Of Oreos and Character Flaws
I won an Oreo cooking eating contest when I was a teenager. Twenty five in five minutes, with no fluids allowed to wash them down. I was thin as a rail then, with raging testosterone and metabolism turned to high. There were larger boys there whom one would imagine being able to chomp more of them, but I blew everyone away. Nothin’ but taillights, like other marathoners watching Kipchoge pull away or sprinters trailing Adrian Bolt.
I did eat a lot, for sure. I once did well in a pancake eating contest also. My grandfather used to watch me eat at dinner and say “He puts me to mind of one of them dogs,” face in the bowl, slurping, hardly chewing.
My brother was proud of me. He loved to talk about how I could eat more than anybody, not unlike George Kennedy’s character Dragline in Cool Hand Luke. Speaking of Luke (Paul Newman) to the other inmates, he bragged–
“That there’s the champion hog gut of this camp. Hell, I seen him eat ten chocolate bars and seven cold drinks in fifteen minutes. He can eat busted bottles, rusty nails, any damn thing. If you’d be so kind as to let me cut off your Yankee head, he’ll even eat that.”
After all the praise, Luke made his famous cinematic claim that he could eat fifty eggs in an hour.
Turns out, I’m a lightweight, in the whole scheme of things. The record for Oreos in five minutes is seventy eight (set in 2013), according to one web site. That may have been broken since then. Still, twenty five is a formidable number. These days I couldn’t eat that many Oreos in a day, probably. I wouldn’t actually want to.
We outgrow a lot of our childhood interests, whether too much pot smoking, round the clock jerking off, drinking, overeating or smashing pumpkins at Halloween. When we don’t, I suppose those are called “character flaws.”
During the day at work yesterday I thought of how Teddy Roosevelt wanted to marry Edith after his first wife Alice’s death but felt trapped by his own moralism. He didn’t believe in second marriages. He wrote. “I’ve always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character.” This is from The Strenuous Life: Teddy Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete by Ryan Swanson (2019). It’s the line about arguing weakness that stayed with me.
I have often felt that my life, as it is right now, is a referendum on the totality of my character. Flaws might include telltales like the inability to delay gratification or to look far enough down the road or to love perfectly, whether your children, spouse, mom, sib, or to fall in love with a lucrative passion. Roosevelt might well be me, saying “The man I’ve become argues weakness in my character.” But something happened when I read TR’s phrase. I thought “So, what? I have character flaws. Maybe I always will. Screw it.” It was a gift, a blessing, scrolling across my mind. So, what? On occasion I’ve eaten too many damn Oreos and my life is the sum total of both my strengths and weaknesses.
Then I remembered Mary Oliver’s sweet words once again, saying “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
