Futile Precautions

“Can I please have the organic arugula salad, with no chicken, no cheese, and a side of hummus?”

I was working with an audit team in Michigan this winter. The most junior member of the audit team was taking lunch orders and I was giving him my request.

The manager on the job looked impressed, “I know some guys try to do the eating healthier during busy season thing, but James, you have had salads every day for lunch this week. I wish I had the same will power.”

“Uh–thank you. It really doesn’t matter that it is busy season. But it certainly does help me feel better to eat well during long work days.” I smiled, ready to change the subject.

I travel a lot for work–some 60 to 70% of the year I am on the road Monday through Friday. I also usually work in teams at client sites. This means I spend 60 to 70% of my year ordering food with co-workers. Lunch and dinner, if not breakfast, is a conversation to be had on a daily basis.

I knew when I started my job at the firm being gay would likely make me stand apart from the crowd, being not from Ohio, and even my Jewish identity. But I underestimated how much being vegan was also going to come up at work.

“Will it offend you if I eat meat in front of you? Will it make you sick?” are frequent responses to someone at work who has newly discovered my veganism.

“Uh, no. I love meat. And dairy. I do it for health reasons. Although the positive environmental and animal welfare results are also great. There is a history of cardiovascular disease in my family.” Just as my co-workers who I travel with all the time know about my diet, they could probably recite this canned response of mine from memory.

My other common discussion points are:

1. Diet is a personal, sometimes sacred, choice each person makes. I try to never tell anyone else what they should or should not eat. By the same token, what I eat is none of anyone’s business (except for my husband, who cooks for me).
2. I love all the foods that make up a vegan diet. When I am home, everything is organic and made from scratch, thanks to my amazing husband. When I am eating at home, there is no food anywhere else I would rather be eating. So being vegan is not a crazy sacrifice that is making me miserable. If it did make me miserable every day, I would stop doing it.

I was inspired to go vegan in July 2013 because of health-related research I reviewed on NutritionFacts.Org. After just a few weeks, I felt so much better, I was sold. But part of what makes me keep choosing to eat vegan, day after day, even when it is a pain in the ass, is I feel like I am taking proactive steps to living longer and to have the best quality of life possible for the years I am alive. And the opportunity to have control over something in my life is a great motivator for me.

Recently, I was on the road with a partner from our firm I don’t typically work with. When she insisted she wanted to go to a barbecue joint for dinner, my dietary choices came up in discussion.

“Why do you not eat meat and dairy? Is this some animal rights thing?” she asked. I also usually say, “I don’t eat meat or dairy” instead of “I am vegan” because many people these days confuse being vegan with being gluten-intolerant. Aside from leading to additional confusion, I do not want anything to prevent me from getting gluten, which I love, love, love.

“My family has a history of heart disease–I do it for health reasons. But the positive environmental and animal welfare results are also nice.”

“Is that necessarily going to do the trick?” the partner asked. At the time, I wasn’t sure if this was a “you’re kind of fat for a vegan” dig or if it was something akin to what my mother would say, which is “we’re all going to die from something.” But since no one has ever responded to me that way, I thought about it for a while.

Which brings me to the car accident I was in this week.

When I moved to Ohio and started traveling for work, I spent a lot of time on the road during some especially terrible snow storms. After getting two Ohio winters under my belt, when it was time to buy a new car, I bought a Honda CRV with all wheel drive so I would have better control on wintry roads. I spent more money on tires that were better for the snow. I read up and watched videos about icy road conditions, what warning signs to look for, and how to handle driving in bad winter conditions.

On the day of the accident, I was driving to a client on some country back roads about an hour north of Columbus. It was early in the morning, some sunlight just beginning to shine behind the thick clouds blanketing the sky. For several miles, the roads were well plowed. Suddenly, they were not. I slowed down, focusing all of my attention of the road, as I began to feel more slippery patches of snow and ice beneath me. Driving over a set of railroad tracks, I hit more ice and began to fishtail. As I fishtailed enough to be on the other side of the two lane country road, a driver coming the other direction did not have time to stop and struck me directly on the driver’s side of my car (“t-boned”, to use the vernacular).

Luckily, the other driver and I were able to walk away from the accident. But even as I was sitting in a tow truck less than a half hour later, trying to get to the nearest small town, I was so frustrated with myself. I thought back to all of the precautions I had taken–from the time I had bought my car three years before until my extra careful driving that same morning–and it had all amounted to nothing, it seemed.

Inevitably, I thought of my mortality as the day wore on, especially when Basil arrived to rescue me from the local McDonald’s, which had been the most available refuge for me that morning.  I was so glad I got to see him again. There could have been other factors at play that could have made the accident worse: the other driver could have been going much faster or instead of being on a road next to a relatively flat field, the road could have been on a mountain side, or near a sidewalk with pedestrians. The potential horrible scenarios are endless–I have had to work to curb my mind from trying to think of them all during the last few days.

Each morning I am home I wake Basil up as I am getting ready. He doesn’t have to get up as early as I do, but he does anyway. He always makes me breakfast and will pack my lunch too. I make him tea and I make my coffee. We kiss each other goodbye.

The morning of the accident, Basil had not slept well during the night. I managed to get ready without waking the dogs up or causing any other racket to wake Basil. Basil also has a harder time than I do going back to sleep once he is woken up. I decided I should let him rest and make my own breakfast and lunch so he could get some extra sleep. I left the house quietly and texted him, telling him I loved him, that I was letting him sleep in, and to have a good day. Even with all of my “it’s later than you think”s and “life is too short”s, it did not occur to me for a second that I might not get to come home again, that less than 2 hours later I would be crawling out of my car as soon as I could after the impact, hoping nothing was about to catch fire, pitching myself panicked into the snow.

There is some futility in all of our precautions. And there is nothing we can do about it, except remember how futile precautions can be. Which for me will mean never leaving our house for work again without kissing Basil good-bye and telling him I love him.