Trading Legs With a Crane

My father was a slender man, so I guess it was preordained that I would be too. Dad was six feet tall and I don’t think ever weighed over 150 pounds. As a plumber he set the soil pipe for new homes. His work was demanding and physical. I don’t know his body fat composition, but he was muscular. I was six feet two inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. Not that I complained. That is, not until slender quickly became “skinny,” a label that didn’t sound as good to me. I struggled with body image the more I was called skinny, constantly worrying about being too thin. Or more precisely, looking too thin.
As a teenager, I ate everything in sight in order to gain weight. My favorite foods to fatten me up were chocolate malted milk shakes and all the baked goods my mother made – chocolate chip cookies, pies, cakes and the best orange rolls in the country. It didn’t work.
When I got to college nothing had changed—I was still skinny. I was always on the lookout for a way to fill out my narrow frame. Soon after I started college, I joined a fraternity and met two chapter brothers, John Kettlewell and Floyd Martin, who liked to lift weights. I hadn’t thought of this technique to put on the pounds, trying instead to eat my way out of skinny. But this might work, I thought to myself. So I began working out with my new friends. John and Floyd could lift more weight than I could, which hurt my ego a little, but what mattered was that it worked. I gained some muscle, and moved back to the slender category.
After graduating in 1962 from Arizona State University, I left Phoenix and moved to Sacramento to start my first job. I was single and living with a roommate, a guy named Bill Murrell. One afternoon, Mike, a friend of Bill’s, stopped in for a visit. He walked past me on his way to the front door--I was outside washing my car, dressed in a bathing suit. I had gained enough to hit “slender” again, or so I thought, but as he strode to the front door he said, “Looks like you traded legs with a crane and lost your ass in the bargain!” I certainly didn’t appreciate the joke. It made me feel like less of a man.
Fast forward to 1978. I was working as HR manager for Esso Chemical Canada in Toronto, and during my tenure there I ran across a program offered by the National Training Lab entitled The Human Interaction Laboratory. It was advertised as a forum to experiment with various behaviors and draw out honest feedback from a group of attendees. Well, I thought, this would be interesting from both a personal and professional perspective, so I enrolled.
The Human Interaction Laboratory was a seven-day program held at a private school in Bethel, Maine. It was in a wonderful town, very beautiful with great weather for the middle of summer. But, no matter what the temperature was outside, ever since being called a crane, I always wore pants. It protected me from the judgment of the world.
There were about twenty in attendance. The group was very diverse, including everyone from a physicist working at the National Standards Lab to a woman who was fighting the after effects of a miserable childhood.
The first day we attended a short lecture on group dynamics and then assembled in a circle with our fellow participants. A trained psychologist facilitated the group, I presumed because too much honest feedback without a moderator might have created emotional problems for some people.
The agenda was completely unstructured. The psychologist said nothing as we sat. Soon we realized that the attendees were to simply start talking. Anytime someone spoke, we were free to tell that person our opinion of his or her behavior, our view of his or her personality or content of what he or she said. As an introvert I didn’t volunteer much, but was fascinated with the process. I was surprised that without any agenda the group was able to maintain a dialogue and people actually gave feedback.
On the third day, the other participants began to comment on the fact that I was the only person not wearing shorts. The facilitator chimed in and asked me why. I told him, “I have never felt comfortable with my body image and being very thin makes me self-conscious.” His instructions were, “Go buy a pair of shorts and wear them for the rest of the week.”
I was hesitant to do so, having never forgotten the crane remark. I dreaded the thought of being publicly embarrassed and humiliated again. Such criticism would be confirmation that my body was unattractive, just as I feared it was. Taking a leap of faith, though, I bought the shorts anyway and wore them for the rest of the week as instructed. Not a single person laughed. That’s when I realized my ego had been in control of my behavior, at least in regards to my wardrobe. Now I could let go of the fear of ridicule.
Although I experienced a minor breakthrough in overcoming my self-consciousness about my body that day, it was not a complete cure. And it wasn’t the only thing I learned. In Bethel, I was also told that I had trouble accepting a compliment. I had always believed your works spoke for you and no compliments were required or welcome. Maybe I was feigning humility or didn’t believe I deserved compliments. This insight had a large impact on me and completely revised my thinking about the gift of gratitude.
Now, over twenty years later, I miss those “skinny” days. Days when I could eat whatever I wanted. Forget skinny, I am now on the plus side of slender. My waist size has grown from thirty-one inches to just over thirty-four. I can’t eat everything I lay my eyes on and exercise is a necessity in my life if I’m going to control my weight and stay slender. If I ate like I wanted, I would quickly pass slender to overweight.
In hindsight, I should have been happy with my weight as a young man. But we often appreciate what we don’t have, what we think we are not. Come to think of it, there are many things I should have appreciated along the way. Someday today will be just one of the good old days. I need to try to always remember that. Now, I try to stay in the moment and feel grateful for my life and appearance just as they are right now.
A bigger lesson I learned about body image was realizing that what’s important about a person is not his or her external appearance. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” I embrace this philosophy and no longer see imperfections in people I know or meet. To truly know someone I must know what’s in their heart. In the meantime, I live with the precept that everyone is beautiful and I try to love them just the way they are.