After the Dentist

What happens if you don't get your teeth cleaned for six years?
Now I know: they grow stalactites and stalagmites.

I've gone in for dental emergencies, but between Covid and the expense, I didn't go in for a cleaning since 2018...
Yesterday when I went (dental insurance!), the cracking and grinding sounded as if the hygienist were conducting a mining operation in my mouth. (She is an old person--almost 70--and used old-fashioned tools, said she didn't like ultra-sound.)

Her radio set to NPR was playing weirdly fitting music--not The Mountain King in Peer Gynt, but something similar.
I thought I heard the announcer say "Samuel Barber"--did he create Music to Scale Tartar By?

Speaking of music, in her car yesterday, Marz was playing Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) (album on youtube).
It sounds so visual! A dark foggy alley outside a smoky jazz club.

The way one sense can conjure another reminds me of a sentence Michael recently posted on his blog--"Chekhov Noir" he called it:

"When I stopped at the end of the street to take breath I could hear nothing but the sound of the rain, and somewhere in the distance a watchman striking on a sheet of iron."

--Anton Chekhov, “My Life: The Story of a Provincial"

Crisscross: these words about sounds create a visual image in my mind. As Michael said, "And it has to be imagined in black and white."
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I asked the young dental assistant who took X-rays what he was reading. He's been reading novels I read in high school--
Invisible Man, Slaughterhouse Five, Rubyfruit Jungle, Grapes of Wrath, Catch 22.
It's hard to hold a conversation in the dental chair, so I don't know why he's reading them. He said he's catching up on novels after a couple years reading textbooks. But why these?

Perhaps I'll see him again when I return. Weirdly, I have no cavities (how can this be?), but I do need two (2) crowns...

He also told me he'd liked Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. "Better than the movie," he said, "which was also good."
That book's from 1987, a decade after I graduated high school--it was never on my radar, though I did see the movie.

The assistant is a trans man--is that why he's reading old lesbian novels like Rubyfruit Jungle? I mean, who reads that anymore? I read it almost fifty years ago, when it was radical for a lesbian coming-of-age story to have a happy ending.
"Did it hold up?" I asked.
It did, he said.
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The cleaning took more than an hour, and I left feeling pummeled and sad.
I took myself to a nearby fancy restaurant with a patio-- too expensive for a meal, but in the mid-afternoon nice for a drink and a snack. I had a hard cider but skipped anything that needed chewing.

I'm almost done with American Wife ^ (2008) by Curtis Sittenfeld. I like Sittenfeld--which is a little weird because I don't like her characters. She writes about nice, normal white women of some privilege who don't rock the boat. In this case, a fictional Laura Bush! The one who married George W.

But even though Sittenfeld's writing about what is perceived as normal American life, she's really world-building--Laura Bush's interior life is the dark side of the moon.

These types of women--like the characters Mary Tyler Moore played-- are hard--remote and unsympathetic–– for me, but Sittenfeld helps me understand them better. Though I don't exactly like them better, I judge them less harshly, and I like understanding . . . and seeing into my misunderstanding.
Your Cognitive Biases Explained.

These women are the ones who relate to the older brother in the Tale of the Prodigal Son--the one who stayed home and did well and good.
They resent their father's love and forgiveness of their wastrel of a younger brother.
My sister is one such. I don't understand her very well. In the parable, I'd be the prodigal. (Though in our actual lives, my father always preferred my sister.)

(Recently I read (where?) someone point out that the stories of undeserved love and forgiveness in the Bible, and elsewhere, seem unfair... until you need that stuff.)

I don't like Sittenfeld's characters, but I enjoy how she shows their inner workings, like those cross-section, cutaway illustrations of a complicated machine. "Oh, that's how that works! The fuel rod is shielded..."

I'm interested to read Sittenfeld's novel Rodham, which imagines Hillary's life if she hadn't married Bill Clinton.
Sittenfels's a good writer--smart, imaginative, never rings false. You can imagine her process of imagining, which is enjoyable.

Like a George Miller movie--the imagined details of Furiosa/Mad Max world--I can imagine imagining them, though I would never work on such a scale (or work so hard, either).

I loved Fury Road but don't feel like putting myself through the new Furiosa. Mad Max world movies are pummeling. Even though Marz told me there's a STUFFED BEAR in it! Carried by bad guy Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).

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Biking from the dentist with my bright-green shoulder bag (2 photos above) slung across my back, I heard a woman in a car call out, "I like your bag".

I wonder if she recognized the patch I sewed on. It's the salamander from the movie of Fahrenheit 451--in the book too, salamanders (and the phoenix) are badges of the book-burning firemen. Below: François Truffaut, directs Julie Christie and Oskar Werner
The movie has wonderful ingredients, but it gets terrible reviews and I've never seen it.