. But we can’t help wondering why they do it. What drives Takeru and Sonya to train so hard and enter so many food-eating contests? According to Sonya, she does it because she sees competitive eating as an international sport. She would someday like to be treated with the same respect and admiration as sports stars Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan.

Some live to eat, and some live to play. Recently a fifty-four-year-old man was pulled over on a freeway in Toronto. Why? For playing the violin while driving.
4
He told the cops he was on his way to a performance and needed to warm up. He’s lucky he didn’t play the tuba.

How about you? What is it that you will do almost anything to pursue? What are you passionate about?

Dave Moffitt is passionate about sports. So passionate that for six years he has been living, eating, and sleeping in his Saturn car, driving across America watching sporting events. He has seen every NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA team play in its home stadium or arena. He has watched hundreds of horse races, car races, golf tournaments, even Little League games. Dave’s passion doesn’t cost him as much as you’d think. He eats veggies from a can and sneaks hot dog buns into stadiums where he loads them up with free relish, ketchup, and mustard. He shaves in Wal-Mart bathrooms and showers at truck stops. Dave never pays to park, and he finds the cheapest tickets he can. He eats bananas for breakfast and orders lunch from the McDonald’s dollar menu. Dave is no dummy. He has earned four master’s degrees but retired after more than thirty years of teaching junior high phys ed. He just loves sports.

Not surprisingly, Dave has an ex-wife and two estranged daughters. His girlfriend teaches school in Japan, not too far from Takeru Kobayashi’s house. As far as we know, Dave’s relationship with his girlfriend is going fine, but should she tire of his passionate pursuit of sports, Dave says that they won’t be together anymore.

Contrast these passions with the passions of those who are living for something that will outlast them. Mother Teresa was passionate about helping others, so much so that she dedicated her life to serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. Billy Graham’s passion was spreading the simple truth of the Gospel to as many people around the world as he possibly could. Did he fulfill his passion? We think the answer is pretty obvious.

Someone has defined failure as succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter. We hope you’re passionate about something that matters. Hopefully your passion won’t cost you your relationships, your job, your family, or your digestive tract, but throughout history, passion is what has driven people to great things. A lack of passion equals a lack of joy. Without passion, we’re all doomed to a life of mediocrity.

And what are we passionate about?

We’re passionate about chocolate, but we’re more passionate about reminding people of the importance of finding the laughter in life. I (Martha) am passionate about telling others how much God loves us and has a plan for our lives. I (Phil) have told people that the words I want written on my tombstone are these: ‘‘He found God’s grace too amazing to keep to himself.’’
5
I’d like to spend whatever days I have left telling others of God’s amazing and amusing grace, reminding them of our reasons to rejoice, helping them bring joy to life.

And we both love to eat hot dogs at baseball games . . . one at a time.

Yet if we celebrate, let it be
that he has invaded our lives with purpose.
Luci Shaw

¹
We are, too, but no one gives us a trophy for it.

²
That one doesn’t impress us. We’re pretty sure we’ve done that.

³
As far as we know, these were separate contests on separate days.

⁴
This had not yet been addressed in the Vehicle Code.

⁵
It sure beats, ‘‘See, I told you I was sick,’’ or ‘‘Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.’’

Fresh Veggies

That day is lost on which one has not laughed.
French Proverb

There’s nothing quite like fresh vegetables from your garden to fill a refrigerator’s shelves. Fresh corn, fresh radishes, fresh cucumbers, and fresh tomatoes.

There’s an old joke that deserves retelling here, since it’s about an elderly Italian gentleman who planted a fresh tomato garden every spring. This particular spring, though, he wouldn’t have his son, Vincent, to help him dig up the ground, as Vincent was in prison. The ground was rock hard, too hard for the old man to work, so he wrote a letter to his son complaining about his predicament. It read,

Dear Vincent,

I guess I won’t be planting a tomato garden this year. I’m getting too old to be doing all that gardening. If only you were here to dig up the plot, I could do it. But I guess that’s impossible.

Love, Dad

A few days later he received this reply from his thoughtful son:

Dear Dad,

Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where I buried the bodies.

Love, Vinnie

At four o’clock the following morning, FBI agents and the local sheriff’s department arrived at the old man’s house and immediately started digging up the entire area. But to their disappointment and frustration, they didn’t uncover a single body. They apologized to the old man and then got into their cars and left.

A few days later the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad,

Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That was the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love, Vinnie

We tried and tried to think of a great spiritual application for this joke. We called theologians; a few had PhDs. They laughed at the joke but shook their heads when it came to a life lesson. Maybe the application is this: Sometimes we need to quit looking for applications and just enjoy a good laugh.

I felt his presence when you laughed just now.
Phil Keaggy

Eat Like You Were Dyin’

With apologies to the writers of ‘‘Live Like You Were Dyin’’’ (one of the greatest country songs ever written).

Song for a Cruise Ship