Cooking With Hot Flashes
’Tis not knowing much, but what is useful,
that makes a wise man.
Thomas Fuller
I’m hot. Not the gorgeous, voluptuous kind of hot.
I’m just hot. My husband tells me I even sizzle. But that is not a
compliment. It is simply a statement of fact. I am, at times, quite literally
sizzling. So much so that I have been ordered to stay away from dry brush and
dead Christmas trees until my body has finished going through this transitional
period known as “the change.”
The change. Middle age. Menopause. Skin that doesn’t
fit us anymore. That is just some of what this book is about. But before you
men get the misconception that this is a missive intended solely for women, let
me remind you that both sexes go through the change. Men just seem to have a
lot more fun with it than women. A man wakes up one morning and instead of
putting on his usual conservative suit and silk tie, he tosses them both aside,
slips on his jeans and unbuttons his shirt to the middle of his chest, adds a
couple of gold chains, and goes out and buys a new sports car. That’s how
the male side of the species faces the midlife transition. For them, it’s
called a “midlife crisis,” and it’s practically a
celebration. They begin acting younger, not older. They join health clubs,
change their hairstyle, their clothes, their demeanor, and their lingo. They
get a renewed zest for life. They’re not like us. They’ve never
been moved to the smoking section of a restaurant because they were still
smoldering from a hot flash. They don’t attend weddings just so they can
hang around the ice sculpture. They don’t sweat puddles every night, so
deep we have to wear a life jacket to keep from drowning. The change is easy on
them.
But for us women? We can rocket from a normal 98.6-degree
body temperature to volcano in
ten seconds or less. There are veteran firemen who haven’t seen that kind
of spontaneous combustion. I’m convinced the only reason any of us get
invited to outdoor parties is to serve as the heat lamp.
Perhaps one of these days medical science will develop a
thermostat patch for menopausal women that will automatically readjust our body
temperature whenever it nears or reaches the boiling point. Who knows,
researchers might already be working on this concept even as this book is
hitting the bookshelves. I sincerely hope so because when it comes to hot
flashes and other symptoms of menopause, we women have suffered far too long in
silence!
Oh, all right, who am I kidding? It’s
never been in silence. If we menopausal women are anything, it’s vocal.
We know the words “Is it hot in here or is it me?” in twelve
languages. We live to let others in on our misery.
“Are you sure Arctic Winter is the
lowest setting on your air-conditioner?”
“So, how flexible is cryogenics?
Can’t I be frozen just until after menopause?”
“That’s the third sofa my body
has set on fire this week.”
We’ve complained, yes, but until now, we have done
little else. We’ve left it up to the medical community to come up with
whatever new and innovative ways they could find to help us handle the
uncomfortable, and even dangerous, symptoms of menopause. We haven’t done
anything significant ourselves to protect us from the symptoms (although
flame-retardant pajamas have helped), alleviate our misery, or even find a
positive side to menopause. We’ve never organized a Million Menopausal
Woman March on Washington. (What over-forty woman could deal
with that kind of claustrophobia?) We haven’t spoken out on the floor of
Congress. (We figure they’ve already seen enough uncontrollable crying
from the minority party.) As far as I can tell, we haven’t done much of
anything to make this change of life not only more endurable for us, but
perhaps even financially beneficial.
That is, until now. That is, until Cooking
With Hot Flashes ... and Other Ways to Make Middle Age Profitable.
I don’t mean to brag, but I believe this book, which
is the first to introduce the concept of using hot flashes as an energy source,
could quite possibly put me in the running for a Pulitzer or, considering the
positive effect it could have on menopausal mood swings, perhaps even a Nobel
Peace Prize.
As with many other life-changing discoveries, this hot-flash
energy idea came to me quite by accident. One day while clutching a handful of
groceries to my chest, I made my way through a crowded supermarket, stood in
the checkout line, then continued to cradle the groceries in my arms as I
walked home, all the while having one of the worst hot flashes of my life.
But as I was putting the food items away, I noticed
something quite remarkable. I discovered that by keeping my groceries pressed
against my upper body, my hot flash had apparently cooked a steak to medium and
thawed out a bag of frozen peas!
That is what got me to thinking: I could save a fortune on my gas bill if I just started using my hot
flashes to cook with!
People, this could be the answer to all our energy needs!
Who knows? Maybe that’s how fire was discovered in the first place. Maybe
it wasn’t a couple of cavemen rubbing two sticks together as our history
books have taught us. Maybe it was a menopausal cave woman who got a hot flash,
leaned against her thatched hut, and set it ablaze!
For years scientists have been missing the mark.
They’ve been looking for the answer to the world’s power needs in
all the wrong places. Since there will never be a shortage of middle-aged
women, this natural source of heat energy is virtually unlimited and thus far
untapped. Forget building more nuclear power plants. Forget alcohol energy,
wind energy, and natural gas energy. Hot-flash energy could be just the discovery
to revolutionize the world. Why, just one baby boomer high school reunion could
yield enough heat energy to light the entire city of Cincinnati! The
possibilities are endless!
But remember, you read it here first. Not in Newsweek. Not in Time. Not in Science News. It was here. A major, world-changing discovery
humbly announced within the pages of this book, without a lot of hoopla,
without a lot of fanfare (although a couple of oscillating fans pointed in my
direction sure would’ve helped).
Now that I have stepped forward and revealed my discovery to
the public, I believe it is only a matter of time before we will be seeing this
new source of energy running heavy machinery, automobiles, and even aircraft.
The possibilities are limited only by our imagination, our ingenuity, and the
intensity of our hot flashes.
Perhaps you are wondering, as I did, why someone has never
tapped into this obvious source of energy before now. Excellent question. We
women have complained about our hot flashes, comedians have joked about them,
pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to
bring products to the marketplace that will help alleviate our discomfort, and
husbands have gasped at astronomical air-conditioning bills from keeping our
houses at a cool and comfortable negative 21 degrees. But even with this much
attention, to my knowledge, no one has ever suggested harnessing this natural
and abundant source of energy and making it profitable for the world. Maybe
we’ve overlooked it because it seemed too simplistic. Maybe gasoline and
electric companies didn’t want us discovering such a revolutionary
alternative energy source, and their lobbying groups kept us from researching
the idea. Maybe we were all just too stinkin’ hot to spend that much time
in a lab coat. Who knows? It could be any number of reasons.
But since no one else has stepped up to the plate, the duty
has fallen to me. So while I await word on my patent application, I figure I
might as well go ahead and talk about some of the other ways all of us, men and
women alike, can make it through these years known as middle age. Who knows
what other solutions to the world’s problems are yet to be discovered by
studying this passage into the second half of our lives—the time when our
muscles might ache a little more, our skin and hair are sure to loosen just a
bit, and our knees and opinions won’t be bending as easily as they used
to. This book is about survival. It’s about adventure. It’s about
discovery. And it should have been about twelve bucks, unless you got it out of
the sale bin. In which case, I thank you. It’s so embarrassing to walk
into a bookstore and find your book hanging out in one of those. So you have my
sincere gratitude for rescuing another one.
I hope you enjoy the read, this light-hearted look at our
journey into middle age and beyond.
If not, feel free to use it to fan yourself.
I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis
and I don’t deserve that either.
Jack Benny
Excerpted from:
Cooking With Hot Flashes by Martha
Bolton
Copyright © 2004 ; ISBN 076420002X
Published by Bethany House Publishers
Used by permission. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
