Café Con Leche and Weight Control Post Mexico

I have been digging around, looking for things to throw away, and I found something I wrote a long time ago and thought I might share it though it's old. I don't know how old. I drank café con leche for the first time in Mexico. Rosa and I drank it at night before going to bed. We made it with hot milk, Nescafé and plenty of sugar. To go with the drink, we roasted flour tortillas spread with butter and sugar over the gas burners until they almost scorched. Well, not almost. They did scorch. These sugary late night snacks helped me put on so much weight the second trip that my mother told me I "waddled" through the front door when I returned. I weighed the most I ever weighed in my life, and being thin (pardon the pun) carried a lot of weight in our family. "Putting on a little weight?" my dad would say and pat me on the behind or on my stomach. Gluttony gave my mother (pardon the pun again) a lot of food for thought. She seemed to love to tell me how at the family reunions everyone on my father's side of the family liked to eat until it hurt. "Disgusting," she'd say, "My dad always said he ate to live, he did not live to eat." My maternal grandfather ate quickly, bringing the fork to his mouth with his left hand, the way the English do (he came from England), and he probably never weighed more than about 150 pounds. I don't know how tall he was, but not very. My maternal grandmother also seemed to be a bit obsessed with her weight. She often made comments about how she had to watch her "girlish figger." My father's mother was thin too. Only my paternal grandfather may have put on a little around the middle in his old age. So I don't wonder why I ended up being obsessed with weight and wanting to be thin. But during adolescence, when I went to Mexico for the first and second time, I simply ate and worried about it later. Or, rather, I didn't worry about it until I got home. I loved the big white cloverleaf rolls at the high school cafeteria, the peanut butter pie, the macaroni and cheese and the mashed potatoes and gravy. For a time I had to have two servings of them all, every day, not without comments from my mother when I put on a few pounds. My boyfriend and I used to eat these sandwiches every day after school that consisted of a couple of slices each of bologna, salami and cheese, mayonnaise or Miracle Whip, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, and anything else you could cram between two slices of white bread. Then we killed it with a big glass of milk and chocolate chip cookies. We did this about every day over at his house. He was a year older than me and already lived in his own place. It's probabl9y a miracle I'm small. I'm serious. In Mexico the first time, I ate everything in sight and only got sick once, the time I ate squid. I couldn't go to this school event where all the exchange students were supposed to go because I was puking up my guts. Besides that, other than a little "Montezuma's Revenge," which was par for the course, I think I did pretty well, overall. I ate any candy sold on the street, and I particularly liked those swirls of vanilla fudge with a pecan in the middle. I ate anything else sold on the street too for that matter. If I was hungry, I ate it, and I was hungry constantly. Like I said, it's probably a miracle I'm small. For real. And sometimes I still crave a cup of café con leche before going to bed. Yum. .