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.