Planning my getaway

I remember a moment several months ago, sitting outside the care home with Mom in the dark. Even masked-up and six feet apart, we did a pretty good job of communicating. Mom asked me how things were going. I said, "Situation normal," and rolled my eyes. She didn't know what that meant. I explained. I'm sure she used to know, because she was married to a former Marine for over fifty years. However, dementia has a way of dispersing brain cells, and most likely some of the ones that evaporated from her head were the few that would have provided a definition of SNAFU. 

All that to say, situation normal. Mom may be gone, but I'm not, and life continues. I am not the boss of circumstances, no matter how I try to pretend I can predict or control what occurs. I don't fret a lot about it anymore. I have my multiple branching contingency plans (if this happens, then that; if that happens, then this!). I brush my teeth, scrub my skivvies in the tub, shop on Mondays, and continue to dismantle the detritus of my life so I can resurrect it somewhere in Arizona.

It's hard to plan for some things, though. Toothaches. Car problems. We all know teeth and cars go gunnysack sometimes, and we all know they don't heal themselves, although in the specific case of strange noises in cars, it helps to have a working radio.

Twenty-four years ago, shortly after I moved back to Portland from Los Angeles, one of my lower molars began to ache. I'd had a crown put on the tooth before I moved and figured the job was done. But teeth choose their moments to wake up and sing. I got a referral from a friend to a dentist, who admired the crown and then proceeded to break it when he drilled through it to give me a root canal. So, a root canal and two crowns later, you'd think the job would be done. Over the years, however, that tooth never gave up. The first dentist retired and died and a new dentist took over the practice. Every six months as I lay captive in the comfy chair, the new dentist would say, "Any teeth giving you trouble?" I would reply, "Well, just that one that refuses to die." Ha, ha, the dentist would laugh (her teeth were perfect). "The x-rays don't show anything," she would say, shaking her head.

The zombie tooth came to sluggish life a couple weeks ago, providentially coinciding with my six-month cleaning. I reclined in the chair, feeling awkward and wrong at being so close to other humans without a mask on my face. When the dentist arrived, I said, "This tooth! It's alive, I tell you, alive!"

She poked and prodded, gave me some things to bite on. The tooth didn't hurt much but I had this persistent belief that it shouldn't hurt at all, seeing as how it was supposed to be dead. 

"Well, root canals don't last forever, you know," she said. What? That is the first time I'd ever heard that. A dead tooth should remain dead, they should not be able to come back to life. This is not the dental equivalent of The Walking Dead. "I'll give you a referral to an endodontist," she said. Apparently she doesn't do root canals. 

As soon as I got my stimmy, I made the appointment with the endodontist. Her office was in a half-vacant building in SE Portland, not far from an area rife with shootings, conveniently located near the freeway for quick getaways. I was the only patient in the place, probably by design. The office looked like a 1990s hotel, all gray tile, gray carpet, and recessed strip lighting, very moody and mod. 

The endodontist was a tiny woman, much younger than me. She peered at a monitor nearby showing the CT scan of my jaw. I took a quick glance from the chair. I'd never seen teeth in such fine resolution. Those dental x-rays you see on your dentist's screen? Amateur hour. It's like the difference between microfiche and Blu-Ray Hi-Def plasma TV. 

"Wow, is that my tooth?"  

"Lay back. Let's see this thing." She put a light on her head and a microscope over my mouth and came at me with something shiny and sharp. "You have a rather small mouth."

"Yow!" I yelped around her fingers. 

"Nine millimeters," she said, oblivious to the tear edging out of my left eye. She jammed the probe in again. "Yep, nine millimeters. It looks like when they did the original root canal, they missed a little spot here in the back. And now the tooth has grown away from the jaw, leaving this large pocket, which has been infected, probably for a while."

I hoisted myself out of the chair and followed her into the room with the CT scanning machine. The room was set up like a movie theater, with several rows of folding chairs facing toward a large computer monitor, on which I recognized my CT scan. I imagined the endodontist and her staff unwinding after a long day by watching movies of suffering patients enduring remedial root canals.

She took a blank CD from a stack and inserted it into the computer. As the file transferred, we sat shoulder-to-shoulder on folding chairs in front of the screen. "See that dark gap there? That is where the tooth has detached. It's empty space, nothing there."

I gazed resentfully at my delinquent tooth.

"We could try to save it, but it probably wouldn't work." I turned and looked at her eyes because that is all you can see when a person has a mask on. She turned and looked at my eyes for the same reason. So there we were staring deeply into each other's eyes. I'm thinking a succession of thoughts: she has nice eyes, what the hell, Dr. Jim!, and why am I not more upset, I'm going to lose a tooth. 

"I'll send my report to your dentist," she said. "Here's a copy for you to take to Arizona."

The receptionist graciously gave me copies of the many forms I had filled out and signed in the waiting room promising not to sue if the remedial root canal went sideways. (Ha, ha, all moot, but I still wanted those copies.) She took my check for $330, and I took my throbbing jaw home, dismayed at the pain. No more half-dead zombie tooth. It's simmered down a little but I'm not back to baseline. Almost a week later, I'm still cutting my food into tiny pieces, cooking it to smithereens, and swallowing it whole. Even sneezing is dangerous—do you mash your teeth together when you sneeze? Right. I didn't think I did, either. 

This tooth wakes up and salutes every four hours. Tylenol and Advil are tiding me over until my dental consult on Tuesday. I think I know what will happen then. My lovely dentist (who specializes in cosmetic surgery, not root canals) will cluck her perfect teeth and express her sorrow that I'm leaving town before I can buy an implant. If all goes well, I expect I'll be taking antibiotics soon and by the end of April I will be driving out of town with a new hole in my head. I'm not afraid. I've had braces. 

On the bright side, today I took my Focus through the drive-through car wash for its annual scrub. I always clench up at first, afraid to take my foot off the brake and surrender to the giant maw. Once I relaxed and let go, the giant felt fingers and rivers of white suds worked their magic. I felt calmer and my car came out minus one layer of dirt and moss. Next task is to vacuum the interior. I want the old thing to look its best when I trade it in for my getaway car. 

Time to put on my infinity hat

Mom started keeping a journal in 2005, when she was seventy-six years old. I scanned it into a pdf file last night. Each entry was just a few lines long, mostly centering on the weather and her garden. Defrosted freezer received equal weight with July is half over already! She noted some major moments in her life and in the lives of her four children, mainly the passing of people and pets, but most of her journal chronicles the weather. Few entries offer insight into her mind, which makes this one notable: In 2006, she wrote, Some days fly by—others crawl. Sometimes I wonder why I'm still here—What am I supposed to do with myself? She answered her own question: to be useful. 

She led a supremely useful life, in my opinion. She kept lifelong friendships with high school chums, nursing school classmates, neighbors, fellow librarians . . .  As an bubbly extrovert, she spread love and hugs to just about anyone she met. Dementia stole her outgoing talkative nature and turned her into a confused, cautious, reticent old woman. Her journal is filled with exclamation points almost right up to the last entries. In 2015, she wrote Growing older. No car. Carol does financial and food. The next entry was in 2016: Just maintaining! In January 2017, her final journal entry: Cold, very cold. 

A few months later, she admitted she couldn't live alone anymore. We moved her into the retirement home. She had her computer but stopped using it. She had her TV but forgot how to work the remote. She forgot how to use the bathroom. She forgot how to think. 

I postponed scanning her journal because I didn't want to feel sad. Last night, I scanned it without reading it. Instead, I listened to the news and let my hands go through the routine motions of flipping pages and pressing buttons. Before I sent the pdf file to my siblings, I finally took time to read through her entries. 

I hear her voice in her Farmers' Almanac style entries. She sounds like the mother I used to know before dementia took her mind away. I wish she'd written more, left more of a legacy. She lived a life of loved experiences instead of documenting her thoughts in writing like I do. She preferred to keep her introspective moments hidden. 

I wonder if she knew when she was writing these pages that I would be the one to go through her journal. 

Probably not. She stopped writing as her life started unraveling. By the time I was visiting her daily at the retirement home, sitting with her on her stinky couch, finding M.A.S.H. reruns on TV, and helping her navigate the meal menus, she had become anchored in the present. If she had introspective moments, she did not share them. After Covid-19 barred me from entering the building, I taped photos of her family on her window so she wouldn't forget us. When she moved to the care home, the caregiver pinned those strips of family photos on her wall in her little bedroom. She loved looking at pictures of her children interspersed with beloved characters from M.A.S.H.

I'm taking those photo strips with me to Arizona so I don't forget where I came from.

Every day is backwards day

Yesterday afternoon, I felt like I was choking. Allergies, you ask? Stress and anxiety? All those things are present, but that was not the problem. The problem was the physics of fashion. When I pulled my shirt away from my neck, I discovered my shirt was on backwards. 

That happens to me more often than I care to admit. It's one of the downsides of not doing laundry properly using a washer and dryer. On the plus side, these long-sleeved Eddie Bauer t-shirts have lasted more than fifteen years,  long past the point at which they could improve with age. However, on the downside, the cotton jersey is super-stretchy when wet, and now that I'm washing the shirts in the tub and hanging them to dry, the necklines are so stretched out, it's hard to tell the front from the back, especially in the dark when I'm dressing. 

I'm trying to think of ways to reuse, repurpose, or recycle these cotton knit t-shirts. I thought about cutting them up into narrow strips to knit with, although it's been years since I knitted and I no longer have knitting needles. I thought, hey, I could braid the strips into long ropes. These colors would look great in a rag rug. Then I realized if they ever got wet, they would stretch like unbaked pizza dough. Then I thought, well, maybe birds would like this soft cotton knit to line their nests. The problem with that is selling the idea to the birds. Thanks for brainstorming with me. Let's keep working on it.

I've reached a reflection moment in my packing process. I've boxed up everything I don't use daily. Now I see that most of my possessions rarely get used. Is that how I should be living? Maybe all I really need is a backpack. I looked at the labels on the boxes: summer clothes, summer sheets, sewing machine, art supplies, dishes, IBICO machine, books . . . I know I will need these things eventually, if I move into a new apartment. It's a little unsettling, though, to reflect on how little I really need. Has my life been one long acquisition excursion? I feel so privileged, and so ridiculous. 

One thing I am vowing: If I move into a new apartment, I will not build furniture. If I need shelves, I will put planks on bricks, like we used to do in college dorms back in the day. No more sawing and screwing together contraptions I will just have to unscrew and send to the dump. I have unscrewed thousands of screws, undoing the evidence of my seventeen-year building spree. When I first moved here, all I needed was a jigsaw, a drill, and a measuring tape, and I was off to the races. I filled every empty wall with terraces of shelves. I chopped up planks of pine as if they grew on trees. My little jigsaw chewed through sheets of half-inch mdf like ants on birthday cake. I was a builder! 

Now I am an un-builder. It feels strangely I-warned-you to be unscrewing all these screws, feeling them get hot enough to burn my fingers, as I coax them out of holes in wood and walls. I left behind a few gouges in the walls, oops, sorry, Mr. Love Shack Landlord. I have been bandaging the holes with that patching plaster that comes out purple and turns white as it dries. So festive, in a melancholy way.

Speaking of launching myself on the mercy of the universe, I thought I had a line on a Freecycler who expressed interest in taking the scrap wood that occupies a substantial part of my living room. She finally surfaced to email me that her phone had been gunnysack and when is a good time to come over. I thought, right on! But today, no communication about pickup plans. It's raining, it's cold . . . I'm thinking she's bailed on the idea of getting free stuff. I have another person in line for the wood, but darn it, if you say you are going to come over to pick up this precious garbage I took time to advertise on Freecycle (photo and everything!), by golly, you should get off the darn Zoom and follow through. Free things don't grow on trees! Or, wait. What? 

My family hired a lawyer to help us clarify what to do with Mom's will and estate. She wouldn't answer our questions until we paid her a retainer. We paid the retainer, she answered our questions, and the upshot (from my limited perspective) seems to be, we didn't really need to hire her. If that is true, I take my hat off to her. That is one cocky approach to making money. Imply that you have the answers, demand a retainer, and then tell the client, well, you really didn't need me, you could have done this yourself. It's like Dorothy and the Ruby Slippers. We had the answers all the time, all we had to do was click our heels together three times and say Lawyer? We don't need no stinking lawyer. 

This is just my opinion. I'm writing to find the humor in a situation I don't understand. I'm a hack writer, I admit it! Please don't judge me too harshly, and if you are a lawyer, please don't take this personally. Again, I'm trying to be funny. Yes, I confess, sort of at your expense—because it's amusing (to me) to poke fun at familial and societal norms and expectations. But this is not about you. Notice you are not named. Everything I write is about me. And the Chronic Malcontent remains anonymous, thanks to my tight-lipped Twelve Step friends who will never spill the beans. 

Speaking of spilling some beans, I gave my official notice to Mr. Landlord today. Come the end of April, if the planets align, I will officially be homeless. 

Organizing my dog house

I vacuumed the two lime green shag rugs and rolled them up in preparation for giving them away on Freecycle. The bedroom rug departed to a new home today. With bare walls and floors, I'm now living in an echo chamber. However, I'm appreciating seeing the hardwood floors again. 

Overall, this place is a well-loved, tired old apartment—well, let's call it what it is: it's a dump. The generic off-white walls are pockmarked, peeling, and scraped; the sinks are rusty, chipped, and partly nonfunctional; toxic black mold grows behind the toilet, along the cracks in the kitchen ceiling, and in all the cupboards. The kitchen is unheated. All the metal hinges are rusted and frozen; the wooden cutting board is so swollen it can neither move into nor out of its slot. My landlord will need to do some serious renovation to make this place inhabitable (and worth charging market-rate rent). On the bright side, the floors were covered with area rugs for the past seventeen years, which means they still look great. Chip and Joanna Gaines would drool over these 1930s-style authentic wood planks.

Today I tried to calculate the cubic cargo space on the model of minivan I think I want to buy. The number of cubic feet I calculated doesn't match the number of cubic feet claimed by the car manufacturer. Should I blame the company's marketers or blame my brain? Math doesn't lie, if you do it correctly, but marketers lie all the time. I know. I am one. I used to call myself the anti-Christ of marketing, back when I used to teach it. 

Therefore, because I don't trust math, marketers, or my brain, I used masking tape to outline the dimensions on my newly revealed hardwood floor. The letter-sized boxes are already stacked along the wall. It was pretty easy to see that my cargo space is five boxes long by three boxes wide by three boxes tall. I believe that means I can transport forty-five boxes. I'll wait while you find your calculator and double-check. 

I have an excess of some possessions and a dearth of others, compared to most of my friends. For example, how much scrap wood do you have leaning against the wall in your living room? I bet you don't have an IBICO machine (I'll let you look that one up). I make up for having lots of some odd things by having very few clothes (most of which I plan to trash when I walk out the door of this place). I also have a mostly vacant refrigerator. I buy fresh food for one week at a time. By Sunday evening, the box is almost empty. A friend texted me some photos of what her refrigerator looked like after a can exploded and destroyed several of the glass shelves. I was astounded at the amount of glass, and I was even more astounded at the amount of condiments that somehow came through the ordeal intact. I am really lacking in the condiments department. Sometimes it is helpful to see how others live to see how I am failing. 

Speaking of failing, yesterday I discovered I put the mushrooms in the cupboard instead of in the refrigerator. They were looking somewhat ancient by the time I realized my error, but they tasted fine. I buy twenty-one mushrooms per week, and I sauté and eat three per day. The morning eggs and veggies don't taste right without mushrooms.  

After last week's blogpost, I'm in the doghouse with my sister. She thinks I hold her in low regard because I don't care if she thinks I'm socially unacceptable for bathing with my laundry. Of course, I don't know what she really thinks about my behavior. I was just making a lame joke, based on my family experiences. She didn't find it funny. Now we are taking a break.

She has no idea how she held me together while our mother declined. She helped me find the care home for Mom last summer. She was my patient and rational sounding board. For several years, our weekly video calls were my lifeline to sanity. She was the only one who listened, who understood the situation, and who remembered our mother as she used to be. I will always treasure those calls. Now that Mom is gone, the dynamic in the family is shifting. The siblings no longer orbit the maternal parental unit. We are free now to find new paths. 

I shaved my upper lip to see what that would feel like. It's a little numb. I ask you, why has the hair on my legs migrated to my nose and upper lip? I despair. That question is right up there with what to do about Google following me wherever I go on the Internet. Jeez, all I did was look at some pictures of ancient Greece on Pinterest and now every website I visit thinks I'm in the market for a vacation to the Mediterranean. This is why I hate marketing. Although I admit, sunny Greece looks pretty good right now while the Love Shack is enduring a hailstorm. Portland is still cleaning up from the ice storm. I'm just thrilled to have electricity and temperatures over 50°F.

I found out last week that I will need to visit an endodontist to fix a twenty-year-old root canal that has gone bad. What is an endodontist? It's a special kind of dentist. Endo plus dentist equals endodontist: a dentist that inspires you to say, when you look at your bank account, well, that's the end of that. I'm not stupid. I know teeth don't heal themselves, and having a dental emergency on the road between here and somewhere else is not part of my plan. I'm not worried. I'll be okay. It's tax return season, and stimulus checks are on the horizon (thanks, half of Congress!), and don't forget the pot of gold if I can catch that dang leprechaun. Rainbows were everywhere today but I wasn't fast enough. It's spring in Portland, though, so I'll try again tomorrow.