The Teeth of the Matter

"Are you a daytime clencher or a nighttime clencher?"

"I do not clench at all," I think to myself. It is impossible to speak, so I shake my head no. I am in the dentist's office for my semi-annual cleaning, and the hygienist is rooting around in my mouth, asking probing questions while she probes with her pointed metal pick.  I remember that Daniel Craig clenches his jaw and looks perfectly fierce, with all his muscles bulging and electric blue eyes blazing. If I were James Bond, I'd clench too, but I am not.  Doing just fine, totally clenchless, here in the dental chair, thank you.  My teeth have been fine for a long time and I expect that they will continue to be trouble-free for an equally long time into the future.

"Your filling back here looks a little bit concave, more so than the last time you were in.  I'm seeing receding gums, worn teeth, that sort of thing. Sure signs of clenching all through here (pressing my gum with a latex-glove-clad fingertip).  And here (tapping with the metal dental pick). And did you say you were flossing regularly?" The dental hygienist is going over my teeth with a fine-toothed comb, so to speak.  She is going over my teeth with a lot of other things, too, and I am beginning to feel a bit worse for the wear. She asks me to open wide, and my jaw clicks loudly.

"Ah ha. TMJ," she says, "Your jaw muscles are probably clenching to try to adjust to the joint misalignment." She extracts her tools and leans into my view so I can see her a bit better. "Does your jaw sometimes dislocate when you chew bagels or apples?  Hmmm?"  I frown, and doubt is nudging under the doorway, creeping into the room.

I glance quickly at the hygienist who is again stuffing all of her fingers into my mouth all at once.  She is talking to me and expecting answers.  She's scraping, probing, polishing and using her squealing dental tool while looking serene, her teeth perfectly aligned and brilliantly clean.

"I'd like to observe your flossing technique," she says crisply, after removing her hands from my mouth finally.

This is akin to showing Yo-Yo Ma your cello technique.  It will never measure up.  Nevertheless, as requested, I show her what I can do, with plenty of wrist flexion, finger dexterity and long trails of floss flicking about in impressive ways.  She's looking at me skeptically and sighing.  I fail the flossing challenge.  Too little up and down, not enough going around corners, and you're pressing too hard on the gums, she says.  She smiles at me and puts all her fingers and a new length of floss back into my mouth to demonstrate the proper technique.

She is talking at length about taking the time to floss, soft pick, and brush regularly, and she goes on for a while about clenching, grinding, jaw misalignment and tooth wear. I am under the impression that my social life is over for good and that I must chain myself to my bathroom sink to remove every bacterium and bit of food that ever crosses my lips or risk edentulation immediately.

I leave the dental office and slink home in a funk, now slotted into the clenching and bad flossing categories of my hygienist's mind. I'm disappointed because I'd actually been brushing diligently, if not flossing regularly.

At home, I sit down to enjoy my lunch, hopeful that the dental visit will become a dim memory very soon.  I bite into my fruit and feel an odd crunch in my mouth.  Clink! A tooth lands on my plate.  A tooth!  Teeth don't just break off for no reason; they must be provoked.  I don't recall biting down on anything like a rock or a nail (who knows, maybe I'd bitten a dental tool).  I look at the tooth, explore my mouth with my tongue and feel a yawning gap back on the lower left side.  I feel no pain and determine that I've broken a crown, most likely by clenching and exerting force on the thing.  I wrack my brain to try to recall any preceding symptoms of impending tooth loss.  Not a one comes to mind.  I wonder if clenching causes amnesia, too.

"I am falling apart," I think. "Literally, my teeth are falling out of my head."  

Now I begin to wonder if I also sleepwalk, sing off key or frighten small children. The creaking door that has held doubt at bay has been pushed open to reveal a host of unfortunate possibilities. I see that tooth lying innocently on my lunch plate and wonder what I might be in denial about, what else could be ready to blow at any second.  I feel like parts of me are simply time bombs, ready to go off with no warning.

Ugh, maybe I have flat feet and varicose veins, too.  Perhaps all my teeth will gradually land on my plate, one by one, when I least expect them to.  I am not so sure about much of anything.  Jeez, I thought I was healthy, in fine fettle.

I call the dentist's office.  They can fit me in at 9 in the morning. They don't seem very concerned; they don't ask if there is pain (there isn't) or how I'm doing (I'm okay).  Sometimes it's just nice to be fussed over and given a bowl of soup and gently rocked to sleep.  I know I'm fine, and the tooth will be repaired again, so what's the fuss? I cannot climb out of the funk I am in.  I don't want to look at the moon tonight; it could crash to the ground or it will be discovered that the man in the moon is a woman after all, or a cross dresser.

The next morning, I am up for my swim and greet my coaches.  He has an obvious limp and she says she has poison oak all over her back, and it's getting worse.  The limping coach had been wading in a creek, tripped on a rock, lost his shoe and smashed his bare foot on another rock. The poison oak coach's rash sounds gruesome and awful; no one wants that kind of itching.  It must be awful.  Wow, I think.

Knowing they are miserable takes the focus off my cratered mouth and my impending second dental visit to recrown the tooth.  I am not alone in my suffering.  Knowing they are worse off than I am helps my empathy reassert itself and my blue mood of self-pity evaporate.  I look around at the other swimmers arriving and realize I am among friends who accept me the way I am, poorly flossed teeth and all.  We share our war stories but also urge each other to swim a little further, return tomorrow.  We can face our challenges anew now that we have suffered together for a little while.

I wouldn't go so far as saying I'm glad I have a tooth war story to tell, but I can say my friends are a pretty durable bunch, what with hobbled feet, itching rashes and bulging disks.  It may be hard getting old, but it's much harder without friends.

Hangin' With My Swim Buddies

Wow, I miss one day of swimming - Monday, which was a holiday actually - and my swim buddies are all over me.  What was my excuse?  Not anything I'd hang a hat on, that's for sure.  "Where were you, Christine?  We were here....(implying "you were definitely not.")

I guess I've found my tribe.

On a regular weekday, there are workouts available, and each one is slightly different than the others.  My group gets in at 5:30 AM and goes for 90 minutes, doing sets of pulling, kicking, drills, and swims.  Go anywhere in the world, and this is what swimmers will be doing when they work out. The intensity of the 5:30 group is consistently good and people are in the pool to improve, swim hard and get fit.

The 9 AM group is pretty much the same, but they only go for an hour or so.  Some swim fast, but most don't.  Most of them are people I've known for a while, and they're a fun group, but the focus is more on socializing and doing a shorter workout.

Then there are the 11 AM and 12 PM groups.  One or two people do both hours, but most people in those time slots are floppers and don't really care about the workout that's up on the board.  Their disinterest is, unfortunately, contagious.  Attitudes affect others pretty easily in groups; swimmers at noon are  certainly influenced by them.

We who swim in the earliest group are the biggest group and the most intent on getting a solid workout.  The only thing I miss is sunlight, but even that has its downside:  I get more distracted by almost everything when I can see it all; predawn limits my field of vision.  Our pool is outdoors, no roof, so it'd be nice to get some sunshine and a tan which translates nicely to Hawaii when you go.  If you go, that is.  

This is about the one-month mark in the semester, and those who had misgivings about swimming early have quietly dropped away, leaving slightly more room in the pool now.  Each lane still has three swimmers or so, which is a good number for a pool of this size and level of ability.  We have sorted ourselves out by pace, so when we circle in the lane (you have to stay to the right of the black line or end up with a concussion after smacking into someone), we are all swimming at the same pace, less likely to catch up with and pass anyone.

With our routine well established and everyone familiar with each other, it's getting easier to tell when someone doesn't show up who is usually there - like me yesterday.

You know, it's not like they'd sit and wait for me to catch up with them in the workout, because they're almost all faster than I am.  I hold my own and swim hard, but my pace is not quite up to their speed just yet.  Someday, I'll surprise 'em. The point is, they know I'm part of the group, and I'd left a hole by not being there.

It was pleasing in a certain way to know I'd been missed, that I mattered and had created a blank space by my absence.  Team-building, even if it occurs by simply showing up, gradually creates a willingness to make an extra effort.  You sense that the work has an importance that's greater than yourself where loyalty and trust are intrinsic parts of the whole.  Those qualities get you through difficult work sets and challenging efforts that you almost always lighten up on when you're by yourself.

I've heard people say, "I always go harder when I'm swimming with someone (and/or) there's a coach up there on the deck."  Camaraderie and friendship are the most valuable aspect of sports teams, the elements athletes miss most when they retire or a season ends.  The strengthening bonds of friendship reinforce group ethics.  Our group's ethic is don't miss a workout, as I found out.

It was good to be missed, to be included in a group of people I admire and respect.  I'll really hear it if I miss a practice, and believe me they will hear from me if they miss now, too.  The kidding is fun, but the underlying message is:  We're in this together, we need each other, so show up and do your best.    

Thoughts on Community and Loneliness

"Anybody out there?"

I recently had a conversation with a few friends about community, and the question seemed to perplex us:  Where is it exactly?

What do we need a community to be in order to even recognize that it exists?

I swim at a local pool each weekday, something I've done for years.  I've become familiar with the routine at the pool, recognize people, know what I'm supposed to do and not do there.  More than any other place, I consider the people who come and go every morning to be part of my community, but even that is a very loosely structured concept; there is one common goal of maintaining fitness, but we do not engage in each other's lives much beyond that.  A lot of what I understand about my pool community has to do with choice.  I choose to go swim and so do all the other people there.  We find enjoyment and benefit from gathering there.

On the other hand, I also work eight-hour shifts with coworkers eight days out of 14.  That's a lot of time, but I don't feel nearly as interested in defining that place as a community as I do the pool.  The hours I am scheduled to work are not my choice.  The work I do is defined by someone else, and rules are externally applied and enforced.

I also write and seek out writers in an attempt to form a community of sorts, although the community at this point exists almost entirely in virtual space, online.  I choose to write, I enjoy it, but I do not have a physical space in which I meet other writers and write together or speak to one another casually.

So, the question comes up:  Do I have a group of friends or a community?

It's very common to feel lonely, isolated and left out in modern America, which I find incredibly ironic considering our affluence, mobility and freedoms.  It's my opinion that ideas that die for lack of interest represent a huge loss for us all, and they die because those with ideas have no community in which to share.  In addition, the wisdom to be gained by recounting adventures and undertakings often is limited or lost because adventurers have no community that will listen to what they've learned.

My swimming friends say they go to the pool to see who's there, catch up on each other.  They miss it when they're away for any length of time greater than a week or so.  We know each other's strengths, weaknesses, gauge each other's progress or health.  We accept whoever shows up, make room for them. People come, take part, leave.  This may be as close as we modern Americans will ever be to the idealized "village" of yesteryear.  But, what else do we need for it to be a community, really?

Bocelli And Beans With Sun

It's high noon and I'm about up to here with vampire weather.  We throw aside the morning paper and head for the door, eyes fixed on points east sure to be frying in hot sunshine.  I want to throw a shadow, not belong to the cast of Dark Shadows (ancient vampire soap opera from the 70s).

We aim the car at San Juan Bautista, a teensy town in San Benito County just this side of Hollister.  The itsiest of bitsy burgs (pop. 1500 or so) embraces a beautiful Spanish mission built in 1797, dedicated to St. John the Baptist.  It's well worth a special trip, a real gem.  We zoom along for miles under a gloomy sky.  But, we are hopeful.

An hour later, we roll to a halt in front of one of at least a dozen antique stores in the middle of town.  San Juan's charm immediately slows my pace.  Is there sun?  I am relieved to say yes, the sun is out.  I think to take a picture of the bakery across the street, which proves to be my last photograph.

The worst I can say about San Juan Bautista is that it's quiet - drowsy, actually -  but that's exactly why you come to it, so there's really no knock at all.  We realize our stomachs are growling and then fall into a deep sadness when we arrive at Poblanito's on the main street.  It's been closed.  Their mole' sauce was fit for royalty and had no comparison anywhere.  This is a blow, but it's not the end of the world.  We are fine with Jardines de San Juan, a rambling property with a casual and gracious garden dining area under spreading pepper trees, riots of scarlet geraniums and potted plants adorned with flowers.

I order ablondigas soup and tortillas and settle down to wait. We crunch our tortilla chips and savor the brilliant red chile salsa.  The garden begins to have its effect on me, as gardens do, and I notice this place is actually romantic and wonderful looking, especially with bolts of bright sunlight splashing all over the ground.  Red, gold, blue and green umbrellas are rich accents against dark shadows.  I think to myself:  I love shadows! and how peculiar that would sound out loud.

There has been music playing, and the romance factor is fairly undeniable.  We are smiling a lot and cannot button our jackets with all the love we are full of.  I am thinking it's largely the effect of seeing sunshine for the first time in two weeks.  Until...I hear Andrea Bocelli's song begin.  Exactly then, in an ironically perfect swoop and looking immensely pleased, the waiter sets a huge plate of beans down for me to eat with my soup.

Con te partiro, he sings.  I become a fool for love and imagine iconic moments with the music swelling in the background.

This is a song you reserve for hearty food served with loving flourishes, sweeping gestures, penetrating looks deep into each other's souls.  It's operatic, emotional and surely was sung with such intensity by the two singers that their buttons popped off and their hair stood straight up.  Drama is required, demanded, and I feel like obliging.  If I were in Italy, I would not hesitate. But, we are in a Mexican restaurant in a sleepy town just past the edge of a penetrating fog, so mild restraint of one's wild emotions fits better.

In a surge of joie de vivre and misty-eyed romanticism, I salute my friends wherever they find themselves, moments we've shared together or simply written words read across miles.  I take the small caresses of sunshine deeply to heart.  Life is where you feel it, and it was all heart today.  (A special salut to Sharon W., packing for Uganda.  Long may you sing, my friend!)



  

Obsidian Blood Brothers

"My dad gave me this rock. It's obsidian." A hunk of hard, black glass-like rock was being held up before us. Sherry was showing it around with a confidence she usually didn't have. It was elegant. It gleamed with curved wave-like surfaces, had a fine, sharp edge on one side. It looked potent.

"Oh," breathed the class, "show it over here." All our eyes followed it around.

"Indians would make a little cut on their finger, and they would mix their blood and become blood brothers. That means friends forever. You can't break the bond. It's sacred. My dad said so," she intoned.

We were in a group, circled around Sherry, eyeing the obsidian, considering friendship bonds. We thought about the idea of being a blood brother. I wasn't very sure about making my blood flow or who I'd want to be bonded to for all that time. But, I didn't want to be a chicken either.

I wondered how she knew about blood brothers, and I looked at her. She had blue eyes, wore a yellow dress and had white shoes on with little white socks.

"Are you a Cherokee or something?" I asked, "because if you're not a Cherokee, you're not an Indian."

"My dad is, but I'm not." I accepted that as proof enough, but I was uncertain about her standing there with the glittering black rock.

A boy stepped in closer to her. "Lemme see that obsidian."

She handed it to him, keeping her eyes on him. He held it, put it close to his thumb and made a small cut, just like that. A red drop of blood came out like a scarlet bead on his skin. No one moved. Since one person was cut, another had to be cut or there could be no blood brother for the one.

The boy handed the black rock to another boy with an underhanded gesture of his arm, like an easy pitch. The other boy caught it, frowned, looked for a second at the rock and then looked at his own thumb with raised brows and pursed lips. He jabbed quickly and his own scarlet drop formed. The two boys held up their thumbs and pressed them together. Everyone had become very quiet. The boys looked at each other while the thumbs pushed one against the other, and then they released. It was done. They smiled and one slung his arm over the shoulder of the other.

Sherry said, "You're brothers forever now. Say it."

The boys said, "Blood brothers."

"Let's see!" We demanded to see their thumbs, saw the mixed blood smears and looked at the obsidian rock. It was so dark. There was a murmur around the circle. We looked at Sherry. I saw her holding the rock, the black hardness of it and the soft frills and ribbon on her dress, looked at her wide blue eyes and saw freckles below them. Now she's different, I thought. The boys now believed they were best friends, that her rock had given them the new rank as blood brothers, and all of us accepted that the bond was good forever.

"Anyone else want to be blood brothers?" We all leaned in, holding our breath and in the anticipation of being bonded to someone - who? - we were held together, bonded already by mystery and promises of friendship symbolized by a gleaming sharp rock.

The bell rang. The two new brothers strolled back to the class door to line up, and time regained its usual pace. One or two other pairs formed more secretly in the girls' bathroom or behind the playground equipment later that day. I heard about them, but I was more interested in the power of the strange rock Sherry had brought to us. Did it give the boys a sacred bond? What did sacred mean? Ritual and belief had made themselves known to me in real terms for the very first time.