Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [11]
I was a stout child. Childhood pictures of me show the progression of my intemperance. Chubby-faced infancy gave way, for all too brief a time, to childhood fitness, the product of a raging metabolism overcoming gluttony. By the time I was approaching adolescence, however, I was beginning to resemble Chunk from The Goonies. (If this is outside your cultural framework, go rent this movie and watch it with your family. You won’t be disappointed.)
The dealers to my habit were my mother and my grandmother—wonderful, well-meaning women who displayed their love and affection through butter and sugar. For my grandmother (a woman who had a special dessert for each grandchild), it was cherry no-bake cheesecake. My mom’s drug of choice was blueberry pie. If I close my eyes, I can still see the flaky crust clinging to the side of the glass pie plate, sweet, plump, freshly picked blueberries oozing up from any available crevice. In the middle of the pie there was a porcelain bird, its mouth open in eternal song, venting heat and, more important, scent and calling to me—my own personal siren urging me onto the rocks of overindulgence.
I’m not sure I knew that I was chubby when I was in elementary school. I should have recognized my condition in the fifth grade when the salesman at the local clothing store took one look at me and said, “I think he needs a husky size.”
Husky. At the time I thought it was a compliment, an indication of an imposing physical presence. Only later did I understand that it was seventies clothing-salesman code speak for “fat.” Sometimes being dim-witted is a blessing.
Neither dim-wittedness nor childhood delusions, however, could save me in junior high school. No, in that psychological torture chamber, that killer of the esteem of youth, it became apparent to me that “husky” was not a desirable physical characteristic in the minds of thirteen-year-old girls. I was beginning to become painfully aware of my size and shape. In gym class, I would try a host of tricks not to display myself to my classmates.
Somehow, despite my girth, I managed to play competitive hockey, volleyball, and, starting in the eighth grade, varsity basketball. I had not anticipated that it would necessitate me taking my clothes off in front of my teammates. No amount of trickery or gimmickry developed over the past year was going to allow me to maintain my “keep it covered” policy. And so there I was, bare to the world (or at least to twelve other teenage boys).
A ninth-grade student (who happened to play the same position as me, as I remember) noticed either my girth or my reluctance to change, or both, and decided to make me the object of scorn. He gave me the first nickname I can remember having. It was an ode to my size and my low shooting percentage (I was always a better rebounder than a shooter). It was to stick for some time. He called me “Fat Chance.”
By high school, I had shed my boyhood fat. But I have remembered my first nickname. I have dragged that little scrap of memory with me into adulthood. In my mind, though I am now a husband, father, prosecutor, would-be author, and Benjamin Franklin emulator, there will always be a little “Fat Chance” in me.
So there it is. I approached this first virtue of Temperance with a history of self-indulgence. Maybe this was the perfect virtue with which to begin. Maybe I could start my moral perfection project with a little corporal improvement. After all, it was Franklin who said, “I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.” Thus, notwithstanding Chris’s instructions not to take things too literally and Ben’s intentions, I decided to take the virtue of Temperance, at least in part, literally.
But how? It was not as if Ben left a menu planner and an exercise schedule along with his day planner. How could