NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

I’m rushing to get this entry out before the year is no longer new. Plus, according to some statistics I’ve seen, New Year resolutions are usually broken, on average, by the nineteenth of January. So, that’s another consideration to take into account. No sense making resolutions the day before you’re going to break them.

But then again, I always hope that this year will be the one in which I break with tradition and actually keep my resolutions. And I usually figure that until about mid-February, when the year no longer seems impeccably new and hope starts to fade.

One that I had for this year was to not miss another deadline for this blog. I made it on December 27 and broke it on December 28, before the New Year had even begun. (My sincerest apologies to my readers, by the way). But since it was broken before midnight on the thirty-first, well, it’s still doable. So okay:

Resolution 1. Don’t miss any more blog deadlines. This is for this blog, The Southern Yankee, which comes out every thirteenth and twenty-eighth of the month (more or less). But I have another one...

Resolution 2. Set deadlines for the other blog: A Yankee At Large http://yankeeatlarge.blogspot.com That’s my political blog and up to now, I’ve written it at random and often very occasionally. Although I like to think the articles I publish there reflect the journalistic professionalism that I acquired during a twenty-year full-time career as a newsman and foreign correspondent, my inconsistency in keeping it up is anything but professional.  And I’ve promised myself to do a lot better from now on...but maybe don’t count on it. I already carry all the remorse I can handle.

Resolution 3. Lose weight. I think this is everybody’s, just about. Like a lot of fat guys, I’ve always had trouble thinking of myself as fat. And I wasn’t always. But I have struggled with weight since middle age. I know I’m big. I know I’m strong. And okay, maybe I could drop a pound or two. But other people are fat. Not me. Well, I’ve got news for you, Chief. You’re fat. Or have been off and on since your late thirties.

I remember once when Whitie’s older brother, my Uncle Red, had started getting pudgy. He went for a checkup to his doctor—a man who wasn’t known for his diplomacy and more than a “bedside manner” had a “bedside invective”. For instance, he was of Polish descent, and one time a few men with medical issues sitting in his waiting room cooling their heels until he could see them started telling jokes to while away the time. In honor of the venue, they soon sort of naturally fell into swapping “Polack jokes”. You know, like, “How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb...” So anyway, they’re on about the sixth of these when the door to the consulting room opens a crack and the doctor sticks his head out.

“Hi Doc!” all the guys say in unison.

“I’ve got a riddle for you,” Doc responds. “What’s black and blue and moans?”

The guys all shrug, like, “beats me”.

And Doc snaps, “The next sonuvabitch that tells a Polack joke!”

Anyhow, Red goes in for this checkup.

“You’ve gotta lose weight, Red,” the doctor says after examining him.

“Why’s that?”

“Cause you’re fat as a friggin’ pig.”

“Think so?”

“I know so and I’m your doctor.”

“Tell you what,” Red says, turning the color of his name, “Let’s go out back and I’ll whip your ass, and we’ll see who’s fat!”

But there’s no use getting feisty over it. If you’re fat, you’re fat. Face it. And, there’s something you can do about it, I tell myself.

This year my wife was away with her family for the holidays and, other than work, I had no commitments. So I thought, “No reason to indulge in all of the holiday excesses. This would be a good time to start getting back into shape. I stepped on the scale for the first time in over a year and tipped it at just under two-sixty. Over the past ten years, that had always been the top weight at which alarm bells would go off and I would begin watching my diet and losing weight. And in that time I’d been down to two-fifteen, two-twenty several times. But as soon as I started feeling “light”, I always re-initiated my ascent.

Last time was a year and a half ago. It was the first time I sought help and didn’t just diet on my own. I went to a clinical nutritionist. I didn’t really learn anything new from her. I mean, come on, I know what makes me fat and if I want to lose weight I just stop doing it. But I found that it was a huge help to have to go weigh in with her every three weeks. Especially since she was a lovely young woman and it would have been really humiliating for me to go weigh in and be just as fat as I had been three weeks before. I still have a modicum of male pride. So, I ended up losing twenty-five pounds in under three months.

Then I couldn’t go anymore, because I had an accident in which I almost bled to death and it took me a long time to recover enough to be thinking about anything but recovery. The massive blood loss took my appetite with it and for the first time since I was a child, it became a torture to eat. A wave of nausea came over me every time a meal was set before me. My cardiologist who had previously always been urging me to slim down now said, “Eat whatever you want, whatever sounds good to you until you get better.” I needed to recover my strength. Hamburgers and potatoes and chocolate should do the trick.

Before I got my appetite back, I had lost another eleven pounds and was down to a trim two-fifteen. But by then I had already put calories out of my mind and was eating “whatever I felt liked” (doctor’s orders!) and kept right on doing that until I was back up to two-sixty.

Anyway, on December 22, I decided, once again, to renew my resolution. Lose weight. Since then, I’m down twelve pounds and if you ask me today, I’m going for another thirty or so. But I’ll let you know what happens.

Resolution 4. Publish. This has been a New Year resolution of mine for at least the past forty years. This, despite making my living with the written word for the past forty-five. It’s not like I haven’t published anything—hundreds upon hundreds of articles, essays, translations, blogs and ghost-written works since I was in my mid-twenties. But never a book of my own.

When I first got into newspaper journalism, being a newsman was only my immediate goal. I wanted writing and reporting experience. I wanted a daily audience. I wanted to learn more about writing from people who really knew how to do it. And I did. But my ultimate goal was to write books, to be a novelist. So I was following my unwitting mentor, Ernest Hemingway’s advice. The advice encompassed in his statement that everything useful that he’d ever learned about writing, he had learned from copy-editors as a young reporter.

But I liked newspaper work and stayed on. Eventually, I was a copy-editor myself and teaching other young men and women how to write. But in the meantime, I was writing short stories, novellas, novels and non-fiction essays. All of which ended up stowed away in the drawers of my desks at home and at work.

Grandma Moses, never too late?

Back then, if you wanted to publish something, you needed a literary agent or a friendly publisher, or both and I had neither. And I had no idea how to go about getting them. While I had myriad contacts back then in journalism, I had none in the literary world. So I fumbled from one New Year resolution to the next, never managing to reach my book-publishing goal. And then, for awhile, after several unsuccessful attempts to get agents interested in my work, I gave up. It was just too hard to break into the US literary market from a remote foreign country. You needed to know people. And that was next to impossible long-distance.

But then, I ended up living long enough to witness the most egalitarian event since the Gutenberg printing press. Namely, the birth of Amazon’s Kindle service for writers. A free portal in which to self-publish previously unpublished works in the form of e-books and/or print-on-demand. Launched in 2007, it has since become a mega-publishing and marketing operation with hundreds of thousands of titles and millions of readers. Numerous self-published authors on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform have even become bestsellers.

Much as I considered it a brilliant and democratic idea that gave voice to a vast community of writers who, otherwise, would never have been heard, I hesitated for a long time to go the self-publication route. My old-timer thinking made me question if, perhaps, it wasn’t a cheat. So I submitted my work to overstocked publishers and hoped for “discovery” but ended up on the slush pile. And the older I got, the less likely “discovery” seemed—especially without the ever more de rigueur English major pedigree from a top US university.

All of the sudden, last year, at age sixty-nine, I found myself once again putting “Publish!” on my New Year resolution list. And I thought to myself, septuagenarians are never “discovered” —with the possible exception of Grandma Moses, who didn’t begin painting in earnest until she was seventy-eight and who, before her death in 1961, aged a hundred and one, had become an American art icon—so, I told myself, from now on, for as long as I’m alive and lucid, I’m going to publish at least a book a year.

Last year, I failed to keep the resolution, although I did prepare an anthology of stories that is pretty much ready to go except for an ISBN number. So that resolution is once again on my list for 2020. Today, if you ask me, I’ll tell you, “This year for sure.”

Ask me again after January 19.