Alan Fox

I’ve read that a habit is first a cobweb, then a cord, and finally a cable.

It’s important to be thoughtful about the habits we develop.  They can control us for a lifetime.

In my life I have changed several basic habits.

At an early age I developed an eating routine which I found difficult to modify.

I hung out in the kitchen every afternoon.  While my mom cooked dinner I separately devoured a two-hour snack.  My favorites were melted cheese sandwiches, sour cream dip with potato chips, and peanut butter and jelly on sour dough French bread.

At dinner, Mom’s salads were far too healthy.  The salad dressing was either vinegar straight from the bottle or lemon juice.  Yuck!  I learned to dislike salad.  I also disliked vegetables because they were always overcooked, limp, and unappetizing.  Worst of all, I was required to eat everything on my plate even if I wasn’t hungry.

At a restaurant I would immediately consume four or five slices of bread and butter, even before ordering real food.  After all, it was free.  (More accurately, Daveen would say it was “included.”)  Lunch and dinner were three or four courses.  After all, a meal isn’t complete without desert.

In short, my eating habits were undisciplined, like the old joke – “I’m on a seafood diet.  I see food, I eat it.”  For most of my life my weight reflected a conspicuous lack of self-control.

I’m happy to report that yesterday evening I enjoyed a dinner that years ago would have been unthinkable – a salad.  No bread.  No meat.  Just a salad with blue cheese lite and balsamic vinegar dressing.  It was delicious, and I wasn’t hungry afterward.

The transformation of my eating habits has been gradual but complete.  I learned that for lunch I was satisfied with a single open-faced sandwich, one-half at noon and the other half in the afternoon.  No potato chips.  No French fries.  No weight gain.

Another habit I’ve changed for the better is not aiming to work too fast.

In the third grade I took a sixteen-problem math test.  As always, I was the first to finish and proudly took my answers to the teacher.  A few minutes later she returned my paper.

“Alan, this is a quiz in subtraction, not addition.”

Oops.  In my haste I had failed to read the instructions.  I again answered all the problems and was still the first to finish.  Thank goodness she gave me a second chance.

But working quickly was a habit that became entrenched. In business I always tried to finish everything as fast as I could. The problem was that if I didn’t immediately know what to do, i.e. respond to a letter, then I would put it aside for later.  Over a period of weeks I would pick up the same letter many times, read it, then put it back on the pile.  That habit kept my in-box filled to overflowing.

I might never be perfect about this, but today I usually respond to an email immediately, or forward it to someone else who can.  I might be a little slower than I was, but I’m definitely more efficient.

Last week I began to change another stressful habit – watching three or four hours of TV news each day.  I’ll write more about that next week.

You might consider your own habits, those cables to which you are tethered.  Perhaps you can detach yourself from one or two, and enjoy your life even more than you thought possible.

Alan

My mother and father were both professional musicians.  My mother played the trumpet, my father the French horn. They met in a student orchestra during the 1930s.  No wonder my dad insisted that I take piano lessons at an early age. But he also advised me to not become a professional musician.  More than once he said, “It’s a lousy way to earn a living.”

There were two pianos in the small living room of my childhood home.  I still remember sitting at one of the pianos practicing when my father, who taught French horn students in the same room, demanded from over my shoulder, “Make it interesting.  Each phrase must be interesting.”

I was still struggling to hit the right notes. Though I knew the difference between pianissimo (very soft) and forte (loud), phrasing was not yet part of my repertoire.  But Dad, as always, persisted.  And it turned out he was right.  He was a great teacher, though somewhat gruff in those days.

“Don’t rush to get to the good parts,” he directed.  “Remember that the notes become a phrase, like a breath, and each phrase must be colorful and interesting.”

When I was in college, headed toward a degree in accounting, I asked my dad, “Do you think I had enough talent to be a concert pianist?”

He thought about it briefly.

“Yes,” he said.  “Definitely.  But you would have had to practice constantly, be on the road half the year, and accept a lower standard of living.  It’s a lousy way to earn a living.”  My dad often repeated himself.

What he didn’t mention was that he knew how much I hated to practice.  With rare exception, I found even the obligatory hour a day unpleasant.  Once I recorded half an hour of myself practicing the piano on my Dad’s new tape recorder.  Then, thinking I could fool him, I played the tape instead of practicing.

On the second day Dad burst into the living room from his bedroom.

“You’re not practicing.  That’s a recording.  I hear exactly the same mistakes over and over.”  So much for that ploy!

In writing I have one essential rule – make it Interesting.  When I read a book, or even a news story, it has to hold my interest.  If not, I skip to something else.  In that respect writing is similar to performing music, every phrase must count.

But ultimately, my Dad was right.  I wasn’t suited to being a professional musician. For years I’ve stared at the two Steinway pianos in my own home, and yet, during the past twenty years, I haven’t played a note.

Alan

When I stare out the window above my kitchen sink I see a lemon tree. Though it grows on my neighbor’s land, its branches hang over our common fence.  For several months there has been a single lemon hanging on that tree, but yesterday morning I noticed it was gone.  I considered mounting a search, but I was in my bathrobe and didn’t care to walk outside, even for a free lemon. And I definitely was not going to climb the fence.

Last Friday, Fritz Coleman, weatherman at the local NBC channel, retired after almost forty years on the job.  When he took the job he told the TV station he was a comedian, not a meteorologist.  They hired him anyway.  The station wanted a weathercaster who was entertaining, and he certainly was.

Yesterday evening, Daveen and I watched a PBS documentary about black holes.  Apparently scientists now believe that a supermassive black hole exists at the center of each galaxy in the universe, including our own. They predict that these black holes, more massive than a million of our suns, will eventually eat everything within their gravitational pull.  I guess that means that in a few billion, or few trillion, years (does it really make a difference?) black holes will consume the universe.

Maybe then there will be another “big bang”.

What do these three stories have in common — a lemon, Fritz Coleman, and black holes?

Each of them has performed a disappearing act from my life.

When I was young, I wrote the following line: “Life is loss.”  I still believe that, but my current view is larger.

For months I observed that lemon up close and personal.  Now it’s disappeared.  Since I have already picked every lemon from my own trees, I guess I’ll have to buy my lemons at the grocery store until Fall.

Thirty years ago when I watched the evening news regularly, I enjoyed Fritz Coleman, both for his whimsy and for providing a weather prediction for the next day.  I watched his final TV appearance last Friday.  Now he’s gone, and today I look up weather for anywhere in the world on my iPhone.

When I was in middle school I studied astronomy.  At that time black holes were just a theory envisioning a mysterious celestial object with such a strong gravitational pull no light could escape. My most specific memory from science class is that on one quiz I named, in order, all nine of the planets of our solar system (those were the days before Pluto was demoted). Because I was a smart aleck, I also threw in the asteroids.  Because I misspelled “asteroids” the teacher gave me a C+ instead of the A or A- that I undoubtedly deserved.

Life is a process of waking up, absorbing data, making decisions, and ultimately letting go. And, like a black hole which we can never actually see (inside its borders), we are truly known only to ourselves, and no one else, before we disappear.

Life is not only loss, but also a wonderful adventure.  I enjoy so many memories, and now those include a lemon, Fritz Coleman, and all of the black holes that vanish the moment they are born.

Alan