Giving Up Pie in the Sky For Just Desserts

It's last New Year's Eve, I'm in a restaurant with friends and it's time to order dessert. Lemon meringue pie, says my pal Al. Chocolate mousse, says Georgia. Vanilla ice cream, says my wife. The waitress looks at me.

Nothing, I say. Nothing? she asks. No, thank you, I say. No dessert, Bob? asks Al. No, I say. Are you sure, Bob? Georgia asks.

But my friends already knew my dirty little secret. I'd gone about 20 years virtually without ever having dessert.

Quite ugly as confessions go, I know. You should see how some people would look at me anytime I declined dessert -- how high eyebrows arched, how quickly smirks materialized. Come on, they would say, you're kidding, right?

Why had I skipped dessert for almost my entire adult life? I dedicated considerable time in my childhood to consuming Ring Dings, Twinkies and whatnot. I like sweets well enough. So why always the thumbs down?

Okay, first, because my father, no stranger to sweets, got fat in his 40s, grew sedentary and later died of a heart attack. Second, because I'm looking to keep my weight right, stay sharp at basketball and live a long, full, active life, preferably with grandchildren and the whole nine yards.

Unfortunately, my attitude toward dessert has endeared me to precisely no one. Everyone is supposed to get dessert. Dessert is a social custom, an all-but-sacred cornerstone of modern civilization. Apparently nobody trusts a person who always says no to dessert. It's regarded as just shy of rude, a sure sign of poor citizenship, an act of heresy.

I found myself stigmatized as a hopeless killjoy. Deserted, as it were. I felt singled out as a threat to common decency, guilty of a peculiar lifestyle preference. If you're ever looking to go directly and flagrantly against the grain of society, try turning down creme brulee in a public setting.

All of which I always found kind of . . . paradoxical. We talk about the pressure in our culture to be thin. But what about the pressure to be fat? The health-minded evidently have no right of first refusal. When it comes to how we eat, some of us are, in effect, talking out of both sides of our mouths.

Even so, after that dinner with friends, I felt haunted by the idea that maybe, just maybe, I was missing out on something essential. So on Jan. 1, 2006, I promised myself to stop being such an extremist.

I would learn to live a little. I would start to treat myself to dessert.

I've taken this big, bold adventure one step at a time, much like a castaway finally returning to the mainland, lest I lapse into shock.

First I'd nibble a fudge brownie, then graduate to going halfsies on a chocolate chip cookie. I even downed entire wedges of my daughter's delicious pumpkin-pecan pie. In such milestone moments, I've rediscovered the long-dormant ecstasy of the sugar rush.

Now that my diet calls for dessert, who knows what kind of random lunacy I might be capable of next? Maybe I'll skip my exercise once in a while, too, even sleep late this weekend.

Let's call it the Reverse New Year's Resolution. It's the concept that our plans for self-improvement, however well intentioned, can work against us -- that we should, at least once in a while, stop playing it so safe and let ourselves go a little. As it turns out, sometimes our sense of virtue can be our worst vice.

If we eat dessert, we might better taste life's other sweets, too.