Truth be told, I was always slender, but my weight varied by a few pounds in college. Then, along with my friends, I’d go on the Atkins Diet…no carbs, only protein and 8 big glasses of water a day. The weight would fall off me. I’d eat eggs, hamburger (you couldn’t get good meat at the dining halls in college), cottage cheese (this was before yogurt got tasty). And pee A LOT! This would last about a week. Then I couldn’t stand it any longer and I’d go back to regular eating, which would include my favorite lunch…fudge cake and skim milk; YUM! But I weighed about 90 pounds throughout most of my college years, 89 pounds on my wedding day in 1974.

Going through periods of emotional difficulty was a sure way to lose weight for me. I weighed 84 pounds while living alone in Chicago from 1978-9. I struggled to put weight back on. Ah, for those days again! I weighted 98 pounds at the beginning of each of my pregnancies (it took me a while to get pregnant the first time…I thought perhaps because I didn’t have enough fat on my body). I lost my baby weight quickly (and I put on 42 pounds with the first pregnancy, 47 with the second…I was LARGE, but delivered good-sized babies too).

In 2003, I became sick and dropped to 90 pounds. I looked skeletal. It took me a few years to get back up to 100 pounds, which now was my desired weight, but then I kept going.

Six years ago, six months before turning 60, I looked in the full-length mirror in my bathroom and didn’t recognize myself. As I said, I had always been slender. Now I could no longer say that. I was up to 116 pounds. I was determined to change that, so worked with a trainer, who also discussed eating and healthy lifestyle choices with me all summer. I tried to give up carbs and as much sugar as possible. I had been doing a Pilates mat class at my gym on the Vineyard for several summers. Griffin taught me a different workout; 30 minutes of aerobics with an interval aspect to get the metabolism going, then weight work for strength building. The weight began to come off and my shape changed. It took a year, but I lost 18 pounds and got down to 98 pounds (a 2 pound cushion). I joined a gym when I returned from the Vineyard, and a new one as soon as it opened, for I didn’t like the original one back home.

I love my gym and take tough classes 5 days a week, doing my own workout the other day. One day I rest. But age has tripped me up and I’ve dealt with a series of injuries over the past 15 months, from tendinitis and a sprain in the left hip flexor, to bulging discs in my back, causing sciatica down my left leg. I have had three cortisone injections directly into my spine over the past three months, which have eased the pain. Just the past few weeks, I’ve been able to get back to the same level of aerobic exercise I once enjoyed. But now I have some pain in my left rotator cuff and began physical therapy in May on that. It doesn’t limit me severely yet. We’ll see.

My eating also isn’t as pristine as it was 6 years ago. Too many parties, too difficult to stay rigorous, too much stress eating thanks to the current political climate! So a few pounds have crept back on. Now that my back and hip are feeling better, I hope to take care of all of that this summer, but age and metabolism are stacked against me. Summer fruit beckons.

My sister checks in with the woman behind the counter, signing her name and mentioning what she’s there for. It hardly seems necessary to mention this. Everyone who enters this room, unless they are a support person like me, is here for one reason: they have cancer.
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I can’t say exactly why I’m so drawn to family history and the mysterious links that cross generations and inform who we are. But it’s something I’ve always had.
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I had no idea that part of me had come from this place, a California boardwalk town in the northern Sierras. I’d grown up in Massachusetts. Save for one trip to California when I was 10, I knew California as a distant, colorful place that gift packages materialized from, sent by my West Coast aunts and grandmothers, boxes full of kites and kimonos, Chinese hats and puzzle tricks, gongs and horns and incense, all from San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I knew that my father had been born in Butte, Montana and lived through his teens in San Diego where, he insisted, there was nothing to do but chase desert jackrabbits through the cactus.

At 18, my father left San Diego. He sailed the ocean seas during the Great Depression and met my mother at a communist party gathering in New York. I grew up in New England, attended school there, and can still sling a wicked pissah South Boston accent. I was no Californian.

I suppose I could have known about my wild western heritage but my father seemed eager to keep a distance between himself and his childhood past. Nevertheless, forbidden California beckoned to me like the gold rush. I headed west after college and landed in San Francisco.

California felt strange but familiar. Still, I knew nothing of this old time family connection. I was full of radical theater, collective living, identifying more closely with Italian commedia actors and jazz musicians than anything requiring muddy boots, a crumpled hat, and the company of galoots. Then, this photo arrived in a manila envelope from my aunt Laura, the family archivist.

The Degelman boot shop

The gentlemen pictured — note, not a woman in sight — have lined up in front of my great grandfather’s boot shop in Placerville, California. John Degelman, the boot maker, stands behind the men, sunken eyes glaring out over a mustache. If you look closely, you can see he’s wearing a rakish bowler hat and a white collarless shirt, linking him to the scattered merchants in watch chains, uptown hats, and good boots who gathered for the photo op.

Perhaps this squadron of gents served as my great grandfather’s local catalog. I imagine a scenario where John Degelman paid the boy in the bowler — third from the right, hands on belt buckle — to recruit satisfied customers to pose in front of his fancy new shop.

First come the bearded fellows on the left, hands in pockets, sporting the gallant-yet-practical caballero-style riding boot. To the right of the caballeros, the young dandy with the white cravat proudly displays the shine on a Degelman boot, style name unknown.

If you skip over the galoots in the mud boots — the boy probably dragged them out of the livery stable — you come to a prosperous-looking duo, trimmed out a bit sharper than the rest, thrusting their Degelman boots forward, striking a tandem best-foot-forward pose.

To the far right, the barflies arrive. I’m guessing great-grandfather Degelman handed the urchin a pocket full of nickels and told him to round up the denizens from the saloon on the south side of Main Street, where nobody had anything better to do anyhow.

The man at the end? With the pipe and the organ grinder hat? I leave his identity for you to imagine. I’m speculating he traded with the indigenous locals. Perhaps the rough-and-tumble residents of Placerville portrayed in this photo displayed a modicum of civility toward the Maidu and Miwok who had come before. One can only hope.

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