A long time ago, in an AA meeting far away, a friend of mine
took a peek at the leather label on the waistband of my 501
Levis.
“Thirty-one!” he exclaimed. “I can’t remember when I had a
thirty-one-inch waistline.”
Obviously, I can. But I assure you, it’s waisting away. I give
up ground grudgingly, inch by inch.
FOR YEARS AND YEARS, I wore thirty-ones and thirty-twos. That
measurement survived a bilateral nephrectomy (both my diseased
kidneys removed) that resulted in a part of my stomach pooching
out, a kidney transplant, years of hard action and rough exercise
(“Larry, you’re looking positively brawny,” said another friend at
one point, a year after I had taken up tennis), and parenthood.
Granted, in one dimension, height, I have been shrinking
steadily for years. Take prednisone every day for 30 years, as I
have, and the bones soften up. I am now a smidge shorter than my
younger son’s godmother, who came over for a visit last week and
compared herself to my sprouting older son, proclaiming her stature
as five feet six.
Gravity works its wonders, year by year. A picture stuck to our
refrigerator shows me at our younger son’s christening in 2002. I
am wearing a luxurious pair of wide wale corduroy trousers bought
from the late J. Peterman catalog, a skimpy size 32. My hair is
brown, too.
Within three years, I was being congratulated by a new friend of
ours at the kids’ taekwondo school, who complimented me on my luck
at having such a young wife at my age.
I always did say Sally would look as good at 50 as she did at
30, and I was right.
FAST FORWARD TO MY DISCHARGE from my last emergency
hospitalization. I pulled off the hospital gown and got out my
clothes, not seen or worn for a week, and failed by six inches to
be able to fasten the waist button of the trousers. The hospital
had bollixed up my dialysis, given me peritonitis, and run a
succession of IV infusions. I had packed on nearly 40 pounds of
fluid weight.
I went home in sweat pants.
Over the next week, under my own care on home dialysis, I peeled
off the excess fluid at the rate of about five pounds a day. I had
had Sally buy me a pair of Dockers in waist size 40, which I
expected to wear for no more than that week, and indeed I
didn’t.
But I never have gotten back to my former stable size, which, in
later years, I had surrendered to a 34 — and I had hated doing
that.
Now, I find, Dockers does not make pants in 35-inch waist sizes
— only even increments of two. So I have two pair of size 36
stay-press Dockers, which I intend wearing only so long as I wait
for a kidney transplant — and a closet full of 34s, many of them
very nice, which have been relegated to the “someday” category.
Darn.
