I Want a New Drug Car

If it's considered romantic to continue to learn things about one's spouse long after the nuptials, consider this: I realized not long ago that I happened to have married a man with a very interesting feature. Somewhere in Alex's head is a little invisible clock, a timer that is constantly counting down to zero the minutes and seconds in which it will be time to rid ourselves of each of our worldly possessions. He seems to own one of these little clocks for everything material thing--mine, his, ours. Nothing escapes his timer; even the houses we've lived in have been on the clock, and in fact, deciding on a dime to sell our first home was how I learned of his expire-o-meter in the first place.

A few months ago, Alex began making little noises about my car, a Subaru sedan. They were little, introductory-type messages that indicated that it was becoming time to sell my car, as opposed to the statement, "I sold your car today." I appreciated the warm up to the main event. I , of course, dug my heels in and proceeded to drag my feet, kicking and screaming all the way to Craigslist the day we put it up for sale. Someone bought it the next day. I cried, wee wee wee, all the way home.

I enjoy forming attachments to my things, and keeping them until death do us part, which is why Sophie is using my childhood bedroom furniture, and--no kidding--sleeping on my Snoopy sheets from 1974. Apart from finding this sort of conservationist quality in myself a strength, I also know that I do it because that's how much I really hate shopping to replace the stuff we've parted with. I think I may also have contracted a case of Being Old Fashioned, which makes buying new things with new features and shiny buttons and knobs a lot like putting the cast of Hee Haw on the space shuttle: an embarrassment to those who have spent their lives and enthusiasm furthering technology's advances, and a plea for space aliens to just shoot us all and eat our brains--NOW.

I say all that, knowing I'm a little sad that I'm no longer such a gadgety gal. The truth is, technology doesn't do it for me like it used to, and that's perhaps because I live in a house full of nutjobs intent on ruining everything I care too much about. Motherhood has done things to me, beyond the obvious, physical things that it does to all of us, and I'm afraid that it's shown me that anything with buttons on it, anything mechanical or digital or electrical, is soon rendered inoperable with extreme and swift prejudice.

I also know that I've inherited a lot of my no-nonsense, frugal behaviors from a long line of people who had just enough, and needed to save every bit of it for as long as they could. Just today, I built a fort for Sophie out of the same (reupholstered) couch cushions with which my dad made countless forts for me. My first car, which made it past college graduation, was the 1971 Camaro my dad bought when I was two years old. Mom and Dad still live in the same house they bought when they married in 1968; they probably always will.

Without entering territory that I would call stingy or cheap, my family's Depression-era thinking has rubbed off on me, a fact that I'm almost proud of, in a noble way; a kind of waste-not-want-not kind of way. In a way that makes my husband, a person I also plan to keep as long as possible, dizzy with anxiety. Funny, that.

So in addition to calling him Rapunzel (behind his back), I shall now refer to Alex as Chronos, Timekeeper of All Our Things. It's a good thing, and an annoying thing, and I'll take it because at least the man is the buying type in addition to being the selling type. Yesterday he bought me a car--a "pre-owned" one, as I like to call it--at my urging. It's just like my old car, only newer, and neater, and in much better shape. No, Dr. Freud, it's just a cigar.

I told Alex that I wanted a newer car that was modestly priced, and that got good gas mileage. I wasn't looking for anything fancy, understanding that fancy is relative; I reminded him that my cell phone only does two things: takes phone calls and makes them. (I think I actually had to pay extra for that.) And now I have exactly what I asked for. For now.

Now it's time to wait and see. Because maybe the clock that governs his clocks is going to wind down to 0:00:00, and he will forget to stop me from keeping and loving every single thing that has ever served me, and we will finally see each other for who we are: People who need deserve each another.

Of Mouth and Men, or, Down in the Mouth: Thirteen Years of Dentists and Dread

There aren't many cruel fates that have befallen me; my health, overall, has been good, and I've said before that, without knowing whether luck is something that you make or something that you get, I've always had a lot of the good kind. It's true that I can't cook, and I'm a terrible photographer--I know these things about myself, and I don't suffer much over them. There is usually little money in the things I enjoy doing the most. A coincidence, or a self-fulfilling prophecy? You tell me, Grasshopper.

There is one regrettable card I've been dealt, however, that causes me a considerable amount of scowling and pouting about once every five to ten years. It's this: My teeth could give a shit about Novocaine.

I discovered this, of course, in the worst possible way: At the hands of a totally incompetent dental technician named George. (After such an experience, you would remember his name after all these years, too.) George worked for the dentist I had chosen the year I finally landed a job with good benefits, Dr. P.V., DDS, a Denver dentist who owned one of those dental franchise-things called Perfect Teeth.

I was in my mid-20s; it made me feel all grown up and responsible to choose a dentist and actually go to an appointment. I was new to being a good consumer of medical and health services, and I believe I chose the good doctor by closing my eyes and pointing to the "Dentists" section of the Yellow Pages. I opened my eyes, my finger resting on a listing called Perfect Teeth. "Perfect Teeth," I gasped, opening my eyes. They must be good.

I went to my first checkup appointment after several years of not making any checkup appointments, and of course I had a whopper of a cavity making a tunnel between two of my bottom molars. What with being a grown-up and all who didn't need her mother to tell her that such things require attention, I made an appointment for a filling.

It was early, maybe 7:00 AM, and still dark the day of my appointment. I had taken the first one of the day so that I could still make it to work on time, even if the weather was bad. I took the chair and met George, the technician assigned to my case. He made chitchat as he set up the workspace, which included explaining that, because he loved snowboarding so much, he had his hands insured. "If I mess these up," he held up two meat hooks, "I lose my livelihood." I looked around at the otherwise empty office and asked, "Where's the dentist?"

"Oh, he's not coming. I'm filling your tooth." This sounded strange to me, but I figured it was just a no-big-deal filling, and could be handled by the superstar snowboarder whose dunlop* hadn't escaped my attention. George gave me several Novocaine shots, and put his Lloyd's of London policy on his drill.

"Ahhhrgh," I said, flinching. George told me to relax, but I could still feel the drill, a sensation that, at first, was unpleasant, but not unbearable. Like maybe picking a fresh scab, or listening to a John Tesh song. As he continued, things became more like taking a pick ax to that scab, or turning up the John Tesh to 11. I was trying to hold still, but found myself squirming and sinking, slinking down out of the chair, my fingernails impaling the pleather of the armrest. "Arrrgh! Arrawaah!" I protested. George tried several more shots of Novocaine, to no noticeable effect. Finally, he put down the drill, filled the tooth, and called it good.

I went to work, to answer phone calls with half my face, and went home to a throbbing sensation in my teeth that night. By bedtime, the throbbing had become a jackhammer in my jaw. Knowing that I faced a sleepless night, twisting and turning myself inside out trying to get comfortable, moaning in agony, I called the dentist's office number. I took down the emergency after-hours pager number the answering machine rattled off. My phone rang in a half hour.

"Take some Advil or Aleve," said Dr. V., unconcerned. I explained that I had already taken enough Advil to kill Keith Richards. He refused to call in a prescription, telling me, in so many words, that shit happens. For whatever reason, I believed him. Two months later, I still couldn't chew with the filled molars, and anything cold was out of the question. This was adulthood, I figured. Fillings hurt, which is why, I guessed, all the old people I knew were so pissed off most of the time.

I thought that for a few months, until the day a I felt a tiny little earthquake, then a tiny little landslide of metal going on in my mouth. I couldn't take it anymore; I made an appointment to see Dr. V. "What day is George's day off?" I asked the receptionist.

I realize now that this is a lot like returning to the hairdresser who just gave you the Borat after you had asked for the Rachel, but these were desperate times. Times during which there was no Yellow Pages in the cafeteria at work.

It turns out that George, untrained in how to deal with a patient who couldn't get numb, said, "Fuck it, Dude, let's go bowling," instead of dispatching the remaining decay before filling the teeth. With such shaky footing, the amalgam could find only limited purchase, and eventually it cracked and shimmied its way out of Dodge. "Douchebag," I mumbled at the news. Dr. V. Himself performed the replacement, with the help of a nice technician with a bad perm and prison work tattoos, andNovocaine, and a generous helping of nitrous oxide gas, which I learned doesn't so much lessen the pain of the drill so much as it lessens how much I care about the pain of the drill. While it was an improvement, I considered the situation a lose-lose one, but the best I could do given the circumstances.

Six years later, I knew I needed another filling, and chose a dentist with the care one would take to choose a babysitter, a roommate, a spouse. I had asked friends and family for referrals; I had learned to ask, "Are you the kind of dentist who performs the procedures, or are you the kind of dentist who does the books and buys the furniture?" I had made an important DUH-scovery that maybe not all dentists were alike. And when my new dentist asked me why I hadn't had a checkup in so long, I didn't lie. I had become self-unemployed, and didn't have benefits. I think I said something like, "The only thing worse than asking someone to hurt you is to pay someone out of pocket to hurt you." I made sure to tell her my story, which for some reason, entertained her as much as it informed her. She gassed me and filled my tooth. It was a little thing, it was no problem, and she was nice and competent enough that I actually don't remember her name.

Since then, I've been more diligent in seeing my dental professional. We have insurance right now, which is a bonus. Alex found the dentist we have now, a congenial fella with what I thought at first sounded like an exotic last name. I balked a little when I found out he was an Air Force dentist, but he quickly bucked the stereotype. (No offense to persons trained and working in the armed forces, but I spent years as a Planned Parenthood patient, and found myself in the stirrups across from a few former Army nurses. When you've had a pelvic exam from Maj. Margaret Houlihan, you can argue with me about the differences between military and civilian care.)

At my last appointment, last week, I learned that my filling of eight years ago, installed by the nice woman who laughed at my jokes and tolerated my nervous nellie patient style, was going bad. I launched my well-rehearsed presentation of George: The Man Who Hurt Me. My exotic-named dentist patted me on the arm, promised to gas me, and assured me that he would do no harm.

I went to my filling replacement remembering the nice dentist who thought my dental story was such a hoot. I lay in the chair in a full sweat, waiting for the ensuing jolts of pain that were coming, coming, coming. Then after the drilling was over, I lay trembling from the chills I got from sweating the previous hour. "Poor dear," the hygienist said, draping a blanket over me, and wiping down my forehead with a mop. Later, I vomited, which I considered a fair price for the modicum of relief the gas gave me.

The dentist's assistant, Xena, was waiting for me when I walked in, showed me to my chair; she asked me if I wanted to wear my own sunglasses, or wear the office goggles. "It's just for your protection," Xena said, and I wondered what kind of filling replacement could put out a person's eye. "Do you want some headphones?" she asked. "They might help if the sound of the drill bothers you." Considering that the drilling was going to go on inside my head, using earphones to dampen the sound didn't make sense to me, but I accepted them anyway, and put them on.

The dentist took a seat next to me, and we prepared each other on what was about to happen. "I can't get numb; there's nothing we can do about it," I said, and he looked at me sideways and said he didn't know about that. Nevertheless, I told him I wanted him to gas me, ASAP, but not too much. "Somewhere between Dead show and Pink Floyd." He gave me my shots and I lay there with my sunglasses and headphones on. I sent up a prayer of thanks that John Tesh was totally absent from the FM dial.

And then he said, "I couldn't tell from your X-rays for sure, but I see now that you definitely have a little cavity in the tooth next to this one. Do you want to just take care of it now?" This was an unwelcome surprise to me, but only mildly so. It's a little like having your mechanic tell you that, during your break job, he discovered you have a tail light out. No biggie, but another 10 minutes in the chair is another 10 in the chair. I told him to go ahead and fill it, to be conservative, and so I lay there, waiting, waiting, waiting. As the drill spun around in my head, I have to say I never felt a thing.

While I don't know if it was a change in me, or a change in the dentist, it turned out to be my most positive dental experience to date. And you can ask me for the man's name and number, but I'm busy organizing a ticker tape parade in his honor, and sending bouquets and gold bouillon to his office. I'm lobbying our local and state governments to name a day after him after offering him a key to the city. Sure, I may sound overzealous, but this kind of breakthrough means that maybe I'm living in a world in which anything could happen after all. Like, for example, how Dr. V.'s stellar filling continues to hold up to this day.

And how, if teeth can change their minds at the hands of one Air Force dentist with an exotic last name and a staff member named Xena, then who knows what other pains I'm tolerating that could turn themselves off one morning? Shoot, I'll bet that in a world like this one, I might even be able to forgo cavities altogether. Just as an experiment, I'm having Lindt chocolates for lunch. And just as insurance, I'm going to brush and floss afterward.


*Dunlop--shorthand parlance to describe one's abdominal physique, as in, "His belly done lop over his belt."

A Place for My (Old) Stuff: A Bonus Post Compliments of Digg

Take a gander at the following story about my all-time favorite site: Zwaggle.

read more | digg story

When Day Planners Go Bad

Since I've successfully ignored my to-do list for a solid two weeks, I'm going with a new approach: The To-Don't List. Make your own! Franklin Covey, call me!

Don't:
1. Talk about Fight Club.*
2. Take candy from strangers--or babies.
3. Sell anything, buy anything, or process anything.*
4. Bring a knife to a gunfight.*
5. Take the gun in favor of the cannoli.*
6. Take a cannoli to any kind of fight. Unless it's a food fight.
7. Talk about Foodfight Club.
8. Trust a dog to watch your food.
9. Let any bulls into your china shop.
10. Let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

*Extra credit for naming the movie referenced in this item.

The "P" Word

Ours is a household with loose rules. We try not to sweat the small stuff, parenting-wise, so that Sophie, Alex and I are together and present, instead of arguing over whether it's OK or not to wear your Crocs to bed. It's not for everyone, but this is the way our family is. Sophie takes great pleasure in picking out her clothes each day before school to create a very unique look that I like to call Boca Raton Bag Lady. Further, the rules are: You can pretty much wear what you want to bed, as long as you sleep; you can pretty much have whatever you want for dinner as long as you eat at least some of it. Wearing seatbelts in the car is non-negotiable, but, hey, you can use any word you want at home, as long as you don't cuss at school.

And then today, the chickens came home to roost.

"Mom," Sophie explained to me today, "you can call big girl underpants 'panties.'" I think I may have lost consciousness for a moment.

You see, for reasons I can't explain, but that probably have to do with a certain series of obscene phone calls that plagued my childhood home in the early '80s, I can't bear to hear the word "panties," much less say it. Even typing the word gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I'm probably going to have to spend the rest of my night with my fingers resting in a bath of sulphuric acid. ("You're soaking in it!")

No one is sadder than I that a new reign of censorship has begun between my daughter and I. Here we are, after three and a half years under my careful tutelage--"These are your underpants"--arguing over the P word in the backyard.

"No, honey, actually you can't call them panties," I said, wincing. "They are underwear or underpants or even undergarments, but that's all." And thus a new rule was born: You can call them panties, as long as you only do so at school. I can't wait for her teenage years; I'm considering getting it over with and taking a pickax to my eardrums now.

Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April Part I

A few months ago, which seems like a few years ago, I was trying my damndest to get Sophie well from some virus that desperately clung to her like one of those creepy boyfriends we’ve all had. (Yes, I’m talking about you, Steve.) She’d been sick with something or other pretty much all winter, which I was trying not to take personally, even though in Boulder, that’s almost impossible. When learning that a family has fallen prey to cold and flu season, it’s not just customary—it’s mandatory—to ask the mother if she’s fed her family anything but organic vegetables, or to blame gluten, sugar, artificial colors, or hand sanitizer. And if the mother had committed to breastfeeding longer, her children wouldn't get sick in the first place. Yes, mea culpa on making sensitive, deeply personal decisions, like weaning Sophie a month, a day, a year longer than someone else thinks I should have. (Like sometime before she started shaving her legs and bringing home calculus homework, for example.)

And while Sophie was entering the third or fourth day of viral symptoms, I slogged inside our nearest drugstore with my clammy, whining toddler draped over my shoulder for an over-the-counter medication we use when things go south. The woman at the counter looked at me as if I had just asked for cyanide. “We don’t carry it,” she eyed me, “people overdose their kids with it.” I’d been fetching juice, laundering the vomit out of everything we own, and watching Blue’s Clues for 48 hours straight, and it took herculean restraint not to overdose that woman’s face with my fist.

This illness, at first, wasn’t anything that I hadn’t endured before, and I had to be grateful that we’d moved away from Vail, where I didn’t know anyone who could help me while Alex was away, and where the physicians were more like EMTs in really expensive shoes. It was during that winter we spent in Vail that I invented a system of helping nurses and doctors triage their pediatric patients in the waiting room just by looking at the kind of shape their mothers were in. When Sophie was on the well side, I looked like a regular mom who could have used some highlights and a breath mint, but was otherwise holding it together OK. When she got really sick, and when her fever rose to 104.5 the minute her medication wore off, I looked a lot like Nick Nolte’s mug shot from 2002.

Living in a real place, where my parents can help me when things get really bad, and the doctors know how to do other things besides treat ski injuries, I felt a little better. Then on the night of February 5th, after we’d seen Sophie’s pediatrician, and were taking a new round of antibiotics, I looked at Sophie and didn't like how she was doing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something told me things were bad, and were going to get worse. With my spidey sense tingling, I paged the on-call doctor, and got a phone triage nurse at Children’s Hospital. “What you’ve just described to me constitutes a 911 call. How does she look?”
“Like shit actually,” I said. I hung up, and packed us all into the car. I didn’t bother changing my clothes; despite the weather, I didn’t even put on a coat. I headed for the emergency room without passing go or collecting two hundred dollars.

Stay tuned for the continuation of Winter Time Warp: How a Virus Turned February Turned Into April, coming soon.

Happy Birthday to Me

On Sunday, I'll turn 39. The end of the road for my thirties, and the beginning of the road for things like menopause and Matlock re-runs. Not only will this call it quits between me and what was for the most part a painful and dare I say transformative decade, but it's also one of those birthdays that falls on the day of the week I was born. I'm sure that somehow, maybe to someone who studies astrology or some sort of mysticism, this is important. Practically speaking, the liquor stores are closed in Colorado on Sundays, which means that I'll have get my shopping out of the way on Saturday if I plan on drinking alone.

I will say that, age notwithstanding, I still don't feel old, and if last night's trip to the liquor store (do you see a theme here?) means anything, I don't necessarily always look it.

I went to my friendly neighborhood liquor store last night for a bottle of wine to pour down the kid's throat before bed share with Alex. I don't usually go there, since the strip mall that it's in kind of gives me the willies, and because their prices remind me of the shower scene from Shawshank Redemption.

I was there because I was in a hurry, and in my haste, grabbed a bottle of something resembling red wine. What could possibly happen? All wine in any container smaller than a gallon is pretty much good wine. I went to the counter, where the clerk asked to see my I.D. He looked at it and laughed, looked up at me, and said in whatever accent he has, "Ha! You look so young!" We laughed together then, maybe a little too much, and then I proceeded to take home perhaps the worst tasting bottle of wine possible, which is saying something, considering that my palate is not that much more discriminating than my garbage disposal. So.

I guess I'll leave the gun and take the canolli, so to speak, and just assume that the clerk was telling the truth instead of trying to throw off my consumer spidey sense that the wine I was about to drink was nothing less awful than what a frat boy would mix up in preparation for the next backyard bash. Maybe the guy is right now having his vision checked, or the light bulbs in the store replaced. Maybe the life expectancy of the women in his country is fourteen, or maybe I just look younger than 39. Since I don't plan on going back there--ever--to ask the man in the new glasses, I get to decide that the answer is the latter. It'll be my birthday present to myself. Just in case, the next time I try my wine-buying skillz, I'll have my I.D. handy.