As an athlete and in most things I do, I consider myself to be a middle of the packer. An average hitter, with average speed (in my day of course) and an arm maybe slightly above average.
As a distance runner, the thoroughbreds win, the plow horses bring up the rear, and I am at best a Clydesdale. And in football, the half back scored, the full back opened the holes and I was a situational back.
But when it comes to eating, I am in a league of my own. Oh sure, Joey Chestnut or Kobayashi I'm not, but put a couple of Big Macs and a Super Sized Fry in front of me and move over Rosie O'Donnell. There's only enough room in this Bleacher Seat for one of us.
I was at a digestive advantage right from the get go. As I journeyed down the birth canal, the surgical team requisitioned an extraction team to dislodge me from a tight connection with my Mom.
Tipping the nursery scale at 10 pounds and four ounces of bouncing boy, with a bulbous head, broad shoulders and a belly which resembled Buddah’s, I was described by my Dad as “sort of a dumb looking lad."
He has taken great pleasure over the years by explaining that the nursing staff was seen “slapping the daylights out of the big kid, who kept forgetting to breathe". It was hours later, that Dad found out that the big kid was his son.
Yes, I was the largest of the family litter. I entered the world thinking of food and searching for the nearest Denny's. A jack in the box wasn’t a thing I played with, but the place I pointed to as Mom brought me home from the hospital. She jokes that instead of teething on one of those Playschool Plastic Donuts, I longed for Dunkin’s.
In my baby pics, I looked a bit like Porky Pig, with chubby jowls and and three chins. Mom was forced to feed me cereal from the day I got home from the hospital as neither the bottle nor the boobies would keep my man-size belly adequately nourished.
She says that I devoured bowl after bowl of Farina and Zwiebacks from Good Morning, Mary Sunshine to Good Night Moon.
My quest for nourishment continued when Mom received a phone call from the school principal on my first day of kindergarten. It seems that toddler Todd had aborted his first trip to the merry go round and had pilfered a couple of his classmates recess snacks. I allegedly engorged myself with Arthur Arguin’s six powdered donuts, in addition to the stale brownies Mom had baked. Oops, my bad.
As a ten-year old, I was crowned the Blueberry Pie Eating Champion of the Spencer Fair, an honor I would hold for three consecutive autumn fairs. Season after season I would be challenged by over-confident teens several years my elder. It reminded me of the Barf-o-rama scene from the movie Stand By Me. "And the Women's Auxiliary barfed all over the Benevolent Order of Antelopes."
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