"Moon Sang Her Story into the Blue"
Last week I discovered that I can still change a tire. I was quite pleased to know that I can still consider myself tough enough.
Wanting, wishing, pretending to be a mermaid in a six-foot across, three-foot-deep wading pool. Trying to get siblings, friends, neighbor kids to move as fast as possible around the edge to get a current going... and then being able to float in the swirl, feet held together, imagining.
The beginning of yesterday's crown replacement. It was no fairy tale.
When the Novocain kicked in, I started to shake. Knitting couldn't happen. Put in earbuds to listen to a book for distraction. Grinding, drilling, scraping, suctioning, all of it too loud. My eyes were leaking from behind the sunglasses. The dentist worried (I know there are a LOT of words about my dental anxiety in my chart). I assured her that it was just dry eyes from allergies, and it was.
And then the Novocain wore off in one spot. It was readministered, and again, and again, and again, I couldn't count how many times, it happened over and over. By the second hour, I was crawling out of my skin. Tapping fingers in random rhythms trying to focus on something else, white knuckling when I could, imagining stitching (needle in, out, thread pulling through, repeat... ), reciting the states in alphabetical order, and then I heard her talking about the temporary crown that she was putting in.
"TEMPORARY?! I have to come back?!"
More leaking eyes off and on over the next hour. I told her it was the dry air, so as to move things along, but it wasn't.
Afterwards, I learned that redheads often have a hard time with Novocain. I was barely an auburn before the gray, but Dad was a childhood redhead, his sister life-long, my nephew, and others in the family reaching back to the O'Neill clan in Ireland. Who knew?
I came home and rested in the garnet moonlight of one of Jude's moons.
Later there was lamenting to K about how awful it was, how I hate feeling weak. He says to let it go, that teeth are my Achilles' heel. It's true, but I still wanted to bite him.
