Unremarkable Pleasantness

   The sky has been overcast since Monday. There is no beauty in the overcast; a gray shroud that mutes nature’s colors and deadens its sparkle. It is the Plain Jane of weather. But, now and then, the sun breaks through to remind us of how terribly hot a June day in Georgia can be. And now and then, heavy dark clouds appear beneath the overcast and threaten to unleash their fury.

   But, the overcast holds its own. With neither the beauty of sunlight nor the awe inspiring rage of a storm, the overcast has given us three days of unremarkable pleasantness.

Learning the Drill

   Someone or something in cyberspace thinks I’m a dentist. How he, she, or it fell prey to this misconception is a mystery. I never went to the dentist unless it was absolutely necessary. And not every absolute necessity was enough to get me there, which explains why my mouth is full of empty spaces once occupied by teeth. No matter: someone out there is sure I have a “DDS.” If I do, it stands for Disappointing Dental Specimen.

   The e-mails began arriving in February.  One of the early ones read:

   “Dear Colleague: My very good friend, Dr. Gary Sanchez has a flat out, revolutionary way of using the internet to market a dental practice. For the first time ever, we asked Dr. Gary to put together a Study Club to teach the same strategies that took his practice from 10 to 40 ideal new patients every month. He agreed!”

  

   What, pray tell, is an “ideal new patient?”  The kid in the old toothpaste commercials – the one who jumped out of the dentist’s chair yelling, “Look, Mom, no cavities!” – gets my vote.  But I wondered about my colleagues. Ideally, the new patients should make them rich. But if the new patients all have ideal teeth, how much income will their two checkups a year generate? Not enough to buy that new yacht, or build that new summer home, I bet.

   A week or two later, another e-mail found its way to me. This one didn’t begin, “Dear Colleague,” but it made me feel as if I were a member of the club. The message made it clear my concerns for the earnings potential of dentists serving ideal patients are shared by others in the bicuspid biz.

   “While many dentists are focusing on how to bring new patients into the practice,” the e-mail read, “it’s always been my belief that an easier solution is to provide an expanded range of services to our patients.” That makes sense. If the bi-annual examinations – despite all the poking, prodding and x-raying – don’t reveal a single less-than-ideal tooth, it’s hardly worth the drillmeister’s time to poke, prod and x-ray.

   The e-mail explains to my colleagues that if they learn a few simple orthodontic techniques they will be able to help their patients get that stunning smile they’ve always wanted. To find out more, I clicked on “Learn More.” I wanted to find out how much it would cost to learn those “few simple techniques.” What I found out was, they might call me “colleague,” but they are none too anxious to let me in the clubhouse. To “learn more,” required that I know what the “d” in MOD stands for. I tried a number of “d” words, and it didn’t do me a d_ _ _ bit of good.

   Then I tried the link for non-dentists. What I found was a video telling me how much happier I’d be if I would only get my teeth straightened. This was like getting half the course for free – the half in which the dentists learns to tell the patient that she’d feel much better about herself if her teeth were straighter. After all, being embarrassed to smile is nothing to smile about. And all the orthodontic skills in the world won’t help my colleagues get rich if they’re not able to convince patients that a movie-star smile will keep people from noticing their sumo-wrestler butts.

   Then I got a disturbing e-mail from Dr. Kit Withers. The e-mail began thusly:

   Escape from Impossible Situations:

Learn how to become an everyday Houdini with modern advancements in extraction instruments

  

   “As dentists we either love extractions, find it to be a necessary procedure before moving on to more exciting procedures such as socket preservation and placing implants, or lastly, do not do them at all for a variety of reasons. No matter what category you may fall within, we have all had an extraction procedure that did not go as expected, which resulted in stress for you and your patient.”

  

   I hope my colleagues will forgive me, but I can’t help wondering what this Houdini thing is all about. What does this seminar teach dentists to escape from? Enraged patients? Salivating malpractice attorneys? What? And Dr. Withers goes on:

   “It is clear that extractions are often the first step or building block to growing your practice to incorporating other procedures, such as socket preservation and implants. In today’s economy, coupled with a growing aging population requiring extractions, there is simply no reason to not perform difficult extractions in your practice.”

  

   “Aging population requiring extractions?” That group couldn’t possibly include me. Could it? I better keep my mouth shut.

  

Thoughts for Sale

 

  Politicians say their views are immutable,

   And based on facts and figures irrefutable.

   But should a big donor find them unsuitable,

   Those views will no longer be indisputable.

   The pol, after trying to look inscrutable,

   Will claim that his old views are now refutable

   And will change them to something much more suitable.

   Thus proving he does intend to be dutiful

   To anyone who’ll pay to make him mutable. 

  

Notes from the Home XII

  Went fishing Friday.  I thought I was going fishing on Memorial Day, but being a doofus of some repute, I was mistaken. One mistake, or even a slew of mistakes, does not make a man a doofus. To err, after all, is human. But, I was in possession of all the salient facts, and all I had to do was think about them for a moment, and I would have known that Monday wasn’t the day of the fishing trip.

   You see, I knew the fishing trip was scheduled for June 1, and I knew Monday was Memorial Day. Somewhere along the way, I became convinced that Monday was June 1. That is a run-of-the-mill mistake, one any human, even one with an astronomical IQ, might make. But I also knew that Monday was Memorial Day, and that Memorial Day is always the last Monday of May. A lesser nitwit armed with those facts would have said, “Something is wrong here. I better take a look.” As a world-class nitwit, however, I overlooked all that until the day before Memorial Day. Someone asked me Sunday evening if I was going fishing on Friday. Yes, God worked in mysterious ways to keep me from being memorably embarrassed on Memorial Day. I’m sure the woman at the desk Monday morning would have found it impossible to stifle a guffaw or two, if, after cooling my heels in the lobby for an hour, I’d asked her if the fishing trip had left without me.

   As things turned out, I was spared embarrassment on Monday only to be embarrassed on Friday. The day started without incident. Everyone was in the lobby at the appointed time, and we all got on the bus and headed to Florance Marina, a state park on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. The sky was overcast and the air comfortably cool. I had no difficulty getting the wheelchair onto the pier. And once there, despite the narrow walkway, I managed to maneuver it without ever once coming close to taking an unexpected dip.

   The ranger gave each of the non-fishermen in the group a bamboo pool, and Dennis, the bus driver, distributed worms. The river, the woods, the egrets, the cranes, and the hawks soaring high above, soon had me lost in reverie. Then someone yelled, “Where’s Helga?” I turned to look, and in the process the reverie turned to embarrassment when I knocked my quad cane off the pier. The ranger was nearby and tried to help, but the cane slipped beneath the surface before she could grab it. On the way to the bottom, however, the cane got tangled in my line, and with a little help from the ranger, I reeled it in.

   Then I went back to reverie. But after just a few minutes, it was disturbed by a tug on my line. It was a fish, not much of a fish, maybe five inches long. The ranger said it was a brim. I began thinking of myself as the brim reaper. The other brim must thought that too, because they and all their aquatic friends avoided my line the rest of the day. Several other residents managed to land a brim or two, and one fellow hauled in four. They were all about the same size as mine, but when Penelope called Dennis to ask who caught the largest fish, Dennis said I did. He must have been thinking of the cane. In any event, when I got back, I received a mounted wooden fish about ten times larger than the one I caught.

  

   Friday night I went out to eat. Every couple months, Penelope arranges a Mystery Dinner. The mystery is which restaurant did Penelope make the arrangements with. I didn’t know anything about this until three weeks ago, when Katherine, who is also in a wheelchair, stopped me in the hall. She said she had signed up for the Mystery Dinner but wasn’t going to be able to go and wondered if I wanted to go in her place. I told her I would, and she said she’d let Penelope know. She worried if she erased her name from the sign-up list and I put mine in its place, some of the other wheelchair folks would suspect foul play. Not wishing to get in the middle of a catfight, I kept my mouth shut and my name off the list. Then Friday afternoon, Penelope asked me if I was still planning on going.

   The mystery restaurant was The Loft. It’s downtown, near a lot of the Columbus State facilities, and most of the people in the place where younger than Russ and Bethany. But the food was great – I had grilled salmon – and so was the Guinness.

   After we’d stuffed ourselves and were waiting for Penelope to bring the bus around, a woman in our group came over and asked me for my name. I told her, and then she said, “My name is Ellen, and this is Richard. We’re living in sin.” I’m not sure if she’s telling the truth. On the bus ride back, when Richard said “my wife,” he was clearly referring to Ellen. But when Ellen said “my husband,” she was just as clearly referring to her first husband, who died several years ago. C’est la vie; they’re very nice people, and, let’s face it, sin isn’t such a bad place to live.

  

   The highlight of the week, however, was Thursday, when I Skyped to writing class. I spent last weekend getting some stuff together for a book proposal, which included a number of Russell’s drawings. I scanned the drawings, and e-mailed them to Suzanne, along with the cover letter I’d written. She wrote back with a list of things to improve my letter, and nothing but high praise for Russ’ drawings. And Thursday, Suzanne showed a couple of the drawing to the class.

   Is there anything sweeter than listening to other people praise the work of your kids?

Notes from the Home XI

Strange Encounters of the Geriatric Kind

  

   As I headed out for a spin today, Al was coming in from lunch. I didn’t catch the name of the restaurant, but he said the mackerel was good.

   “What’s your name?” he asked. “I keep wanting to call you Bob, but I don’t think that’s it.”

   I told him my name is Tom. Then he asked where I was from, and I gave him the Readers’ Digest condensed version of the journey that began in Bethel – the Park was added later – and has now brought be to Columbus.

   “I was born here, and I grew up here,” Al said. “Then I went into the military, and I was stationed here a few times. Now I’m back here. I should have gone to Savannah or Fiji. Fiji’s an island in the Pacific. I always wanted to go there. Maybe I will go there. Everything I need will fit in one bag, and I’ll just leave the rest of my stuff in the room. Somebody else can clean it out.”

   He laughed and then asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to do a couple laps around the building. “Be careful,” he said. “And don’t be going down the drive all the way to the road.” I said I wouldn’t. But I lied.

  

   I sat with Herman and Joyce at dinner the other night. Herman is 86, and Joyce can’t be far behind. A retired cop, Herman is tall and looks younger than his years. Even now, he wouldn’t look out of place a policeman’s uniform. But most of the time he’s confused and isn’t sure where he is. Joyce was the head of the Columbus recreation department when she retired. She is in a wheelchair, and she seems to be shrinking even as she sits there. But she is alert and likes to laugh.

   “Are we going home tomorrow?” Herman asked.

   “We are home,” Joyce said.

   “We’re home? I thought we were on the ship.”

   After waiting a minute or so, Joyce turned to me and said, “He thinks he’s on a cruise.”

   I asked her if they’d ever taken a cruise. She said they had gone on ten, maybe twelve over the years. I said I’d never been on one. She said I didn’t know what I was missing; they really enjoyed theirs.

   “Did you like the cruises?” she asked Herman.

   “Yes,” he said.

   “What did you like best about them?”

   “I could take them or leave them.”

   “I said, ‘what did you like best about them?’”

   “Everything.”

   Joyce laughed half-heartedly. You could see it in her eyes; she appreciated the humor in the situation, but she also knew the most important person in her life, the man she loves, her best friend was slipping away.

  

   After I finished my meal and was headed out of the dining room, I stopped to say hello to Evelyn and her tablemates.

   “How are you?” I asked Evelyn.

   “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been better.”

   “How bad can it be? You’ve got your chocolate ice cream.”

   Evelyn loves chocolate ice cream. Everyone knows she loves chocolate ice cream. Her preferred dessert is two scoops of chocolate ice cream. The waiters don’t bother to ask Evelyn what she wants for dessert unless – heaven forbid – there is no chocolate ice cream.

   “Let me tell you something,” Evelyn said. “My momma didn’t like chocolate. We never had any chocolate in the house: no chocolate candy, no chocolate cake, no chocolate ice cream. Nothing. The only time I could have chocolate was when we went to my grandmother’s. I never lived in a house where there was chocolate until I was over twenty years old and living on my own.”

   And that’s why Evelyn has two scoops of chocolate ice cream every night.

  

   Realizing that someday I too will be old, I try to adhere to Mom’s admonition to treat my elders with respect. Sometimes it’s difficult. I was in the laundry room the other day, listening to the washer ca-chunka, ca-chunka its way through the cycle when a woman with the facial features of Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies walked in. There are four washers in the laundry room; two of them were in use. The woman looked over the situation and announced that the washer I was using was her favorite, and she wanted to use it.

   Being the patient man I am, I said it would be available in a few minutes. Being the impatient woman she is, she cozied up to the washer and drummed her fingers on it. After several minutes of drumming, she turned to me with a look of concern and said, “I’ve never known this machine to take this long.” I told her a watched washer never completes the spin cycle. Then she started to lift the lid of the washer. “Please leave that alone,” I said. “It’s almost done.”

   A few minutes later, it was done, and she stood by the washer as though to make sure I didn’t get up and put my underwear through another cycle just for the heck of it. “I need to get up there to get my wash out,” I said. She stood still. I told her again, this time with an unaccustomed sharpness in my voice. She moped her way to a chair while I emptied the washer and dumped my unmentionables in the dryer. Then she put her laundry in the washer she’d been waiting so long for and went back to her room. She must have realized the error of her ways. When she returned it was with some donuts, and she offered one to me. That night at dinner, she made a point of saying “hi” to me as I was going out.

  

   Monday evening I went to a performance of the Columbus Community Orchestra. The orchestra, which is sponsored in part by the school district, is a mixture of high school kids and older musicians, many of them doctors by day, from the area. Twelve doctors from the group call themselves DNR and they did the last third of the show by themselves. And just two of them, one playing saxophone and the other the guitar, did “Here, There and Everywhere.” If you closed your eyes, you would have sworn you were in a smoky club somewhere.

   I sat next to Helga. She was raised in New York City and has been just about everywhere in her eighty-plus years. She’s lived in Europe and Africa. Her stories were a little disjointed, and I had to struggle to make sense of what she was saying, but she certainly has led a fascinating life.