Did you know that more than one-third of all food is wasted?  That would not make my parents happy.

For many years I was proud of myself when I finished all the food on my plate.  I pleased my dad, who insisted that we not waste food.  Also, I enjoyed eating.

When I graduated from high school, I weighed 207 pounds.  Later I ballooned to 278 pounds, which I reduced to 220 through healthy lifestyle changes.  The scale this morning displayed 192.6.

At a nice restaurant yesterday, I ordered a BLT sandwich for lunch.  Half of that sandwich is now in my refrigerator.

Finishing everything on my plate was a long-term habit which I have finally discarded.  How did I do that?

I’ll give full credit to the nutritionist I worked with, who made a life-changing suggestion.

“Eat half your sandwich, open face, at lunch, and the other half in the late afternoon,” she said.

What a revolutionary idea.  Unlike my father she did not grow up in the Great Depression.  Unlike my mother, she didn’t believe that how I ate would have an impact on “the starving children in China.”  My mother never did explain exactly how wasted food at our house would magically feed the children of China, but we all use many arguments in life that are unrealistic.  For whatever reasons, I consumed too much food for most of my life.

Every one of us grows up with ideas on how we should do things.  I was startled one morning when I walked into the kitchen to find my young son Steven kneeling on the kitchen counter next to the cook top frying an egg.  He wasn’t tall enough to reach the stove, but he solved the problem in his own way.

My son no longer kneels on the countertop to cook. But many habits have a way of continuing long past the day of their usefulness.

Do you still finish everything on your plate?

Years ago, I was told a story about a girl whose mother taught her to cut off both ends of the roast before cooking it.  As an adult, she discovered that this family practice had begun with her great-great grandmother, whose oven was too small for the entire roast.

I hereby give you permission to leave as much food as you like on your plate.

And you can give yourself permission to revise every one of your other life rules, notably those that no longer work for you.

Alan

Last Saturday, Daveen and I enjoyed a lovely day on Catalina Island, which is located off the coast of California, 26 miles West of San Pedro.  I’ll bet I was one of the few people visiting that day who had lived there in 1944, more than 75 years ago.

My dad earned his living playing the French horn.  To avoid the draft during WW II, he volunteered for the Merchant Marine Band which was headquartered on Catalina.  In 1944, when I was four years old, my mother, father, brother, and I lived there for almost a year.

I still remember our rental house – which was only a half a block from the ocean.  Mom and Dad would let me walk to the beach by myself.

I remember the day I went fishing on the pier.  Dad used yarn to tie my fishing pole to a buttonhole in my sweater.  Being four years old, and therefore almost entirely grown up, I untied the knot as soon as I left the house.

On the pier, of course, I immediately dropped the pole into the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again.  I don’t remember how I explained that to Dad.  Nor do I remember what punishment he doled out as a result.  But he didn’t trust me with a fishing pole for many years.

While on Catalina, my mom seriously injured her back and we had to return to Los Angeles. She slept in the upstairs den for nearly a year as she recovered.

After she recovered, I remember Mom crying one morning in the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She said that the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had died.

I don’t have many memories from before I was ten, but the memories of our time spent on Catalina Island are some of my fondest.  And the day FDR died was one of the saddest.

Alan

My dad grew up in New York, in what I believe was the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn.

When Dad was nearly eighty years old, we were visiting New York City together, and he asked me to rent a car and drive him to see the home he had grown up in.

When we arrived we discovered what appeared to be a large beer brewing facility.  There was no trace of any house in what had clearly become a commercial neighborhood.

“Take me back to the hotel,” he said.  “I never want to see this place again.”

My dad and I never spoke about this day, which means I will never know for sure how he felt.  But I imagine that if I visited my own childhood home near Glendale, California, and found a shopping center looming over what used to be my bedroom, I would be distressed, maybe devastated.  But I know I would hide my dismay, especially from myself.

We each need a place where we feel we belong.  A place that remains the same, steadfast, even as we change.  We need a touchstone where we feel at home in this strange and scary world.

My own touchstone is my real estate company, which I established fifty-four years ago and have nurtured ever since.  I can only imagine my distress if, somehow, I was able to visit our small office building on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, California, ten, twenty, or a hundred years from now, only to find the building gone and a vacant lot the only reminder that it, or I, ever existed.

As I write this, I am sitting in the baggage claim area of SeaTac airport.  I used to own a home, as well as several investment properties in Seattle.  Now I own nothing here.  As other travelers pick up their luggage, a comforting bit of home to accompany their journey from wherever, I have the sense that I no longer belong here.

Dad, I wish you well.  You are no longer in this world, but perhaps you have, indeed, found home again.

Love,

Alan