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Be kind to all versions of you.
As much as I dread my bi-yearly dentist appointment, I am equally fascinated by the experience. It’s a time of forced reflection under duress — what else are you gonna do while someone ransacks, digs, and carves into your mouth bones? I’m sure ( but haven’t really checked ) that the word ‘teeth’ is some form of marketing. You see, these are special bones! I thought in between the ransacking.
There’s little space for talk either. Beyond being reprimanded once more about not reaching behind, in between, and underneath said bones, my dentist also tries one-sided small talk (Did you see the game last night? Great performance by the such and such.) To which all I can do is nod with my eyes (I hate sports), maybe throw in an emphatic gurgle here and there — he’s the man with the knife, after all. There’s ample pain, of course. I usually shed some tears and focus on the discomfort as a sign that I am alive, and that has to be good, right? And then you pay a small fortune to the folks who just tortured you, thank them, and go on with your life. Weird.
Today’s routine check-up was not routine at all. In fact, it was something of a life-changing event for me. There was the unexpected but relatively trivial: You need to come back to redo a root canal. Wait, what? I already had one. Well, yeah, they can go bad after some time. Well, dang !— there goes my new bass guitar fund. I’ll have to pay for some scheduled pain, the alternative being to risk having some unscheduled pain and then pay for even more pain. It’s pain and weirdness all the way down with these mouth bones, I tell you! But that hardly counts as life-changing, does it? What came after was — and I think it’s relevant to all of you.
Do you like to bundle? I do. Beyond streaming services, I like to bundle things like chores, difficult conversations, and activities. ( I once fired like four people in a row. ) The additional difficult thing this day was visiting my estranged and ailing father, who just so happens to live a few blocks away from my dentist in the ritzy part of Mexico City. I debated skipping the visit — last time was brutal — but the walk was nice, and I wanted to see how he was doing. If not as a son, then at least as a fellow human being.
