This past month, I have been happily MIA doing a health retreat. Health reform is very much in my blood, thanks to two generations of Seventh-Day Adventists in the family.
For the record, I do not subscribe to any particular denomination. I am merely grateful for the guidance it proffered me during my more formative years; I will be the last person crooning Gimmee That Ol' Time Religion.
The SDA heritage comes with ties to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. For most who are not in the know about the beginnings of Dr. Kellogg and the Sanitarium, I would recommend watching a movie with Matthew Broderick called The Road to Welville. I made a note to go to a theater to watch it when it came out in the 90's but never got around to it. My reasoning, I guess, was along the lines of why watch it when I'd lived it?.. and would live it intermittently, all throughout my life.
Engaging in health retreats, is not so much out of obligation, tradition, etc., but more out of comfort and pleasure for me. Pleasure is based on past experiences. And one of my favorite recollections as a child was watching my grandmother put out her trays of wheatgrass by the bay window in our living room. This was the early 80's.
When I became an adult, a health retreat became more enjoyable to me than luxury resorts, clubs, lounges, bars, and decadent food. While other mother-daughter types bonded during facials and shopping sprees, mom and I bonded over colonics, rebounders, and dehydrated snacks that looked very much like Kibbles 'n Bits.
It's a bit odd for many to understand this predilection so I really have no one to take with me on these retreats. Colonics are not featured on a vacation cruise. A wheatgrass implant is not well-received in exclusive spas, but it's just my cup of tea.
These retreat centers are certainly not a place to meet men. The guys you meet here will be sort of weird - kind of like the treatments and the food. But the guests - men and women alike - are mostly single. Here, it's a different sort of "Club Med." It doesn't stand for "Club Méditerranée." It's more like "Club Medical" to address all sorts of afflictions - physical, spiritual, emotional, real or imagined.
Socially, it was a mix of Calistoga, Esalen, and summer camp. It would've been a bit Big Love too if this kahuna poseur could have kept up his game with all the little hens. You could fool some people some of the time but you can't fool girls from the Big Apple... We can spot a worm by the way he wriggles with his words.
Of course these health retreats existed much earlier in human history - long before even the word "sanitarium" came to be. The formidable La Paiva, herself, had gone to a wellness center before the adoring husband pickled her dead body in a glass jar. Now that's undying love and devotion.
I am also certain Madame Pompadour entered health retreats and ate weird foods to compete with the ever changing new flocks of nubile young things in the court of Louis XV.
Who am I competing with? The younger version of myself, perhaps. The girl that never thought she'd reach middle age.
Happy Valentine's ~e
