CityView Magazine

8 | January/February 2015 I have had the good fortune to experience long love in many different ways. I have been at the same church for all my life. I have loved one wife (praise that same Lord). The children and I have forged a loving way for their 13, 16 and 17 years. Several good setter dogs have spent their entire lives with me walking over many a mile of frost- crinkled earth together. Long love is a beautiful thing. McFadyen's Musings BY BILL MCFADYEN It's Only a Number Life balances out though. Many peo- ple and things that we are sure we will love forever when we discover them, turn out to be far less attractive over time. e armor chinks, oen over something small. ings again are nev- er the same. I used to love my bathroom scale. Now I believe that I hate it. It used to smile back at me year aer year from the same position on the dial as the time before and all the times before that. We totally understood each other. e rela- tionship was easy. anksgiving dinner was but an anomalous blip on the radar screen. Christmas lunch with its oyster dress- ing and pecan pie and home-spun whipped cream shown almost imper- ceptibly north of the familiar numer- als. Within a day or two, the bathroom scale returned to its place of familiarity. February always netted me one of mom's famous caramel birthday cakes. I would allow a slice to any and all at- tendees who sang the birthday song and in whatever dimension they felt they could enjoy, but one piece only. What- ever was le aer the original sharing went home with and was subsequently ingested by me. Aer the cake's com- plete annihilation into my digestive system, I would spend a few quality minutes with my bathroom scale. It would edge up into regions beyond our stated norm, but only for a bit. A cou- ple of days of routine life and couple of good nights of sleep and the scale and I were back to the place where we first met. Our time together was predict- ably uneventful and comforting in its consistency. en… something changed. I remember the story of the mar- ried couple riding home from Cracker Barrel in the pick-up truck. She was grumpy and it did not take 30 years of marriage for him to know it. He also knew the mood was not going away un- til he brought it out in the open to hear what he had done wrong. He finally asked her. She said, "We don't ever do anything romantic anymore. We just go through the motions. I remember when we first met, you'd pick me up for a date and I would sit in the middle and we would hold hands and laugh and snuggle. Now we just go where we go and then we go back home." He glanced at her with her right elbow on the top of the door panel, staring out her window. "Well, look," he said in self-defense and turning his eyes back to the road, "I didn't move." I think I now hate my bathroom scale because it changed so radically without any change in me. I am doing the same things I have always done. I am eating the same things and drinking the same ways. I do the same number of push- ups and walk the same number of steps. My adult lifelong partner in the bath- room, though, has moved farther and farther away from what we once called normal. Each time we are together, the scale becomes something I recognize less and less. It started showing me numbers a few years back that I had never seen before. e worst part was when the very first number changed upward. In that mo- ment, you look down at and just past your toenails (perhaps leaning forward a bit to avoid an obstructing view of one's belly) only to realize that the scale has gone to a place in life that you never thought it would go. To make matters worse, I found that when I would go to visit my favorite doctor friend on Haymount Hill, his bathroom scale acted the same way that mine did. While that relationship was nurtured far less frequently than the one at home, it too was one of those bonds that I could depend on to be the same. In fact, the scale seemed to be even a tad more obnoxious, probably in response to its not liking my bulky shoes and due to my pocketing, several weighty sets of keys. If scales universally are going to be- have in this manner, then what chance do I have of intervening on behalf of my

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