Going to the Dentist

I need to find a dentist. This is harder than you might think. I’ve gone to the same dentist almost 40 years. Well, the same dental practice. I outlasted one and when he retired he passed me off to his chosen replacement.

The dentist came with my husband. You might call it a package deal. One Saturday before we got married Beaven was showing me how he wanted his laundry done (this was the 60’s, remember) and I was looking for a dentist so he gave me his guy’s phone number.

When I told my mother-in-law I had an appointment with Dr Lowe, their family dentist, she told me I could expect a compliment the minute he walked in the door. She said he always complimented her on her complexion or her dress or her perfume or something like that. I couldn’t wait to go. The dentist walked in and introduced himself and I sat back and waited. I opened my mouth and he peered in. “Wow, you’re a really good brusher.” It was downhill from then on. I looked on the folder that held the entire family’s dental records. There were Beaven, Blanche, George all in the same folder. And on the tab, their names were all in ink. My name was in pencil.

However, I fooled them all. I outlasted Blanche and George both. I even outlasted the dentist.

Some of my favorite memories were in his office. It was the only place I found peace and quiet when my kids were little. I would sit in the dentist’s office twice a year like clockwork. He had an amazing array of magazines, even recent ones that covered news of presidents who were actually still in office. For those stolen moments of calm all I had to do was sit still. It was the only place in my life that nothing more than sitting still was asked of me. This, plus the time in the chair with the fluoride treatment were just about the only moments of my life that were quiet and serene. I loved to go to the dentist.

In spite of being “a really good brusher” I ended up with enough dental work to provide me with more than my share of serenity in that chair. I think I have more crowns than the Queen of England.

When we received a letter in the mail announcing his retirement, I swear to God, I teared up. But, the new dentist was even better. This guy wore enough surgical garb to make me think I was having a heart transplant. They took my blood pressure and asked about my medications. Our family MD wasn’t as interested in my vital signs as my new dentist. I liked this guy. Even better, the hygienist was a guy named Igor. Who can resist a dental hygienist with a name like that? I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

But, sadly, they started moving their offices westward about ten years ago. First to Preston Hollow, then Carrollton and finally Frisco. All the while I kept moving eastward. I finally had to tell them it just wouldn’t work.

So now I have to find a new dentist. Beaven already has one but I don’t like him because he doesn’t wear gloves. Now, I know that when I started out with Dr. Lowe he didn’t wear them, nobody did back then. And I never died from Dr Lowe not wearing gloves. I guess I’ve developed this tiny little hangup.

There’s not much else to report here. There’s no punch line to the dentist story. We’ve been rained in all day and we’ve been bored enough to have a whole serious conversation about something really mundane like napkins. I’m not sure it was even napkins. It was such a forgettable conversation that I’ve already forgotten it.

So I will keep this mercifully short. Tune in next week. Maybe I’ll have a more interesting life by then. Or check last week's post. I added another picture of the ladies at my party.

Five Part Harmony

I had me a big ole party last weekend. Like I said last week, I wasn't celebrating that my husband was out of town-- it’s because he hates parties and I love them. So I wait until he's gone then have a party.

Beaven ended up having almost as much fun as I did. He came home with a suitcase full of electronic odds and ends, swooning over $3 connectors and bragging that he didn’t pay shipping charges for them. I’m not sure what he calls the airfare to get him to Ohio and the hotel bill. Apparently, not “shipping.”

In the meantime my party was about as close to the perfect party as I’ve gotten in a while. My friends really have to love me to come to my parties now. We’re a 90-minute drive from Garland and gas isn’t cheap anymore. The twelve women who came were a really special bunch.

Melanie and Miatta came the night before and we took the grand tour of downtown Winnsboro, which is about four blocks. But my sleepy little hometown has gone through a boom lately for some reason that I haven’t figured out. I think everyone else in town is as surprised as I am. There’s hardly a week that goes by without some sort of outdoor “thing”, music concerts, mostly. For a small town in Texas to open four trendy new restaurants in the remodeled 1920’s buildings and keep the restaurants full is a huge accomplishment. We ended up eating Greek food at a wine bar, complete with homemade dolmas and pita bread – and yes, this is TEXAS!! - And yes, the biggest church in town is the Baptist church and there’s a wine bar in town. Go figure.

I love to have Melanie and Miatta come. They’re both Christian Educators in different churches and they possess an array of knowledge that I savor whenever I can tap into that reservoir. We not only talked into the night but about halfway through the conversation I got on the Internet on the living room computer looking up books and facts. These are my kind of chicks. Who could have predicted one day you would need a personal computer for a conversation? I ended up with an order from Amazon and they took a couple of free books home with them. I love to offer magazines and books I’m finished with as party favors. It makes house cleaning so much easier.

Then Saturday morning the rest of the group came to join us. We ate ourselves silly and sat outside watching the birds and swapping stories we can’t tell in church. (The hummingbirds have finally arrived…a little later than usual.)

But by far the highlight of the party was the Angel Band.

Debbie, Kat, Nancy and Shirley started singing together about five years ago and I love the sound they put out. It’s straight from heaven. I started recommending venues for them and talking them up to friends in other churches. This got them invited to sing at other churches and I declared myself their manager.

I love having them sing at my house because a small room sounds even better than a cavernous church sanctuary. At our church the sound gets swallowed up no matter what kind of microphones they use. By far the best way to hear them is in someone’s living room surrounded by friends in a mellow atmosphere with the soft sounds gently massaging our souls. But they told me I couldn’t bill this as a concert; it would be more like a rehearsal that we might overhear. So they sat on the edge of the room in the shadow of the hallway, quietly strumming the guitar and having their own separate conversation and thinking through the music. Periodically we would notice them singing softly which caused our usual boisterous gossip to stop so we could hear them. This turned it into a tiny and unorganized concert of sorts.

After all of the other guests left the Angel Band stayed to practice a bit more. They were the last to leave. They stood by their cars and I knew they hated to leave each other. Since Shirley moved out of town it’s been harder for them to get together. At the annual Women’s Retreat in February for the first time in years two of them couldn’t make it and the other two tried to sing without them. But it just didn’t work. Whenever even one of them is missing from the group it’s not the same.

We talked about that. Everyone agreed that it changes the sound more than just the absence of the other voices. When the four of them are singing together they are joined by something else that enhances their sound and give it a voice that is beyond what it technically should be. It occurred to us that this is the Holy Spirit joining in with their songs. We decided to call it Five Part Harmony.

Houses

It’s Graduation Season--the time when advice to young people flows like a magnificent fountain of castor oil. We have a couple of high school graduates and three or four college graduates at our church this month. But we also have an ordination service in a couple of weeks and when I count them I realize our congregation has two members plus a handful of friends attending seminary. Soon we will be covered up in ordination services. What a harvest!

So here’s my sage advice, gleaned from a lifetime of experience. I can sum it up in one sentence: Never buy a big house.

Beaven and I have now lived in four houses over a period of almost 40 years. I know what I’m talking about.

The house we raised our kids in was about 1400 square feet. It had four tiny bedrooms. When we bought it the kitchen was so small we had to set up a table in the living room if we had company for dinner. My brother and sister-in-law lived in another house so small that when it was time to take the Thanksgiving turkey out of the oven I had to stand up and move my chair into the other room so she could open the oven door. You have to love each other if you live in a house that small.

When the house got cluttered with 20 years of “stuff” I suggested we might throw some things away but Beaven’s answer was to build a bigger house. Some men will do anything to get out of cleaning house. So we built a huge house—big enough that Beaven would never again in his life have to throw anything away.

The house was too big. The master bathroom was drafty; I felt like the Beverly Hillbillies and started showering in the guest bath. We lasted a couple of years and decided to move out here to the weekend cabin we’ve had for years. We solved the “stuff” problem by getting three storage buildings, one of which is bigger than the house. We have room for stuff but not an extra inch in our living quarters. It fits us perfectly.

I helped a friend moved out of her house once following a bitter divorce. Her nine-year old daughter told me she had never really liked the house anyway. It was too big, she told me. I realized the kid had found a nugget of truth in a hard situation.

In other news, Beaven is going to his annual Nerd Convention in Ohio. I think it’s some sort of ham radio thingy but I always picture it in my mind as a bunch of pocket-protector wearing geeks finding ecstasy over a grab bag of transistors and resistors. Whenever he goes out of town I always give a party. Not because I’m happy that he’s gone but I’m a party animal and he’s not. So I do parties without him.

I used to paint the house without him, too. He went out of town a lot when he worked for the TV station so I had my choice between painting or partying, whichever suited my mood. When I worked on the house I always called Linda Peavy to come help. Linda always had an opinion when it came to decorating a house and I usually agreed with her. Together we were fearless and decisive in a way that Beaven wasn’t. If I had an idea to take down all the curtains in the house and replace them with blinds Linda would agree and off we went. We were especially good at wallpaper. We called ourselves “Mertz and Ricardo” and whichever one’s house we worked on got to be Lucy.

Linda does not believe it when they say the paper is pre-pasted. She always adds paste. Her wallpaper never comes off. Never. By a strange twist of fate my daughter and son-in-law bought the Peavy’s house when Linda moved to a bigger one. (Not too big, though—she and Carl are still happily married.) The first thing Emily wanted to do was take the teenage-boy-themed wallpaper off one of the bedrooms to use it for a nursery. She wanted clouds of serenity and not a hunting motif. I told her the paper would be hard to get off and suggested she paint right over it but she wouldn’t listen to me. They rented one of those steamer things to take the paper off. She scrapped it with a paint scrapper. She used a variety of harsh solvents, which removed her fingerprints but not the paper. It took a month's worth of time and a dictionary full of profanity before Emily understood that Linda Peavy’s wallpaper does not come off. Emily finally realized what she was up against but she had passed the point of no return and had to keep going. She couldn’t paint over it and had to stick in there with removing the paper. It was a nightmare. I’m not sure the fluffy white clouds were worth it but eventually Emily finished.

Then Emily and Steve moved to Ohio for a couple of years and sold the Peavy’s house to some innocent stranger who knew nothing about wallpaper. That was the time period when every single person in our whole family moved in a gigantic game of fruitbasket turnover. We moved out of the little house to the big house, my parents moved into the little house and rented it from us, Elizabeth moved back from Virginia and into an apartment, then we sold the big house and moved out here to the country, my parents moved into a retirement center and Elizabeth bought a house. I get dizzy just remembering it. Finally, Emily and her family moved back to Texas and into the little house she grew up in. Everyone ended owning each other’s furniture and when the dust settled we were all where we belonged.

The first thing Emily did when she moved into the house was announce that she intended to change the wallpaper. It was old and outdated and she had always hated it. I took a few minutes to figure out how I would break the news to her that Linda Peavy helped me put that paper up. But nothing would soften the blow. I’ve never heard such a sad groan in my life.

But they’ve been happy in the house. She just paints right over the paper and the house fits them perfectly.

PS: miscellaneous updates you might be interested in:

I am now www.JaneEls.com I don't know what I will do with this but it makes me feel cool. And it's easier to remember than the address of this blog. If you type in the dot com you will end up here at the blog.

Also, to update my friends on my Project Risk, I can announce that I got my Obama bumper sticker in the mail and put it on my bumper. But another risk has surfaced. I put the sticker on crooked and now everybody will think I'm a klutz. Plus now I see that I need one of those yellow Support Our Troops stickers so I can be clear that I may be liberal but I'm not a communist. This thing just gets more complicated every day.

Risk part two

I found out what I was risking when I decided to put a political bumper sticker on my car. I ordered one on-line last week. I haven’t even received it in the mail yet and the risk is already coming home to roost. Silly me that I didn’t anticipate what would follow.

I'm on everybody’s mailing list. Thankfully, nobody calls anyone on the phone anymore so the mail is either in my box beside the road or on my computer. Easy enough to ignore. But how to you ignore it when the IN box says I have mail from Barack Obama or Michelle Obama? Wouldn’t you open it? The kicker was when Caroline Kennedy sent me a note. It reminded me of the times I get a letter from Jimmy Carter wanting money for Habitat for Humanity. It makes us mortals feel so special to get mail from people like that.

One of our family secrets is that Beaven’s mother was a rabid,foaming-at-the-mouth conservative. She had a gun, combat boots and membership in the John Birch Society. Needless to say, she was a Goldwater supporter. That got her on a mailing list back in the days when mail only came from the guy walking around the neighborhood who put pieces of paper through a flap that led directly onto the hall floor. Remember that kind of mail?

Blanche always sounded like she and Barry Goldwater were close personal friends because he had written her a letter.

Sometimes I miss old Blanche. She was one of the strongest women I’ve ever met. She could out-drink a sailor and out-cuss a truck driver. She died of cancer after smoking a pack or two of cigarettes every day for 50 years. By the time she died, it had spread everywhere in her body and you could tell she was in undescribably pain. The night she died she cooked a pot of beans for dinner, put the leftovers in the fridge, cleaned the kitchen then went into the bedroom and laid down and died. They don’t make women like that anymore.

I have always regretted that I couldn’t make a relationship with her work out. My daughters remind me that there weren’t enough medications in the world for either of us to make that happen.

I’m rambling and last week I promised you better words today. I must have spring fever. We’re expecting rain today and we need to mow before it starts.

So here’s where you can find something great to read today. Go to Nancy’s blog. Forgive me for outing you, Nancy. But I’ve got to offer these folks something decent to read. And the stuff you’re writing is too good to keep it to myself and not share.

www.positively-indecisive.blogspot.com

Her entry today on The Want To is a classic. And for those of us at the church picnic Sunday the photo is a reminder of how much fun we’re having at First Presbyterian Church in Garland. Would that each of us climbed the ladder of faith with such ease and earnestness as my friend in Nancy's photo.