My dad insists that an occasional fried pastry never hurt anybody, using the word “occasional” to mean “daily.”
“Everything I eat is good for me,” he insists, and I have to agree that his diet is certainly healthier than, say, gunfire. Otherwise, the high-fat food he consumes, rich in cholesterol and carbohydrates, is exactly what doctors tell us we should never eat if we want to live a long life.
My father is 84 years old.
Oh, and he’s also a doctor.
True, his heart has more bypasses than the Los Angeles freeway system. True, he has hearing aids in both ears, which he forgets to turn on when my mother is talking to him. But he’s hardly frail — if you don’t believe me, try wrestling the remote control out of his hand.
We are out to eat at his favorite restaurant, where he orders the “shrimp in white sauce appetizer,” a delicacy so rich with a heavy cream that when the waiter serves it to you, he shouts “clear” and presses two paddles to your chest. I decide it would be rude not to accept a cream shrimp from my father when he offers it to me, which he doesn’t.
My wife orders some sort of vegetable hors d’oeuvres for the both of us to share. My dad regards it snidely. “Are you enjoying your broccoli in water sauce?” he asks. It seems he enjoys his food more if we enjoy ours less.
“I want your son to live a long and healthy life,” my wife informs him loftily.
He thinks about this. “Been there, done that,” he pronounces. He orders a porterhouse steak with garlic butter on it. My wife tells the waiter that she and I will both have poached salmon, romantically entwining her fingers in mine just as I was reaching out to steal a creamed shrimp.
There are apparently three factors that lead to longevity: heredity, habits and what your wife will let you get away with. When it comes to heredity, I’ve obviously done as well as I could and take full credit for that. “If my dad is having a delicious steak soaked in delicious sauce,” I reason, “shouldn’t I have the same thing?”
“You are having the same thing, only it’s salmon,” my wife replies. OK she doesn’t actually say this, but I think she believes it. To her, eating provides fuel for the body, so you should pick the cleanest, purest fuel possible so your engine will run well. To me, you should floor it, and if you blow a cylinder you’ll just have to buy a new motor.
And OK, I don’t actually ask my wife if I can have the porterhouse steak, because I don’t want to look like some wimp who lets his wife decide for him what he wants to eat. I am an independent, strong-willed, free and unfettered individual who lets his wife decide for him what he wants to eat.
My mother isn’t in the equation because she would never order a steak — she doesn’t even like steak. She orders the trout. She always orders the trout. You could take her to Burger King, and she’d order the trout. “I don’t know what I want,” she murmurs as she reads the menu. Everyone else knows, so we wait for her to decide. “Maybe . . . maybe the trout.”
“The suspense was killing me,” my dad says. We probably have this same conversation every time we go out.
“I also want a wedge of lettuce salad with blue cheese dressing, blue cheese crumbles and a hypodermic injection of blue cheese,” my dad says. OK, he doesn’t say that last part, but I’m having such order envy I’m hallucinating whole conversations.
My point in recounting this event is that we stood up at the end of the meal, we were all still alive — well, all of us except the trout, I mean. So if my dad can eat like that every night and he’s still going strong, why can’t I? Isn’t it time I spoke up for myself and declared that I’m going to order a huge steak?
Would someone tell my wife?
Contact W. Bruce Cameron at . For his previous columns visit brucecameron.
