On the Import of Fruit, particularly of tropical persuasion

I've been told that since I am a big baby and achood facebook, I need to update my blog more often. The word might have been "eschewed" but who really talks like that, Mary? ;) Hmm. I am chained to the living room couch for at least the next six weeks with this broken ankle. Nothing interesting is going to happen to me. What shall I write about?

I think we will all die of boredom if I chronicle my convalescence step by step. We could work on the eternal question, "Are we human or are we dancer?" for a while. Blogging through Julia Child's cookbook has been done. So today our topic is fruit.

First, cantaloupe. Our cat, Kaleo, is, to put it politely, supersized. He's a big muscular guy for a cat anyway, but he really put on weight when our daughter's kitty died five years or so ago. I must admit I did not pay attention to how Kaleo was handling the loss of his beloved. They had been inseparable and I should have expected some response from him but I just didn't think about it. I had my own sad and I was busy. So three or four days after the death of the other cat, I finally noticed where Kaleo had been hanging out: inside the 20 pound cat food bag, gorging. He gained four pounds (for a cat, that's a LOT) in less than a week. To quote Dave Barry, I am absolutely telling the truth. We had a depressed cat who tried to eat himself to death.

So we put the cat food in a container with a lid and tried to help him lose some of the weight he gained, but really ever since then he has been obsessed with stuffing his face. He steals food. He sneaks food. He begs for food (mostly "ham" because it's one of the few words he can say). He thinks about food all the time, you can tell. It came to a head last Christmas, when Rick and I came to visit. Kaleo (who stayed here with our kids) was struggling to jump up to the place where the cats were fed. His spring was sprung. I thought he might be having hip problems, like older adults sometimes do, so just in case we took him to the vet. After x-rays and various tests and such the vet told us he was overweight, charged us three hundred dollars and put him on a diet. Three hundred dollars to find out our cat was fat, which I already knew. I'm still not over it. Anyway, this three hundred dollar diet plan included a list of things he could eat and how much. My favorite item was Cantaloupe, because the quantity allowed was "as much as he wants." I suppose some cats eat cantaloupe. Kaleo won't eat fruit. Not any, not ever. But he was crazy hungry on his diet, of course, and so was sniffing mightily at anything anyone was eating. I kept a text message Steph sent me last winter that said, "Kaleo thought he might want some cantaloupe, but upon consideration, he thinks not." I am pleased to report he has lost a pound or two since then, and he has enough spring in his hind end to jump up again. He's also getting more energy - for the first time in years, he is getting playful, even. I recommend the three hundred dollar cantaloupe diet. We need to get our money's worth out of it.

Mango. I've been thinking about diet because it occurred to me a day after surgery that if I eat "normally" while laying on my back doing nothing, I am going to have to go on the cantaloupe diet myself. I like cantaloupe but I like mango even more. Given the choice, I will take mango flavored you-name-it over any other option. (My second choice is peach.) Guess what I found out? Mango is not good for people who need to diet. If fruit can be fattening, mango is fattening. This is true of most everything I like to eat. I think learning to walk again in a few months will be hard enough without extra weight straining my joints. So I'll have more cantaloupe, less mango. Portion control is my new watchword.

Bananas. There are two things about bananas. One is that I like them very much and tell myself they are very good to have because they are one of the few foods containing potassium, which I miss when I don't have enough in my diet. However, bananas have a well-known -um- binding quality that is not helpful to me at this time. I am on a steady (but decreasing) dosage of oxycodone, which has the same trick of putting a stopper on the human digestive throughput system. I was eating a banana to take my pills a couple of days ago and suddenly realized that I have a problem... Rick went to the store and got yet another pill for me to take, and now all is well again. But I should probably go easy on the bananas.

The other thing about bananas is that they confuse our dog Snickers. Our daughter will ask, "Bananas?" at those moments when Snickers is soulfully nose to nose with her, and invariably it causes Snicks to tilt her head sideways, as if she is trying to get her brain in a better position to understand. Lately our daughter has discovered that "Papaya?" is as perplexing a question to the dog. Now, Snickers, like Kaleo, won't eat any fruit or vegetables voluntarily. None of our animals like fruit. I thought for a while our son's dog would eat grapes. But though I briefly fooled myself into believing he was eating them, Shinobi just licks grapes, takes one bite to break them open and leaves them on the ground for one's toes to discover later. So who knows why Snickers is so curious about bananas, since no one but the humans eat them. Perhaps she'd like to know more about potassium.

Winter is coming. Right now pumpkins are ripe, of course. Unfortunately I've never been a fan of pumpkin, except the roasted (salted) seeds. Did you know the only native American fruit that provides potassium is the pawpaw? This is true. I have some seeds planted in our backyard right now. They have to be exposed to a winter before they will even think about growing. In fact, it could take up to two years for the pawpaws to sprout. I will have to be patient.

That's enough about fruit, though no doubt the subject of patience is going to be a theme for me. Next time (possibly): Inside Cat's various hobbies.

love,

cat