Month: April 2019

TEN GEMS AND A GENIUS: How To Turn A Preschooler Into A Student of STEM

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Of the four grandparents my granddaughter has, I would probably be the one voted least likely to succeed at fostering a love of STEM. I’ve never encountered a jigsaw puzzle I haven’t run from. And even in my watered-down college bio classes, I never could understand alleles. For me to sell my granddaughter on the benefits of STEM is like asking a pig to teach mah jongg.

Two Tuesdays ago, I took my granddaughter to Genius Gems, where there were no actual gems and, as far as I could tell, only one genius ( of course I mean my granddaughter). It was pouring and I was desperate. She’d already had a manicure.

Lucky for me, Genius Gems is advertised as an incubator for STEM with coding classes for kids ages 2-12.  It sounded like a pretty big step up from Chuck E Cheese where my kids spent way too much of their toddlerhood.  I imagined simulated circuit boards and places for kids of all ages to insert colorful pegs into holes, kind of like a communal game of Lite Brite fueled by math and engineering. It never occurred to me I’d have to help.

It was school vacation week and the place was overrun with toddlers, elementary school kids and moms and dads with babies on their hips. Almost everyone in there could have been my child, except for the 60 or so that could have been my grandchild.

The grandchild I did have was somewhat puzzled about what we were supposed to do.

“See those giant towers those big kids are making? They actually represent things in science,” I said to my granddaughter. “Things like electrons and neutrons and protons .”  Wow, Grandma. Good try. Incidentally I didn’t know if any of this was true. But it sounded good.

Luckily, my granddaughter wasn’t looking for a science teacher but instead more of a hunting and gathering companion. The tower she built never got off the floor. She wanted to collect every purple diamond shape in the immediate vicinity. It was like hunting for truffles.

Not surprisingly, her structure didn’t end up looking anything like the pictures on the instruction cards we had. And unfortunately I was no help. I’m more Flintstone and Rubble than Watson and Crick.

Undeterred by our building debacle, my granddaughter abandoned science in favor of art. At the craft table, she started to make a school banner based on the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter was a clearly a stretch for a 3-year-old. My granddaughter doesn’t even know who Bugs Bunny is.

But seeing how engaged she was, I was ready to declare Genius Gems a success. But then came an unfortunate blip.

My granddaughter was undone by a facsimile of the sorting hat from Harry Potter. Every art room of toddlers and young elementary school kids needs a sorting hat —  apparently that’s the only way to make sure they’re sufficiently spooked when they cut and paste.

Even I was a little scared of the sorting hat. In its slithery disgustingness, it was just tall enough to make a 3-year-old and a 57-year-old squirm, especially when it  began to talk.  It issued its proclamations in a deep, raspy voice, like something that had just come back from the crypt. In the Harry Potter books, the sorting hat organizes kids like Harry and Hermione and Rupert into schools. Here it was just driving kids out of the art room.

“Grandma,” my granddaughter said. “Make that hat go away.” Indeed.

Hoping no one was watching, I took the stupid sorting hat and hid it as far away from the craft table as I possibly could — behind the used glue containers and dried up paint.

Was this STEM? No way.

But while I may be no science teacher, my granddaughter now knows something important about me. I’m a helluva good hat thief.

 

 

KIND OF A THRILLER: Why Michael Jackson Special Kept Us Rapt And Disgusted

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Last Sunday, Hal and I watched the two-part documentary about Michael Jackson, Leaving Neverland, in one salacious stretch. I’m not sure which was worse: that we cozied up to a National Enquirer-worthy story or that we were privy to interviews that were as much therapy sessions as entertainment.

When I was younger, I used to love tearjerkers where the main character died of cancer, never realizing they’d be ideal preparation for adulthood, which for me included widowhood at age 39. I’m not sure why we watched the Jackson special. It’s not like I needed some kind of refresher on the idea that when a pedophile knocks, you don’t let him in.

The only good thing, is that for me Michael Jackson is no longer an enigma. Now he’s just a pedophiliac jerk. That shouldn’t have been a surprise. Anyone who could have carried the actor who played Webster around like a pocket pup probably had his issues.

Was it really such a shock? The Penguin had a cane and an eyepatch. The Joker had green hair. Could we really not have known that someone who covered his face with a mask and wore one glove was some kind of long-lost villain from the Batman cartoons? In retrospect, “I’m Bad; I’m Bad” sounds less like a song and more like a character description.

I’m still reeling that no one, namely me, figured it out in the 90s when Jackson was first accused. Adults with breathy, high-pitched voices who invite children for sleepovers after throwing money at their families are obviously up to no good.

Maybe it was just a more innocent time when people wanted to think that a big star, out of sheer goodness, would pluck downtrodden boys out of obscurity and anoint them as his special friends. And then they’d sue him and try to fleece him.

It’s hard to believe we really were that stupid. In watching the program as raptly as I did, maybe I was reliving my own parenthood of two boys who lost their dad young. How might I have reacted if someone with money, power, and the promise of paternal care, benighted as it was, had swooped in to save them, to save me? Maybe watching the program was exactly what I needed to feel superior to the moms who folded. I could sit back from the moral authority of my couch and the #metoo movement and proclaim myself a keener judge of character, a better parent.

Could I, though? When my boys were in elementary school, they had an unattached tennis teacher who regularly asked me if he could take them to McDonald’s in one of his six fancy souped-up sports cars. (It was the promise of cheeseburgers and Happy Meal toys that would have done it for my kids, not the rides in a Maserati.) While this man’s intentions may have been good, I always said no. But at the time, I felt bad about my refusal, thinking it was impolite. But somehow I continued to allow this man to teach my kids tennis. If something bad was going to happen to my boys in his car, it could just as easily happened when he was alone with them on a tennis court.

Oddly enough,  I never said anything about his invitations to the management at the clubs where he taught. I probably should have. And maybe in 2001, they would have talked about me behind my back. Can you imagine? Here was this nice guy who was just asking to take boys without a dad out for a hamburger…

That’s probably not what they would say now.

IN THE ZONE AT SKYZONE

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Sunday, we paid for about 40 minutes too many. That’s because I told my husband that my granddaughter needed a full hour, not a half hour, of time at Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park. This is the same spirit of overkill that moves me to have two quarts of leftover chicken soup at the holidays. Truly, sometimes people are better off with less.

That was the case with my granddaughter anyway. She didn’t need an hour to decide that she should back off when pushing piranhas, aka older kids, infiltrated and wrought mayhem in the toddler trampoline area. It reminded me of the chaos that ensues when I take my 23-pound mutt to the small dog park and there’s a bull mastiff there.

My first instinct was to swoop in and save my granddaughter from the elementary school marauders. But I stood back. I’ve made my own kids anxious enough for more than 25 years; surely I don’t need to inflict my neuroses on another generation.

Skyzone, an indoor trampoline park, seems like a more raucous version of a Bounce class that I sometimes take at my gym on Thursday mornings. Raucous is right. Ultimately, there were as many as 10 non-toddler sized people in the area where my granddaughter was jumping. As best she could, she shied away from the bruisers and brutes, including 10-year-olds who moved like speeding bumper cars between mats, happy to take down an unsuspecting three-year-old.

Parents and grandparents have a defined role at Skyzone. They’re there to watch and wave, not jump– or jump in. Incidentally, another useful thing that grandparents can do at Skyzone is run after granddaughters who move with startling and unexpected efficiency between areas of the ginormous gym.

In keeping with the expedited jumping plan she’d devised, my granddaughter dashed over to the foam block pit. There, she and another under-4 engaged in the Sisyphean task of throwing Styrofoam blocks in and out of a pit, counting blocks (or throws) out loud as they went.

After about 10 intense minutes in the pit, my granddaughter wanted out, and the next logical distraction she chose was a vending machine that allowed kids to use a metal hook to grab seedy-looking toys.

Play until you win, the sign on the machine said. It sounded scarily like a lottery for toddlers.

“I want a ball,” my granddaughter told us. To be clear, Grandma and Grandpa often say yes even when they know it’d be better to say no.

Apparently with this machine, you could take as many grabs as you needed to “win” a ball as long as you were willing to fork over $5 in tokens.

This is just what I wanted to do: pay $5 for a ball that would have cost 99 cents at Target. My granddaughter stared at us with a look that communicated stark need, the same one I get when the new Nordstrom’s catalog comes in the mail. And what a grandparent does in this heartrending instant is comply, right?

My husband and I looked at each other.

“This is a good time for you to learn the value of a dollar,” my husband said to my granddaughter who didn’t look especially convinced. “We are going to continue to say no even if you choose to get upset,” my husband continued. Who was this man I barely recognized? In grandfather-hood, he’d finally grown a pair of balls.

The truth is one of the reasons we were at Skyzone to begin with is that my granddaughter usually makes our job easy. She listens to us. She can be convinced to move on from a display of glittery pocketbooks — that was last weekend in Nordstrom’s– or from this Sunday’s ball-hawking vending machine. At 11:30, at my suggestion she gave up on the ball for good and settled for a $2.37 bag of popcorn. I know, I know. It was kind of close to lunchtime. But we’re grandparents after all.

When I was a kid, I used to watch old home movies of myself at age 3 with my grandfather at a Brooklyn amusement park called Buddy’s. My dad both filmed and watched me as my grandpa sat on a bench with a cane and a cigar. As I strap my granddaughter into her car seat, it’s hard for me to believe I’m only a few years younger than my dad’s father was at Buddy’s. I smile. I wave. I give my opinion sometimes, even when it’s not wanted. Why not? Even if I don’t have my own grippy socks for Skyzone, I’m not ready to be banished to the bench.

SHINGLES SUCK AND OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS ON AGING

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Some of my father’s wrongheaded convictions have, oddly enough, turned out to be right. It was my dad who insisted that my mom needed to go to the hospital this weekend.

“They’re going to the ER for a rash?” my sister asked. It was easy for her to be incredulous about the whole thing from Ohio. I was having an equally hard time with the concept in Manhattan where my husband and I had just lucked into a spot and were heading into Artexpo.

We got into the car and turned back to New Jersey.

Before this Sunday at noon, I never realized that in the pantheon of rashes, it’s always smart to root for an allergic one. A histamine rash resolves with Benadryl, the assisted living nurse told me over the phone, and that’s a good thing. But your mother’s rash, it’s just getting worse. Of course it was.

I didn’t hear much of what the nurse said next until she got to the word hospital. Let’s just say that if you’re almost 82 years old and you have a rash that doesn’t go away and it’s a Sunday, they call an ambulance.

I have nothing against ambulances, but this was the first beautiful day of spring, and when I spoke to my mother the day before, she had insisted her rash was nothing, the result of sleeping on the tiny crack that separates my parents’ twin king bed. It was a hopeful but fictitious explanation.

When we convened at the ER about an hour later, my husband, my mother, my dad and I learned that my mom now has her third case of shingles in less than three years. This is ridiculous. Until my mother was diagnosed, I didn’t even know this was a possibility. It’s like winning the misfortune lottery.

Shingles suck. And the worst thing is my mother was just coming up on the six-month mark since her last outbreak. That meant she might have actually been able to get the new shingles vaccine and avoided this latest fiasco, um I mean, case.

Now my mom is in quarantine at her assisted living place, which means she can’t go even go to the dining room for meals. Everything is coming to her, including her food, her doctors and my son and me.

I used to say I wanted to live to be 120. As of today, I’d like to amend that. I’d still like to live to be 120 but only if I could have the mind and body I had at 40. Hell, I’d even take the mind and body I have at 57, though, to be honest, I wish I looked better in a bikini.

IN THE PRESENCE OF GENIUS: What Happens When Grandma And Grandpa Go To The Mall

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

At 3 and a half, my granddaughter has the surgical skills of Christian Barnard. Yesterday, my husband and I took her to Color Me Mine, a place I haven’t thought about, let alone set foot in, for about ten years.

Following the extremely prohibitive rules, we each picked our measly five paints — even the Cinderella figurine warrants no more than that unless you pay extra. The power broker, aka the distributor of the paint, then walked over with a bottle the size of an eye dropper. “This is for the really hard-to-get spots like the eyes,” she said. I sized up the thing. It was kept closed by a pin tiny enough for Thumbelina who, in a cruel twist of fate, was not represented anywhere in the store.

My granddaughter grabbed the minute bottle, negotiated the tiny pin, and promptly squeezed out the paint. Then she put the Tiny Toons-sized dropper back in. Did I mention she is 3 and a half years old? This was something that I would have had trouble with and, incidentally, eventually did. “Did you just see that?” I asked my husband who was busy putting the required three coats of paint on the monkey figure he’d chosen; he was so transported by it, he might as well have been painting in Arles, not Menlo Park. He looked up. “Hmm?” was all he said. Ok. Our granddaughter was clearly some kind of incredibly gifted magician, or at the very least a genius, and my husband was so busy painting his monkey that he hadn’t even noticed. “Look what she’s able to do,” I said.

Maybe this wasn’t as big a deal as I assumed. When we picked her up to go to the mall, my granddaughter had been sitting on the floor of her family room competently painting her sliver-sized toenails. I have four sons, and I had never seen anything quite like it. Ok. I admit it. I’m 57 and like a lumberjack with a bottle of nail polish. If you want to know the truth, I don’t even like cutting my own food. Maybe that’s why I never expected this tiny little child to have the motor skills of Albrecht Durer, whose etchings hang in the Met.

Thinking about what this might mean, I couldn’t even move forward with my lion figurine. Would she be a famous artist? An engineer? A dentist like both her grandparents on the other side?

When my oldest son was a baby and my uncle observed him putting together Donald Duck puzzles, he said, “Maybe he’ll be the first Jewish president.” Yeah right. That didn’t happen.

I know, I know. Everybody thinks the next generation is going to be wonderful: with futures unwritten, there are limitless possibilities. I love how I get little glimpses of the person my granddaughter may become. She loves her science picture books? She’s surely a future bio major. She can recite Chick A Boom, Chick A Boom by heart? That’s good for an orator. As I sat in awe with my lion, which was still full of unpainted white spots, my granddaughter turned to me.

“Need me to help you, Grandma?” Yes, darling. What I didn’t say is she already had.

WHO’S UP FOR A HIGH SCHOOL REUNION? Unfortunately, 100 people I don’t know very well…

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My ambivalence grows. The woman who’s in charge of my 40th high school reunion has been using a special page on Facebook to list the names of the people planning to attend. Now she’s up to the F’s, and it’s fair to say that none of the people on the list were my friends. One woman is a medium, and I think she’s coming mostly because she has a book to sell. She’s someone I’d like to speak with, if only to use the three hours of the event to commune with my late husband. But really with the exception of my friend Barbara, who was a G, there is no one I’m dying to see.

Confession: I even used to be afraid of some of the boys on the list when they ended up in my gym class. They’re men now — at least I assume they are — and I expect they won’t throw volleyballs at me when they see me. Let’s hope.

In a move that is destined to jeopardize whatever social clout I never had, I am dragging my second husband with me to my reunion. Bad move, I know. The reality is I want there to be someone in that room, other than Barbara, who recognizes that I am not the social clod I was in high school.

Hal can talk to anyone and probably will. Undoubtedly, he’ll come home with the names of three or four people he’d like to have dinner with. And because most of the people coming live within 30 miles of my high school, including me, we’ll probably do it.

I have been analyzing why I am so desperate to go. Maybe it’s because I want to say a permanent adios to my high school persona. She got me where I wanted to go but also made sure I didn’t have a lot of fun while I was doing it. I never had a drink in high school. I was lucky to squeak out a last-minute invitation to the prom from a boy I could speak to about Macbeth but had no desire to kiss.

Back then I was not at the peak of my powers interpersonally. I was so desperate to be at the top of my class that I couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t in that decile with me was worth knowing. Defense mechanism, anyone?

I remember wanting to have a conversation with the boy I had a perennial crush on — surprise: he’s not coming to the reunion — about how a large bus could physically manage to make a turn around a sharp corner. Face it. Nobody in high school wants to discuss things like that. Very few people in my adult life want to do it either, except maybe my niece who’s a physics major at Yale.

It has been almost 40 years since graduation, and I remember very little about that day. But something recently made the rounds on Facebook as a fond “remember when”. One of my classmates, hoping to inject some mirth into a somber ceremony, had apparently released mice into the auditorium during graduation. Yes, it was the boneheaded move of an 18-year-old jerk. So why did it bother me now that at the time I didn’t even know about it? Or even worse, that if I had known, I probably would have disapproved.

The thing is, I want to prove to the people who do show up that I’m different. No, that’s not it. I want to prove it to myself. For years I have been telling a good friend who I exercise with to take pity on me when we run together. After all, I was the high school newspaper editor, not a cheerleader. But the dirty secret is I wanted to be a cheerleader, too. A non-cartwheel doing one, but still.

Five years after graduation, I was riding the bus to the city to get to my first job. I ended up sitting with one of the “popular girls,” and I discovered she had a lot to say. She even invited me to a Rod Stewart concert with her and her brothers and I went.

And in the end that’s why I’m anxious to go to the reunion: to meet the cheerleader I probably didn’t know who wanted to be the high school newspaper editor I was. I bet we have a fantastic conversation.

MEANINGFUL MATZOH: My Sunday Morning Volunteering At Lifetown

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

No more rearview window humanitarianism for me. For five years, I had watched my son volunteer with”differently abled” children at the Friendship Circle from the safety of the front seat of my car. I pulled away every Sunday morning while he did the heavy lifting. It was time to stop pretending I was a good person because of my close genetic link to a former volunteer.

Last Sunday, a good three weeks before Passover, my friend Lisa invited me to volunteer with her at a matzoh-making event at Lifetown, the new Friendship Circle headquarters right off Route 10, less than 10 miles from where I used to do drop off. Heading over, I decided to focus on something I could deal with, that I didn’t know exactly where I was going. This was preferable to my other concern, that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

Lisa has been talking about Lifetown for weeks.  Many Sundays, she volunteers there with autistic children and teens, and it’s where her son Harry now has a career.  Let me just put it out there.  Lifetown is a funny name. It sounds just enough like the local fitness center Lifetime so that when you go, most people will believe you’re headed to the gym. But as Lisa said being at Lifetown offers a very different kind of endorphin rush.

I was afraid I would not get that kind of rush or any rush at all, other than one that would lead me right out the door. Cancel that. I was afraid period.  Years ago, my son had told me about a story about something that happened when he was volunteering for the Friendship Circle.   The boy he was working with — known then as his “special friend;” there may be more politically correct nomenclature now– began doing something decidedly un-special:  hurling pretzels across the room. By the time this happened, my son had been exceptionally well trained by the Friendship Circle. Flying pretzels did not faze him. Little did.  I’d done nothing to prepare for my volunteer hours Sunday but go to Starbucks and drink coffee.  I wasn’t ready.  This kind of work, I imagine, is like changing a ceiling lightbulb without a step-stool. I could easily end up hanging by an arm.

Let me just report that the Lifetown complex, and it is a complex,  was nothing like what I expected. It’s a great example of what can happen when lots of money gets together with love and commitment.

The Friendship Circle’s new home is an amazing facility;  under construction are a handicapped-accessible pool, rooms specially outfitted for sensory stimulation, and touch tanks.  A gym with equipment for those with physical challenges is already up and running. One day soon, there will even be an opportunity for young adults with special needs to have real work experiences in a specially constructed town with a bookstore, hair salon, pet and grocery stores and a bank. It’s Mr Rogers Neighborhood on steroids.  But this is no place for Henrietta Pussycat. Nor, when I walked in, was I sure it was for me.

I’m not going to lie.  Being there was not easy. I had tears in my eyes a lot of the time especially as I watched Lisa’s grown son working with the child who’d been assigned to him. I’ve known Harry since he was a toddler playing with my own boys. To see him navigating his post-college professional world in such a meaningful way was beyond moving.

Lisa had been assigned to D., a preteen who, according to the program, was labeled high functioning. My job was to follow them through mundane matzoh tasks. Pounding.  Rolling.  Screaming in excitement.  Lisa and I  were kind of extraneous.  D. worked the room.

The first thing D. said to me when we met me was “I like your shoes.” And like the chump that I am, I deflected her compliment.  “Oh, well, these have rubber soles and they’re easy to wear,” I said.  Why did I say that?  Did I really think she would care about rubber soles?  Was I planning to help roll matzoh dough or run a marathon?   “They’re pretty,” she said, but then she moved past me, happy to be with the friends she sees every week.

In spite of her enthusiasm, she came with the saddest story of all.  She is sister to E., a younger, non-verbal Lifetown member for whom the raucous nature of the matzoh room proved too much.  Lisa and I volunteered to watch him to give his recently widowed mom a break.  Yes, that’s right. The mom was widowed.  It wasn’t enough that she had two children with special needs to care for, one with severe autism.  Her husband had to die of cancer, too.  As I watched Lisa speak calmly to E., I was in awe.  But the music grew louder, and E. reached for her arm and began to head butt it.  She looked at me.  “We may be in over our heads,” was all she said.

Driving away had been easy years ago.  But even then I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do.

PARENTING THE PARENTS: Who’s In Charge Now?

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Today I emptied a storage unit, signed a sale contract over e-doc, and oversaw an estimate on the imminent transfer of two step-stools, 15 pots, one couch, seven tables, and an easy chair. These sundry items will move from my parents’ apartment to the homes of my four grown sons. Somehow, almost imperceptibly, I moved up the responsibility chain. Odd isn’t it that at age 57, I had wanted nothing more than to stay put.

In the past, I would have been fighting to advance. When my son was born 28 years ago, I remember being upset because in the family line-up, nothing seemed to change. Even though I now had someone to diaper, it was like I was relegated to being the sitcom kid forever.

My grandmother still got to be called “Grandma Rose”. My mother continued to behave like a benevolent despot around the holidays, assigning the making of jello molds and mandelbrot. She had no compunction about airing her displeasure when I insisted that, at a mere 10 months, my son give up his bottle and drink from a stupid plastic cup.

With my husband working about 100 hours a week, my dad prevailed over the burnt-out bulbs and recalcitrant outlets in my tiny new house. When we went somewhere together, my parents drove. I sat in the back next to my son in his car seat. Touché. For a long time if I had a question, any question at all, I was convinced my parents had the answer. And often they did. Because my parents were so competent and so forceful, I stayed everybody’s little girl.

At some point, weren’t we all supposed to catapult forward a generation? In retrospect, I was way more anxious than I should have been for the shift to occur. And now that it has, it is uncomfortably seismic.

Today my parents mostly watched the dismantling of their last owned home, occasionally interjecting some unhelpful nugget. I refer specifically to my dad’s conviction that anything affixed to the wall like the television sets was a fixture and couldn’t be moved. He argued for ten minutes that a corner table that fit perfectly into the corner had to stay where it was because it was part of the apartment. What he was really saying is that he was part of the apartment.

Earlier that day in the storage unit, I’d found the tiny bulb boxes that he’d labeled with the names of every lamp they belonged to. There was the extra large water bottle in that unit that they’d bought just in case the water in the building was ever shut down again, like it had been during three days in a storm. My father doesn’t label things anymore. He can barely use his cellphone.

Later when we were nearly done, my dad said “You wouldn’t have to worry about any of this if we had just stayed here.” Well, yes. And rather gratuitously my mother reminded him, “Our daughters made us do this”. Why were they so clear on this point and yet couldn’t remember not to double pay their rent in the assisted living?

It’s strange how much I miss being the daughter that my parents always worried about. I forget what that was like now that I have to worry about them.

DIETING FOR DUMMIES

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I have been married to Hal for almost sixteen years, and I have been trying to get him to eat right for fifteen and a half of them. While I love my husband, we have had an ongoing battle about why the 200 calories in a pretzel are not equal to the 200 calories in an avocado.

This is why I was shocked when he told me he had signed up for a prepared diet food delivery system. I never asked to stop serving as his unofficial nutritional guru. In fact, I kind of liked it.

Was this service going to laugh about his joke about liking a little tea with his sugar?

Would they pack him a Tupperware container lunch with a piece of fresh salmon and broccoli? I doubt it.

Next I imagined he’d be getting into bed with Jenny Craig who, incidentally, now refers to herself as Jenny in all lowercase letters. Enough with the familiarity. I didn’t want her in my bedroom, to say nothing of my kitchen.

This wasn’t Hal’s first go at a nutritional remake. Since 2003, we have gone through the Moosewood Cookbook phase, the private chef shared with our neighbors’ period, and the infamous plastic bag diet, which was both environmentally unsound and nutritionally unsatisfying. It involved my putting small quantities of nuts or cheese or raisins into tiny packages and telling Hal that was all he could eat between meals.

A week ago, the giant box of food arrived, and Hal was really excited. Usually when the door opens and there’s a package behind it, it’s got my name and Nordstrom’s on it. He ripped into the box, conveniently ignoring the one plastic envelope that said, “Open Me First.” Clearly this was shaping up to be a rousing success.

By the time he was done, all the packages of chemically modified meals were hopelessly mixed up. He decided it didn’t matter. If he could just eat five things in the packages every day, he told me, the weight would come off.

Initially I was not a supportive spouse. I had met the enemy, and it was packaged chili with beans.

“The one thing all the nutritionists say is that you should eat fresh, not out of packages,” I told Hal. Did I really say that out loud? Yeah, I did.

In a shining example of untruth in advertising, the first week of the program was called Fresh Start. Really? It might have been a start. But how could anything that came through the mail encased in plastic claim to be fresh? I consoled myself. At least I was spending less at the supermarket.

It all came to a halt last night when Hal faced Week Two.

“What do I do about the special shakes? I’m not sure where they fit in,” Hal said. It occurred to me that Hal was becoming unduly attached to these drinks which weren’t part of any discernible food group.

That was the dawn of the Evening of Befuddlement, wherein two grownups with masters’ degrees couldn’t figure out the nuances of the food system vocabulary. We even waited 20 minutes to get a weight counselor on the phone who kept admonishing us to read the tiny little book. I didn’t want to read the tiny little book unless it was a page turner by Lianne Moriarity or Harlan Coben.

No such luck. The book had the scintillating title of Daily Tracker and Grocery Guide.

The thing was incomprehensible. There were addition signs around words like PowerFuels and SmartCarbs. Then there were the puzzling FlexMeals; Hal was allotted six a week.

A Flex Meal was a real (very small) meal, and Hal could add one diet food packet to whatever he chose to eat. This could be actual fiber or protein. Oh, excuse me; I mean PowerFuel, as in one egg, a piece of turkey bacon or a slice of cheese. In other words, real food. But at first, only occasionally. All Flex meant was that the ubiquitous packets continued to star in the new eating “program”. What a shocker.

As we paged through the book, something struck me when we got to the infamous Grocery Guide.

“This is just a printed list of the things I buy every week at the store,” I said.

For fifteen years I have been going about it all wrong. I should have marketed myself, given my food packages for Hal fancy one-word names like CarrotCarton or BroccoliBox.

But for now, I will be his packaged diet food cheerleader. When he can’t find his glasses, I will read him the insanely small print on the packages, so he knows precisely how long to put them in the microwave.

If this food plan turns eating into an exercise in cutting through plastic, so be it. But there’s no one for me to eat with now because Hal’s not really eating. He stands at the counter, and he’s done in less time than it takes to microwave his dinner. I admire his discipline. But I suspect good conversation around the table may be better for his health.

I can’t be too angry at the program. The proof is in the results. After one week Hal is down six pounds.