On collective vulnerability, broken teeth
October thoughts
This rainbow snuck up on me this weekend and it’s too nice not to share.
When my dentist found out I was a writer he gave me a pen.
This is a dentist who understands the affections of a writer, I thought to myself as I pocketed the pen, a nice, capped one with a comfortable rubbered tip and generous rollerball glide.
The pen is bronze-coloured and, as I later discovered, branded. My dentist’s name, address, and phone number are printed along the barrel.
This, too, is a dentist who understands the power of targeted marketing.
I was at the dentist yesterday morning because I had a dental blip. The night before I was eating cereal in bed and at some point, during this beloved /disgusting evening ritual, the back of my front tooth broke and slid off. The enamel, heretofore assumed sturdy, shattered and fell, falling off the main structure like a serac slides off the surface of a mountain.
No one was injured in this catastrophic failing of my enamel —pretty sure I swallowed it —and you couldn’t see the damage by looking at my tooth from the front. But I could feel the jagged remnants of what remained of the back of my tooth with the tip of my tongue. The sensitive papillae were distressed by the texture and kept going back to the damaged area to verify that the smooth porcelain they had spent decades gliding over was gone forever, replaced by the texture of broken crockery.
The tongue remembers. The tongue does not forget. (Read this little tongue explainer from a McGill researcher if you don’t believe me.)
And so, first thing in the morning, I called the dentist to get my tongue some relief.
Repair took about an hour to accomplish and the dentist and the dental hygienist, who had the patient demeanour of a woman who knows far more than her ancillary position suggests and could be forgiven if she just said, oh, give me that drill already, were kind and chatty.
It’s interesting to have strangers’ fingers in your mouth especially when they belong to two people taking turns clucking about the overall state of your teeth.
Do you grind your teeth? The dentist asked me.
Do I ever, I answered.
Do you drink carbonated water or lemon water?
Yes.
Hmm.
Do you eat a lot of sugar?
Yes, I eat a lot of sugar.
And for some reason I added: Because I’m a kid.
I don’t know why I said this and felt immediately ridiculous but neither the dentist nor the hygienist seemed to notice the absurdity of a middle-aged woman expressing such a skewed sense of self. Maybe that’s because they were too busy stretching my lips to MAD magazine-like proportions and counting occlusions.
When I got home, I had to make up for lost work time, pick up my kid from school, and prepare to start my evening job. In between, I caught up on everything happening in the world. All the horrible human catastrophes that portend more to come. I listened to all the podcasts and read all the live updates and I scrolled.
I don’t find any peace in anger and I’m angry. Almost all the time. The endless challenge is to see my my way clearly despite that anger and the anger of others, which seems to come through in an endless stream as you scroll. I am struggling to behave as I want to behave almost every minute of every day.
To combat my own anger and cycle of endless reacting, I’ve been tapping other necessary emotions and restorative states of mind.
I’ve been reading poetry again and watching TV and movies recommended by people I respect and admire. I’ve been listening to people who have knowledge to impart. I’m such an inveterate loudmouth; but I do love to listen and be inspired by better minds.
I’m seeking catharsis in art, too, and I’ve been lucky of late. Especially because what I’ve watched restores some balance to my mind, reminding me how often I draw a despairing moral from failure, conflict or disappointment in my own life, especially, rather than look more tenderly at the circumstance and find a better, more complete thought.
A TV miniseries I loved for its tender POV is the BBC limited series The Sixth Commandment. I read about the series in the summer and bookmarked it as something I wanted to see whenever it landed here. (I watched it on iTunes but I’m not sure if you can see it here without paying for it. ‘Check your local listings’ as they used to say.)
The miniseries dramatizes the crimes of British conman and convicted killer Ben Field, who targeted elderly people, insinuating himself in their lives, homes, and hearts for money.
It sounds grim and it is but it’s not grim at all, too. It’s beautifully done and with heart. I give all credit to the screenwriter, Sarah Phelps, because she tells this story with such care and concern for the humanity of the drama’s central characters – the people targeted by Field, Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore Martin. The series doesn’t exaggerate or exploit their vulnerability but reclaims it for them as a necessary aspect of their humanity – their longing for love and connection is what makes them recognizably good even if it’s also what makes them prey.Â
It’s also what makes them just like you and me.
I cried during the finale. Not like a kid who’s hurt. But like a middle-aged woman that needed to be reminded she has a human heart, too.
