As in:
Before Bernice discovered how much she enjoyed kayaking she was prone, more than most, to deep bouts of depression. Anything could set it off, but nothing frosted it quite like getting three credit card statements in the mail in one day. It was as though the banks were singling her out for punishment and criticism, and the grim wall of numbers meant that she couldn’t afford to eat out, or even take a trip to the movies, if she expected to make her minimum monthly payments and then pay the rent as well.
When she could rally she walked to the market and filled her shopping cart with ramen noodle packets and a generic brand of condensed vegetable soup that could be tricked up with soy sauce and cheap parmesan so that it tasted less like something that had been used to clean plumbing. She resorted to instant coffee, and used her Lemon Zinger tea bags two and three times to drain every hint of flavor out of them.
Her really big treat was to eat a can of Campbell’s Tomato Bisque with Pepperidge Farm cheddar goldfish. For this weekly delight she allowed herself one mozzarella stick that she used to stir the smiling little fish around. But then she realized just how sad of a big treat this was, and she felt worse.
At bottom she simply refused to get out of bed one Sunday. The phone had been cut off and the screen on her old RCA black & white t.v. set shrunk as though even her electronics were now vulnerable to glaucoma. She pulled the covers over her head in the dark and, without reaching for a blade or a poison, just asked everything at work for her to cease and desist. Enough already. To every follicle, to every oxygen-carrying red blood cell, to every enzyme emitting gland, to every lymph node and every corpuscle on patrol for microbes, she quietly commanded, “stop.”
She gave this up after a few hours when she finally accepted that she had to pee really badly.
It was only a few days after that, at the insistence of old friend come to visit her, that she discovered kayaking. A couple 360s in cold clear water and the exhilarations of her new sport began to change her whole outlook. She became a new woman, and within a year was able to literally reduce her credit cards to a small pile of plastic shavings. By force of habit, though, she still uses her Lemon Zinger tea bags twice. At least twice.
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