Dead Letter Department #115

things I overheard my dentist asking about as I waited in various states of mouth numbness

did they have a good weekend; did they have a good summer so far; was it humid when they went to the zoo in Nebraska; did the kids end up signing up for soccer this year; are you thinking about braces; have you been flossing; have you been up to the lake yet; was the water warm enough; have you been flossing; the crown is a little too thin, can we schedule you for another appointment after we get the lab to make another one; how does that feel; this is going to pinch, but you should be numb, so tell me if you feel any pain; how does that feel; have you been flossing; do you want to see what the decay looks like in your tooth; how’s your mom; have you been flossing?

First a numbing swab and then the aforementioned pinch and then twenty minutes of sitting looking at the colored glass in the window & assigning personalities to the various shades (my favorite was the uneven teal with a crack down the center) while the feeling in that side of my face vanished. Then a tiny spring, to push my teeth apart so there was room to work. “You’ll feel some pressure,” he said, but at that point I was feeling nothing on that side whatsoever. After that, the drill, and the strange awareness of the size of my tongue as it tried hard to keep the sprays of water out of my throat, and the little scatterings of tooth-bone dust across the dark glasses over my own glasses, the sense of something I took a long time to grow and kept in my mouth this whole time on purpose being eviscerated for my own good.

“It’s like an M&M,” he explained. “And once the decay is through this little crack, it can mushroom.” Here he expanded his gloved hand like a flower to show me just how fast it could grow.

Then another drill, “This one’s a skull-rattler,” and a dye to make sure that the decay had all been shaved into dust and blown away, and the mirror again. “These are just stains,” he said, and I thought about my dog’s teeth, and the wear on my steering wheel, and how long it takes to stain a tooth, “but the decay is all gone,” which is a nice thought, isn’t it?

There was adhesive after that, and layers of filling that are tooth-colored, unlike my old silver fillings, and another wait, slightly more dazed, with the awareness I could start drooling and not notice. Finally the filling down, to make it even with my bite again, and the firm good-to-see-you handshake you get from a dentist who has seen you for 15+ years, since he was just a baby dentist, and now I can barely tell that anything happened at all, except for the $264 (including discount for paying by check) missing from my bank account, and the slight ping of soreness where the injection sank into my numb gums.

There’s a crawl space under the eaves in my apartment, behind a little wooden door; insulation, plywood floors I wouldn’t trust my weight to, etc. When I rearranged the furniture a couple of years ago, I took nearly everything out of it, knowing I’d rarely if ever want to move A-M of the fiction and both chest-high wooden shelves to get to whatever was back there. In the intervening time, of course, I forgot what I had deemed unimportant enough to stay hidden, and for some reason over the course of the past few days, it started to worry me.

What was back there? I had visions of gradually inflating lithium batteries in old electronics, torn piles of cardboard announcing the presence of some kind of pest I would have to have removed, something precious and forgotten being alternately baked in the sun and frozen all winter.

So instead of having a nice restful Sunday morning, as planned, after a beach walk, I came home and took my apartment apart, removing one stack of lightly alphabetized books at at time to keep them somewhere near their letter-neighbors, carefully putting the bookends and my old flute to the side, and finally heaved the shelves up and over that tricky edge of carpet to reveal the wooden door of the crawl space.

What did I find, after all of that? Four (inexplicable) carry-on size suitcases, in various stages of their lifecycle, the old feather weight sewing machine my mom gave me that I cling to despite it needing repair, several old cardboard cartons, a bag of things from a friend I miss very much that I am no longer in touch with but cannot discard (the friend or the things, really), and my college laptop, which feels like it weighs about 20 pounds and is unlikely to ever boot up again, all of which I removed to store more sensibly.

That was it; that was all. It hardly seemed worth the vast amount of dust and sweat and book-reorganizing required to clean up afterwards, but now at least I know what’s back there: insulation, plywood floors I wouldn’t trust my weight to, and the one cardboard box I could not manage to wriggle close enough to grab.

I did find The Love of Julie Borel while I was re-shelving, and was possessed of a desire to read it again, despite having several things out from the library that ought to be read first. When I tell you some of the other titles by Kathleen Norris, who wrote over 90 books between 1911 and 1959, are Second Hand Wife and The Foolish Virgin, you will immediately know all you need to know about. It is delicious.

one good thing

The tides were far, far out on Sunday morning, far enough that I put on my water shoes & just kept wandering into the glinting expanse, using the way the seagulls were wading to judge how far I could go out. I got all tangled up in eel grass, saw sheaves of purples sand dollars, dozens of green and purple anemones, those skittering flat little fish that hide the soft upper layer of sand, and got full body greeted by an extremely damp yellow lab puppy, which was really all that was required to make the walk perfect.

More soon, and in the meantime, may whatever dusty crevice you go prying into in your own home have only the mildest of surprises waiting for you.