Escalus, Shmescalus

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
            --- Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)

      When I was a younger lad in my early twenties, I gave up wondering about my weight. (In fact, I even switched from rye-and-ginger to beer in the vain hope of gaining a few pounds, as so many of my friends and colleagues had, shall we say, found excess in such changes.) Tonight, er, this morning I actually dared step on a scale for the first time in some years and the result was disappointing, sadly a little too close to my own general life experience: all those years, all that misbehaviour, and I'm no different than I was when last I measured myself. Fully clothed, shy of shoes, I still came in at about eight-and-a-half stone, or 119 pounds. Supposedly "scientific" context: that chalks me in as being at least twenty pounds underweight by even the most conservative standards. Comical context: that means I've almost gained four pounds for every year I've been alive, which is just short of the five pounds my father's purportedly gained for every year he's been married to my mother.

      Why am I writing about this here? It's certainly not as if I'm proud of this fact. But I guess it's the somewhat depressing realization of the truth of the old saw, that the more things change, the more things remain the same. "Your dad used to be skinny, just like you," my relatives would say, smugly assuming I'd turn out exactly as my father. Family members always want desperately to believe in patterns of repetition. "Well, no," I always used to tell them: "I was always more like [my] great-grandpa," who went to his grave a rail despite having done all those things that are supposedly the emblems of ill-health and physical-expansion. So here I am, back on the corner again, still what I was twelve or thirteen years ago, certainly older now and less agile and definitely more cynical, but still stuck looking like Woody Allen's distant, but unspectacled, cousin. My friend and bartender Michael likes to say, "You can't change a good thing," a phrase I'd like to believe but which Coca-Cola disproved lo-those-years-ago. The Ecclesiastical ironies of this are all too clear: so much has changed, and yet so little has changed. My wittier friends will say that this just proves what they've said for some time, that à la Dorian Gray I must have a painting in an attic somewhere. Pardon my pessimism, though, if I stew on the thought that it hardly seems to matter what happens or what I do, I'm stuck in conditions that govern me more than I govern them. If there's a note of exasperation there, so be it. Then again, maybe this is fate's snarky way of preserving that lean and hungry look that could unsettle even Caesar. Never underestimate the little guy, the saying goes: chances are, he wants it more than you. Who knows. No Cassius, I, but certainly no Ally McBeal, either-- but yet why do I have these words, from Captain John Bourke on Crazy Horse, chiming in my head:

I saw before me a man who looked quite young, not over thirty years old, five feet eight inches in height, lithe and sinewy, with a scar in the face. The expression of his countenance was one of quiet dignity, but morose, dogged, tenacious, and melancholy. He behaved with stolidity, like a man who realized that he had to give in to fate, but would not do so as sullenly as possible...

Hmmmm..... As Portia says, "But we'll outface them and outswear them, too." Not sure about the quiet dignity, though.... Key words, there, my people: "not do so as sullenly as possible." I prefer "spitefully." Besides, I'm reminded, the slightness of some attributes can emphasize the extra-proportionality of others. As the palm said to the oak tree, "If you think those are impressive, you should take a look at these suckers!" Perhaps the scales of situation have their wisdom in the last. After all, the ladies *just love* a man with an impressively large vocabulary.