The dentist visit today was funny. The last time I went was about a year ago, and at the time I had not seen a dentist in 7 or 8 years. I was sort of nervous about it at the time, but when the dentist looked into my mouth he, in a rollicking kind of voice, said “Niiiiiiice!” and then proceded to sing praises of the layout of my mouth, saying it was laid out like a textbook perfect mouth.
That previous dentist from 7 or 8 years previous made similar comments, even inviting his assistants to come gather around my pried-open mouth to behold the wonder of my glorious teeth.
Today’s visit brought further evidence that my mouth is a force of nature. I have not flossed in a year, and some nights I forget to brush at all, but the teeth are still exquisite. This dentist even questioned the 2 tiny fillings I have, suggesting they were so small as to have been unneccessary.
And he remembered me from last year. He remembered how I had not seen a dentist for many years, but how everything was just fabulous inside. He did not specifically remember saying “Niiiiiice!” but he said that it sounded like something he would say.
OK, then. Next month it’s the retinal specialist who will gouge out my eyes with little spoons and stick needles into me to see if the macular degeneration symptoms have progressed. That will probably not be so fun.
I just spent several hours with a friend of 11 or so years and his girlfriend. Joe lives in Chicago now, Rachel lives in Brooklyn. Joe and I knew Keri, and while I told some about my afternoon at Bryant Park with Keri’s sister a couple of weeks ago we did not dwell on the subject. We ended up talking a lot about how interesting the Internet was in 1993 and 1994, an erotic rising of text from invisible sources — erotic not necessarily having a sexual connotation, just the earthly sensations of being alive and having no way to communicate that fact but through text.
The Internet is an interesting place today, too. We were not waxing nostalgic or lamenting the present with rose-tinted versions of the past. We were just talking was all.
And we had the bar to ourselves. That was classic. Three friends at a bar with nowhere else to go.
We sat in my car. They were impressed with its luxuriousnesses. I showed them that Emergency Identification card my dad left in the car, telling whoever might find him in a roadside that he had a pre-arranged funeral at a certain Daytona Beach funeral home. I also told them a story I had not told anybody before:
On my last trip to see dad in Daytona he drove me out to a far-away gas station to get cheap gas, probably not calculating how he burned enough gas getting there to make the 10¢ per gallon cost saving irrelevant. As we left the gas station he calmly and with seeming full awareness drove straight up an exit ramp for I-95, into oncoming traffic with trucks and all sizes of vehicles moving at 60-70mph.
It happened slowly and deliberately, and he seemed so aware of his actions that I didn’t question them. Dad was driving, and when dad was driving he was in charge as I sat comfortably in the passenger seat. This was where we had our great adventure up to Sneedville, Tennessee, and I liked being in that seat.
The driver is always in charge.
I saw trucks and vans and cars of all sizes veering around us, honking their horns with the doppler effect invoking itself in that wheezing, sinusy, oh-so-special way.
The gust of traffic receded and dad turned the car around, muttering through his cigarette “I thought this was the Goddamn road” but never commenting on the matter again.
I remember thinking: “This is it.” And I didn’t care. It was calm, like anything.
