Big Beautiful Dreamer
ridiculously contented
~BHM, ~~WG. After a shock, a guy needs to back away from the world. But who would expect what a monastery has to offer?
A monastery is just about the last place you would expect to gain weight.
Let me explain.
My friend Alan, who had rashly invested – at a time when home desktop computers were rare – in a “search engine” called Google in 1997, had offered to treat me to a two-week retreat after my fiancee left me … for a woman.
Do you have any idea how creepy that is? I was not just kicked in the nuts, but left with a weird tendency to philosophize. If Julie Ann left me for Tasha, then what did that make me...? Best not to think about that.
“No females … peace and quiet … no TV … no cell phone not ringing … c'mon,” Alan urged.
So here we were in the guest room that looked like a modest hotel room with great views in a monastery retreat center run by the Benedictines, an order famous for its hospitality. According to the pamphlet, St. Benedict's Rule was to treat each guest like Christ Himself.
The retreat center offered breakfast on your own in the guest house, lunch at noon, dinner at six. Otherwise they left you alone. For an extra fee, you could schedule therapeutic massage, energy balancing, yoga, spiritual direction. There was a library and gift shop, a chapel, a labyrinth, walking trails, and a hundred acres of rolling hillside nestled an hour or so outside San Francisco.
The guest house refrigerator held locally made milk, cream, and butter, monastery-made jams and jellies, and bagels and English muffins the monastery bakery made fresh each day. Big as your hand. I quickly took to having one with my first cup of coffee, one with my second cup, and one each as a midmorning and midafternoon snack, each one slathered with the fresh-as-it-gets jams.
After breakfast, I would retire to my room for an hour or so of meditation.
When I woke up, I would wander along one of the trails, find a hammock, and sprawl in it, contemplating the sky.
Weird as it may sound, the whole routine was beginning to screw my head back on straight and clear out the mess Julie Ann had left behind. I could feel myself mentally bagging up her garbage, sorting out the recyclables, toting everything to the curb. I was starting to recover. I was even regaining my appetite, and none too soon.
For breakfast, guests were on their own – assisted by all those homemade goodies – but lunch and dinner were served in the dining room.
Usually chicken or turkey – salads with fixings straight from the monastery garden – potatoes or sweet potatoes, roasted, baked, or mashed – monastery bread – two or three hot fresh vegetables. Served buffet style in the kitchen, then eaten at large communal tables. You could go back as often as you wanted so long as you cleaned your plate. Which I always did.
And after dinner, dessert. Caramel apple cheesecake – carrot cake – trifle – chocolate bread pudding.
The monks ate sparingly, never more than one serving, and when they had dessert it was little cups of ice milk, but we guests dined heartily.
All that fresh clean air, and all that hiking the trails. Well … some guests hiked the trails.
After one such dinner – this might have been midway through the first week – having waddled dazedly to my room, I sank into the chair, put my feet up, and with difficulty unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans.
My belly was tightly bloated, stuffed full of a gigantic salad, Chinese-style turkey, baked sweet potatoes, broccoli in garlic cream sauce, several slices of wheat bread spread thickly with butter, homemade applesauce, beet slaw, and two embarrassingly large slices of cheesecake.
I shifted heavily in the chair, trying to find a position that would be kinder to my gorged and aching stomach. The skin was stretched taut as a drum, and I could feel and hear the digestive process struggling with the overload.
Alan, sprawled on his bed, glanced over. “All right?” he yawned.
I hiccuped. “Fine.” I rubbed my roundly distended belly, a good inch and a half of fullness keeping button and buttonhole separated. “A little—hic—full.”
Alan smirked and patted his own middle, his waistband showing visible evidence of strain. “Good—ohh—cooking,” he managed through another yawn. He belched. “Very relaxing.”
“Ought to be,” I said, still drowsily massaging my bulging gut like a bear contemplating hibernation. “We're not doing anything but eating and sleeping.”
“You bored?” Alan belched again.
I thought about it. “No … actually I'm not.”
Alan was right, it was peaceful up here, and the break from TV, computers, and phones was therapeutic in its own way. Doctorate in hand, I'd quit my copy shop job and my drudgery slot teaching middle school history, and in eight weeks would take up a low rung as an assistant professor of modern American history at the University of California at Irvine. Thirty-five hundred more a year than I was making now, better insurance, and a faculty parking sticker.
Meanwhile, three or five days of imitating Garfield was very enjoyable stuff, even if my jeans seemed to be slowly shrinking. I yawned, hauled myself upright, shucked off my jeans and underwear, and sank into bed.
By the end of twelve days, packing up (reluctantly) to leave, I was wearing a bagged-out sweatshirt that, I hoped, hid my unbuttoned jeans and unmistakably thickening waistline from public view. I settled into the little two-bedroom cottage I was renting on the outskirts of campus and hit up Goodwill for khakis with a bit more give through the middle. I told myself I would work on paring off those extra fifteen (!) pounds once I got into the swing of things.
Well... after fall break.
Well... after Thanksgiving break. After all, Mom would feed me right up. (She did.)
Well... after the new semester started. Who embarked on a diet in December? Especially with so many secretaries bringing in so many tins of goodies?
Well... it was really too cold in January to start walking to work, I rationalized as I squeezed my extra thirty-or-forty-ish pounds into my hybrid car.
Well... now that it was warmer, all the flowering things were messing with my allergies. Besides, all that uphill hiking would make me sweat.
Suddenly, it was June again, and Alan and I were back at the monastery for two weeks of much-needed rest. Alan tugged his new XXL polo shirt over his two hundred and forty-one pounds (at five eight, he looked like a short Santa Claus), and I prudently let out my new 48-inch belt a couple of notches and smoothed my XXXL UCI T shirt over my softening pecs and down over the comfortable double spare tire riding around my midsection. I stretched my neck, letting out the stiffness of the drive and airing out the creases in my two chins.
Alan patted my shoulder.
“Ready for dinner?”
On Retreat
by Big Beautiful Dreamer
by Big Beautiful Dreamer
A monastery is just about the last place you would expect to gain weight.
Let me explain.
My friend Alan, who had rashly invested – at a time when home desktop computers were rare – in a “search engine” called Google in 1997, had offered to treat me to a two-week retreat after my fiancee left me … for a woman.
Do you have any idea how creepy that is? I was not just kicked in the nuts, but left with a weird tendency to philosophize. If Julie Ann left me for Tasha, then what did that make me...? Best not to think about that.
“No females … peace and quiet … no TV … no cell phone not ringing … c'mon,” Alan urged.
So here we were in the guest room that looked like a modest hotel room with great views in a monastery retreat center run by the Benedictines, an order famous for its hospitality. According to the pamphlet, St. Benedict's Rule was to treat each guest like Christ Himself.
The retreat center offered breakfast on your own in the guest house, lunch at noon, dinner at six. Otherwise they left you alone. For an extra fee, you could schedule therapeutic massage, energy balancing, yoga, spiritual direction. There was a library and gift shop, a chapel, a labyrinth, walking trails, and a hundred acres of rolling hillside nestled an hour or so outside San Francisco.
The guest house refrigerator held locally made milk, cream, and butter, monastery-made jams and jellies, and bagels and English muffins the monastery bakery made fresh each day. Big as your hand. I quickly took to having one with my first cup of coffee, one with my second cup, and one each as a midmorning and midafternoon snack, each one slathered with the fresh-as-it-gets jams.
After breakfast, I would retire to my room for an hour or so of meditation.
When I woke up, I would wander along one of the trails, find a hammock, and sprawl in it, contemplating the sky.
Weird as it may sound, the whole routine was beginning to screw my head back on straight and clear out the mess Julie Ann had left behind. I could feel myself mentally bagging up her garbage, sorting out the recyclables, toting everything to the curb. I was starting to recover. I was even regaining my appetite, and none too soon.
For breakfast, guests were on their own – assisted by all those homemade goodies – but lunch and dinner were served in the dining room.
Usually chicken or turkey – salads with fixings straight from the monastery garden – potatoes or sweet potatoes, roasted, baked, or mashed – monastery bread – two or three hot fresh vegetables. Served buffet style in the kitchen, then eaten at large communal tables. You could go back as often as you wanted so long as you cleaned your plate. Which I always did.
And after dinner, dessert. Caramel apple cheesecake – carrot cake – trifle – chocolate bread pudding.
The monks ate sparingly, never more than one serving, and when they had dessert it was little cups of ice milk, but we guests dined heartily.
All that fresh clean air, and all that hiking the trails. Well … some guests hiked the trails.
After one such dinner – this might have been midway through the first week – having waddled dazedly to my room, I sank into the chair, put my feet up, and with difficulty unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans.
My belly was tightly bloated, stuffed full of a gigantic salad, Chinese-style turkey, baked sweet potatoes, broccoli in garlic cream sauce, several slices of wheat bread spread thickly with butter, homemade applesauce, beet slaw, and two embarrassingly large slices of cheesecake.
I shifted heavily in the chair, trying to find a position that would be kinder to my gorged and aching stomach. The skin was stretched taut as a drum, and I could feel and hear the digestive process struggling with the overload.
Alan, sprawled on his bed, glanced over. “All right?” he yawned.
I hiccuped. “Fine.” I rubbed my roundly distended belly, a good inch and a half of fullness keeping button and buttonhole separated. “A little—hic—full.”
Alan smirked and patted his own middle, his waistband showing visible evidence of strain. “Good—ohh—cooking,” he managed through another yawn. He belched. “Very relaxing.”
“Ought to be,” I said, still drowsily massaging my bulging gut like a bear contemplating hibernation. “We're not doing anything but eating and sleeping.”
“You bored?” Alan belched again.
I thought about it. “No … actually I'm not.”
Alan was right, it was peaceful up here, and the break from TV, computers, and phones was therapeutic in its own way. Doctorate in hand, I'd quit my copy shop job and my drudgery slot teaching middle school history, and in eight weeks would take up a low rung as an assistant professor of modern American history at the University of California at Irvine. Thirty-five hundred more a year than I was making now, better insurance, and a faculty parking sticker.
Meanwhile, three or five days of imitating Garfield was very enjoyable stuff, even if my jeans seemed to be slowly shrinking. I yawned, hauled myself upright, shucked off my jeans and underwear, and sank into bed.
By the end of twelve days, packing up (reluctantly) to leave, I was wearing a bagged-out sweatshirt that, I hoped, hid my unbuttoned jeans and unmistakably thickening waistline from public view. I settled into the little two-bedroom cottage I was renting on the outskirts of campus and hit up Goodwill for khakis with a bit more give through the middle. I told myself I would work on paring off those extra fifteen (!) pounds once I got into the swing of things.
Well... after fall break.
Well... after Thanksgiving break. After all, Mom would feed me right up. (She did.)
Well... after the new semester started. Who embarked on a diet in December? Especially with so many secretaries bringing in so many tins of goodies?
Well... it was really too cold in January to start walking to work, I rationalized as I squeezed my extra thirty-or-forty-ish pounds into my hybrid car.
Well... now that it was warmer, all the flowering things were messing with my allergies. Besides, all that uphill hiking would make me sweat.
Suddenly, it was June again, and Alan and I were back at the monastery for two weeks of much-needed rest. Alan tugged his new XXL polo shirt over his two hundred and forty-one pounds (at five eight, he looked like a short Santa Claus), and I prudently let out my new 48-inch belt a couple of notches and smoothed my XXXL UCI T shirt over my softening pecs and down over the comfortable double spare tire riding around my midsection. I stretched my neck, letting out the stiffness of the drive and airing out the creases in my two chins.
Alan patted my shoulder.
“Ready for dinner?”
