A CHOCOLATE A DAY DOES NOT KEEP THE POUNDS AWAY

 

Hello readers.  I’m Beatrice Bell or Bea as my friends call me.  I don’t have to tell those of you who follow our Grandmothers, Incorporated adventure series that my friends and I are detectives.  I ran across something a few weeks ago that couldn’t help but challenge me to sniff out the truth.

Like many people, I wouldn’t mind losing a few pounds.  So, when I first heard that chocolate might be good for weight loss, my ears perked up.  The story was all over the news and the internet.  Happy day!  I didn’t waste my time or taste buds on cheap chocolate.  For a week I ate the good, expensive stuff.  My reasoning was that the quality of the chocolate would probably speed up my weight loss.

My detective sense started to tingle when a little known heredity gene kicked in.  My grandmother called it ‘mother wit’; you may know it as common sense.  Eat chocolate every day and lose weight faster?  Really?  There was another clue that made me suspicious.  When I put on my favorite pair of jeans I couldn’t zip them up!  I knew it was time to investigate this eat chocolate and lose    weight claim because something wasn’t right.

I was reading the Wall Street Journal (yes, I do that every once in a while) and I ran across a story about a science journalist named John Bohannan.  It seems this Bohannan, was a sort of watch dog of other scientist.  With the help of fellow colleagues he rigged a “scientific” study, wrote a paper about chocolate being a weight-loss accelerator and sent it to science journals for publication to see if anybody would challenge the study.

The next thing you know, nearly every media outlet you can name was reporting the story without checking the facts.  According to the article I read, most reporters didn’t challenge a single word of the study.  They didn’t even Google the “German Science Institute” that supposedly did the study.  If they had they would have found that it was phony.  It doesn’t exist!

I’ve managed to lose the five pounds I gained during my week-long chocolate diet.  Like I always say:  if it sounds too good to be true...” 

Thanks Wall Street Journal for pointing out the hoax, but being the crack investigator that I am, I already had it figured out.

STRANGE PRIORITIES

     I paid a visit to a friend, an old lady who recently turned 95 years old.  She said to me, "Connie, I never thought I would end up like this."  She lives in a nursing home.  I'm Connie Palmer and I have know Miss Lydia since I was a little girl.  She and her husband never had children and since I found out she was in a facility, I make it my business to check on her.

     When she first went to the nursing home, it was clean, comfortable and full of seemingly caring and competent people.  I later learned that new management took over.  They began to cut corners on patient care.  They laid off aides and nurses and removed some of the management staff.  In other words, they made big changes for the worse.

     The makeup of the aide staff seemed to change every week.  The low morale meant that they constantly argued among themselves, often in the halls where the patients could hear.  The food was inedible.  There were shortages of gowns and towels, and medical equipment was so inadequate that patients who needed special help waited for hours.

     On that particular day, I found Miss Lydia in her room crying softly as she sat in her wheel chair.  By this time, she had grown feeble and requirement assistance for most of her needs.  The next day, I made new arrangements for Miss Lydia.

     I know you're asking what this has got to do with me, the reader.  Just this:  the cost-cutting decisions of that facility were made on a profit basis.  I directed my anger from the aides to administrators and government regulators.  The aides were expected to give basic care--duties that were often distasteful to them and demeaning to the patients--for paltry pay.  No wonder staff turn-over  was mind boggling.

     We say we respect our elders, just as we give lip service to the preciousness of our children.  Yet, workers who care for both children and the elderly are sadly underpaid.

     I enjoy a good burger as much as the next person, but if i were going to fight for anyone's pay to be raised, it wouldn't be for fast food workers, but for those workers who take care of our most precious resources, our children and the elderly.  Let's get our priorities straight.

WE'RE GOING ON A STAKEOUT

     As sure as my name is Fanny Mae Collier I know that one of these days my daughter-in-law, Hattie, is going to get herself in a mess she can't get out of.

     One reason it's bound to happen is those nutty friends of hers, Bea Bell and Connie Palmer.  Now, Connie ain't so bad, but if you've been following our adventures in the books, Grandmothers, Incorporated, Saving Sin City, and Something's Wrong with Miss Zelda you know that Bea's got the crazy notion that she's a detective.  The lunatic imagines she sees a crime in anything that's just a little off-kilter.  Bea even went and got a private investigator's license.

     The point is Hattie thinks she has to prove that she's just as good a detective as Bea.  private detective--ha!  If you ask me, two things neither one of them know about is privacy or detecting.   

When Hattie decided to take on a "case" for a friend, I had no intention of getting involved but, you guessed it, the fool drags me in it.

     The scandalous affair that Hattie discovers will either establish her as a bona fide detective or blow up in her face.  To see how it all works out, come to our play, Stakeout.  Directed by Deborah Asante, Stakeout will be coming to the annual Indy Fringe Theater Festival in August, 2014.

     This is Fanny Collier and I'll see you at the Fringe.

Brain Fart by Miss Fanny: Growing Old Can be Fun

The other day my great-grandson was at my house and I was helping him with his homework when suddenly he looked up at me and said “Granny, I don’t want to grow old.”

What he said didn’t take me by surprise.  I’ve heard people say that before. What bothered me this time was that it was someone in my family speaking those words, and I took it as a personal insult because I’m old and proud of it.

I was curious about why the boy would say what he did, and asked him about it.  Do you know what he told me?  “If I grow old then I’m going to die.”

I couldn’t argue with that, but I had to give the little guy a reality check, so I told him:  “If you don’t grow old, that means you’re going to die young.”  That got his attention.  

It’s a sentiment I use often when I hear folks talking about not wanting to grow old.  It seems to me that anybody ought to be grateful if they reach “old age”, whatever that happens to be.  Everyday somebody doesn’t’ make it.  Every day, maybe every hour, somebody doesn’t wake up in the morning.  Others don’t live to go to bed that night. I asked my great-grandson did he want to be one of those. Of course he said no, so I told him to stop that foolishness and be grateful for everyday that’s given to him walk the earth.  We all ought to be grateful, but we live in a country that worships youth and looks at aging as something to fear instead of something to respect.

What’s wrong with this country anyway?  It’s not like that in other countries that have been around much longer. Maybe the fact that the United States is a young country is the reason that it worships youth so much.  Maybe it hasn’t been around long enough to have learned to respect age. Shoot, I live in a city that tore down its basketball arena because it was twenty-five years old.  Yet, I bet the same folks that made that decision will travel across the ocean to take pictures of ancient monuments and that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If folks can respect aged buildings, why not aged people?

You’ve got to be tough to grow old in America. It ain’t easy.  Older folks are often treated like children, or too often we’re the object of ridicule and bad jokes. The contributions that we have made to this society can be overlooked or unappreciated.  Still I ’m thank God that I’m old. I’m in my eighties now and a lot of my friends didn’t make it this far. 

As we grow older we should gain more wisdom and more insight. I say should because unfortunately I’ve met some older folks who are as dumb as a box of rocks. I take that as being heredity.  I guess nothing can help that.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I do know that as I aged my confidence in myself increased.  What used to be so important I discovered didn’t matter anymore and I certainly stopped trying to please others.

Yep, I’m enjoying this growing old thing.  Of course, I’m still pretty healthy.  I’m still mobile and independent.  I might not feel his way if I wasn’t.

The day might come that all of these good things might not be so good anymore.  Yet I can’t let what might happen tomorrow stop me from living the best life I can today.  I’m an old lady and I’m loving it!  Go muse on that.