Somewhere in the Washington Cascades

My Tooth

For the past ten days I have thought almost exclusively about my tooth.  First there was pain, diffuse pain involving the entire right side of my face whenever I drank hot coffee.  I went to my dentist and was referred to an endodontist, who couldn’t find any pathology on the first visit, but on my second visit, when I could finally localize the pain, he said the culpable tooth was cracked, and that after I spent $3,000 on a root canal and a crown it might only last a year.  The option was to have the tooth extracted.  I chose extraction.

Yesterday a very nice oral surgeon pulled my tooth, with a lot of cracking and crunching sounds.  Today I am writing this with an ice pack on my jaw, a pain in my head, and a funny metallic taste in my mouth.

This problem has given me some time to read.  I finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction account of the lives of people living in a Mumbai slum near the airport, behind the huge billboards advertising tile floors that are beautiful forever.  It is an excellent book, very well written, but I liked A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry even better.  The latter book is a novel, and the author creates his characters as he wants them to be, unrestrained by the truth.

In the 1980s I subscribed to a book series from Time-Life books, works that were, in the editors opinion, important and under-appreciated.  Some of them I read, some have sat on my bookshelf for 30+ years.  Now I am reading one of them, Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary, the story of a Nigerian rogue in a British colony.  Having spent a year in Nigeria in 1977-1978, I can identify with so much of what is going on in the story - the parallel but separate lives of the whites and the locals, the entirely different interpretations of the same event by different characters.

Nonnie and I went to a play the other night, Waiting for Godot.  It was an excellent presentation in an intimate theater - we were in the fourth row center - but the play itself was disappointing, boring.  We have a tickets to four more plays, all by Shakespeare, which should be better.

Blanche

Blanche Crook

My father married Blanche in 1977; my own mother had died shortly after Nonnie and I were married in 1976.  Blanche was my ‘wicked’ stepmother and grandmother to our children. My father died in 1990, and for the next 24 years she continued to be close part of our family.

Blanche died last Monday at the age of 93. She was a wonderful woman, kind and loving, with nothing bad to say about anyone - the exact opposite of  the’ wicked’ stepmother stereotype.  She showed us how to grow old gracefully, how to maintain interest in the outside world, in other people. Although she had many health problems she did not complain, she asked about other people and their their well-being, their dreams and goals.

Over the years Blanche took many wonderful trips with us. Several times she and my father came to visit us in Aruba, and after he died she joined us on a trip to Hong Kong.  Colin and Derek were so excited, waiting for her in the arrival hall of the old Hong Kong Airport.

She had a wonderful smile, and seemed genuinely glad to see people. She was a real people person. The day before she died she was asking us to make sure that her lunch dates were all canceled. But she was old and frail and she told me she was ready to die. When her time came she simply closed her eyes and rested.  I sat with her all day in her hospital room, and at the end of the day I held her hand as she took her last breath.   Her absence creates a huge hole in our lives now.  We miss her terribly.