The weather-imposed isolation last week was one of those situations where you can’t do jack. Your water supply is in buckets and jars, your food supply is already in your stomach, and the only part of you that’s working properly is your forgetful mind.
Yay!
So, you adjust. Every year since 1985 I’ve done a six-day cleanse. The best time to start is Ash Wednesday, the day after Mardi Gras, because it’s easy to remember. This year I started the cleanse three days early because it was clear there would be nothing shaking all week.
A cleanse is not really a fast. Every day I made a broth with four mandatory ingredients – carrots, celery, parsley and spinach. Adding any other vegetable is fine, but those four are essential.
I boil a gallon of water, cut up the vegetables, let them simmer until I remember to check on them, and drink the broth throughout the day.
I never feel hungry during the six days. It’s like you never know how far you can drive on empty but it’s always further than you thought.
Cleansing can play tricks on your mind…
For instance, for absolutely no reason, a man I hadn’t thought of in 53 years popped right into my head last Saturday night. It made me laugh. I had only met him once, at a snowy February party in Laramie, Wyoming, 1968. He taught me the proper way to drink tequila – salt in the crook between your thumb and index finger, shoot the sauce, squeeze the lime and make a face.
He was delightful.
His name was Hank Coe. He knew everybody there and I knew no one there, but we spent the evening talking mostly with each other. I never saw him again and never thought of him until February 13, 2021, when I was busy fasting and pondering. Suddenly there he was, front and center in my thoughts.
I Googled him. Come to find out he died about a week before I thought about him. I read his obit and what his friends said about him to see what direction his life had taken.
Honestly, it read like he was the same man all his life that he was that night in Laramie. Fun. Energetic. A gentleman.
Politics are what we talked about. He was for Nixon, I was for Humphrey, but neither of us much cared about either of them. Neither of us fancied the war in Vietnam and both of us knew lots of guys who were over there.
Hank’s obit in the Cody Enterprise (founded by Buffalo Bill) quoted him saying, “I don’t know where you’re going to move that’s better than Cody, Wyoming.”
Which reminded me of a quote in our paper on Feb. 10 when Mayor Butch Berry said, “There’s no place on earth I’d rather be than Eureka Springs.”
And my money says that Kirk Ashworth, a man I met once in person and each week in a column, would have said the same thing about Grandview, Arkansas.
Those unexpected persuasions from random men in my life endeared them to me even more. We don’t have to see eye-to-eye to get along beautifully.
And by the way, I feel the same way about John Cross.
Yes, fasting is cleansing. And tequila is probably not the answer to anything but it’s worth a shot.