Summer's Nearly Here, But The Learning Never Stops

The kids are so cute, the kids are so cute, the kids are so cute. I wonder if it is getting to be a boring refrain? But I can’t help it, because the kids are so cute.

Actually, even though in many ways they are less cute, because the summer countdown is here and it really can be measured in so many days and hours--so they are absolutely off their gourd with excitement, frustration, inability to sit still and focus, and rabid rambunctousness--but I think this makes them more cute. This is being a genuine human and who can’t relate? After all, we aren’t really much better, just more heavily socialized. I mean, I feel that summer energy, and we aren’t even off for the summer! But we do have certain summer privileges and the atmosphere is infinite looser and anyway, it’s SUMMER!

We have a teacher here at school (who therefore does get the summer off) named “Jayne” and she has this thing that goes, “This will be the Summer of Jayne.” I don't know what it is supposed to mean exactly, and yet I really like it and I always feel that it is going to be the Summer of Jayne, too. So I figure out ways to honor it or celebrate it, because if it is a good summer for Jayne, then it is good summer for everybody. Maybe Jayne is the Goddess of Summer?

Anyway, two years ago, in support of the Summer of Jayne, I gave her a listing of all the beaches in this southern third of the state complete with evaluations on quality, cleanliness, beauty, and so on, and for those hidden gems, directions for finding them. This I had taken from a book written by a couple of middle-aged surfers who from their pre-pubescent years on up had swum, surfed, camped, ate, slept, beach-combed, hiked, and done every conceivable thing that you can do on a beach, so they really know their way around. Jayne, of course loved it, but I think she ended up spending most of her summer on a lounge chair by a swimming pool.

Well, last year, when people asked me where I went for the summer, I said “to my air mattress on my apartment building’s swimming pool”, and that, literally was the truth. Whereas several years prior I had gone on a wonderful cruise to as far south as the islands off the coast of Honduras, this past summer, I never went any further than two stories down and twenty feet horizontal to the swimming pool. I made my own heaven out there. There’s really no more patio space than three feet around the edges of our pool and it used to be that apartment residents filled up every inch of that space in the summer, but eventually all the lounge chairs were stolen or damaged, so now nobody goes out there any more.

But I wanted to, and just prior to the beginning of the summer I had gotten a book on the healing nature of the sun (people nowadays, who are afraid of everything because corporations or government or media want them to be afraid of everything, even if it is as natural as things like sunshine, air, and meat, think they will get skin cancer if they venture outside without sunblock slathered all over themselves), which explained that many more people suffered from diseases caused by Vitamin D deficiency than they did skin cancer, and besides, the chemicals in sunblock are cancerous, and I was eager to put this healing of the sun into practice. A gradual, careful build-up of exposure to the sun and avoiding burning was what was prescribed, but it was ridiculous to fight traffic for an hour, pay $7.00 to park, to only stay on a beach for ten minutes. So my own building’s swimming pool was the only reasonable answer, yet how to lay out there without a lounge chair or any room?

Brilliant mind that I have, I came up with the idea of using an air mattress floating ON the swimming pool. And that’s what I did every day I had off all summer, building up that exposure to the sun and meanwhile, getting a lot of swimming in, too. And while I soon enough became “the god of the swimming pool”, nobody else ever came out there except to walk by to the parking lot or to dump garbage in the dumpster. I know almost all of them were thinking, “Look at the fool, getting himself a good case of skin cancer.” Which was fine with me, because I didn’t want them out there, anyway. So it was MY pool all to myself!

So this year, my offering to the Goddess of the Summer, “the Summer of Jayne,” will be a copy of that book and an air mattress, just like mine. There’s nothing more wonderful than that, much, much more comfortable than a lounge chair. If you get too hot, you simply roll off into the cooling water, and then climb back on.

With the school year coming to an end, the lower school presented an appreciation luncheon for all the teachers in the lower school. In order for all of them to partake of the luncheon, volunteers were sought among other employees who wouldn’t ordinarily have lunch duty to do lunch duty for those lower school teachers whose day it was to be out there. I volunteered, so this put me out there with all the lower school kids. A couple of the kindergarten kids came up to me and said they remembered me from having been a mystery guest reader in their classroom at the beginning of the school year, and wished that I would come to read them again. Well, how can I refuse, especially since I really like to do it?

So I told this to their teacher, who invited me to come read the next week. I looked through the few children’s books that I have at home (which I buy for myself because I like them) and selected two different ones, Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch, and Look At Me, Grandma. "Mr. Hatch" is about a dull loner of a man who sticks to simple, boring routine and has no friends. However on Valentine’s Day, he receives a huge heart-shaped box filled with candy and a card that says “Somebody loves you.” Amazed to think that he has a secret admirer, Mr. Hatch comes out of his shell and becomes a joyful, generous, well-loved man at work and in the neighborhood where he hosts barbecues and parties and helps everybody. Then it is discovered that the box had been delivered to him by mistake, that he had no secret admirer after all. He immediately crawls back into his shell. But it’s too late, the true wonderful personality that was really Mr. Hatch had already been let out of the bag, so the neighbors throw him a special celebration, letting him know that EVERYBODY loves Mr. Hatch, so the story ends with everybody happy and Mr. Hatch playing the harmonica while everybody dances and parties.

"Grandma", on the other hand, is a sparsely-written, somewhat difficult to understand book that nevertheless was based on an idea that really appealed to me. It’s about a boy who now questions his place in the world because his mother will soon give birth to a sibling. She has gone off to the hospital and the boy is left alone with his grandmother who has come to take care of him in the absence of the boy’s parents. Wisely, the grandmother understands what the boy is going through, but rather than discuss the issue directly, she brings her photo album that shows her as a little girl the same age as the boy. What the boy discovers in the photo album is that his grandma had an older brother that he hadn’t known about, because this boy had died when he was still a child.

That night, the spirit of the grandmother’s older brother comes to the boy in a dream and takes him on an adventure floating in the sky, and acting like a big brother, teaches the boy how to ride a bicycle, something the boy had been having trouble learning, because he was afraid. But in the dream with this “big brother”, he loses his fear and rides the bicycle.

The next day, the boy asks his grandmother to take him to the park and he wants to bring his bicycle, which he finally masters in real life, thanks to the courage he received in his dream. As he successfully rides, he says, “Look at me, Grandma!”

That night he dreams of his grandmother’s big brother again, who this time takes him to the beach and teaches him to swim in the waves, something else the boy had wanted to do but, while he had had swimming lessons, was too afraid of the waves. But with his “big brother,” with him, he loses his fear.

The next day, he asks his grandmother to take him to the beach, and he says he wanted to swim in the waves. When he manages to do so, he calls out to his grandmother who is swimming next to him, “Look at me, Grandma!”

Again, that night he dreams of his grandmother’s brother once more, who this time takes him to the amusement park and together they ride in the bumper cars. (I remember, myself, being afraid of the bumper cars at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, but an older boy gave me the confidence and soon enough, it was something I came to really love.) So the next day, the boy asks his grandmother to take him the amusement park and he says he wants to ride the bumper cars. She lets him steer, and when he masters it, he says, “Look at me, Grandma!”

Later that day, the parents come back home with the new baby, a little girl. The boy wants to hold her and when he does, he loves her so much and swells with generosity and pride over being her "big brother”. Of course, without saying it, it is understood that he has now successfully repositioned himself from being “the baby” of the household to being the big brother, and he now knows how he can be in a position to help his sister with the challenging things in life. As he holds her, his final words in the book are, “Look at US, Grandma!” It is now no longer all about him, and yet he has gained something marvelous, instead.

I figured the best way to “read” this story was to basically semi-”tell” it, filling in the gaps with fuller explanations and using my voice to animate the magic and the thrill of it. So now I felt ready to give the kids some great enjoyment.

However, then the teacher e-mailed me and said that I would have only fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes--that’s hardly any time at all! Well, I didn’t really believe it...of course, once I got going, the kids would love it and the teacher would let me continue. I had no idea how long (or short) these two stories would be, but surely the two of them would be the right length.

No.

I got to the classroom a little early, so waited outside while the kids gathered after their lunch. Some of the more assertive ones told me they remembered me from before and said they were glad that I came. One boy reminded me that he had asked for me to come, and I said, “You asked, and here I am!”

Then the more aggressive ones wanted to see what I had brought to read, so I showed them and asked if they had already heard (or read) those books. It seemed that the majority of them already knew “Mr. Hatch.” Well, this disappointed me, but I said, “Well, I have another book, do you all know this one, too?” They didn’t know “Grandma,” but they all wanted me to read “Mr. Hatch” to them anyway. Several kids said, “We love that story and want to hear it again,” and one boy said, “It is my FAVORITE book.”

Frankly, I was less enthusiastic about reading a story they already knew really well (I was much more interested in presenting something more obscure), but that’s life. I said to the teacher hopefully, “Well maybe there’s time for me to do both...?” and she said, “Well, we will have to see, we really expect to allow only fifteen minutes.” I said, “Well, I’m not trying to interfere with whatever you’ve got set up,” but she said, “it’s not what we have set up, it has to do with their attention span.”

Oh, their attention span, well now I wasn’t worried...surely they would have enough of an attention span to want to hear both stories.

So then I read “Mr. Hatch” and they all listened with intense attention, as if they had never heard the story before. Maybe I did it differently enough (with different-sounding voices or inflections for the various characters) that it was almost as if it were brand new.

Since they already knew the story, I was less interested in showing the pictures and more interested in animating the story. However, the kids insisted on seeing the pictures, too, and the teacher explained to me how I had to do it. “We do what we call ‘the Fan’,” which consisted of holding the open book up and slowly panning across the width of the crowd of children sitting on the floor. If I moved too fast, one of them would say “the Fan,” which meant that I had passed them too quickly. It seemed to me that doing “the Fan” doubled or tripled the length of the story; however, I wanted to make the best of it and pointed out certain details that I liked, such as “There’s his prune that he brought for dessert,” or “see how the neighbor who was painting the shutters green fell off the ladder, drawing a green line down the wall.” When I did that, I had to fan twice, once for the kids to see the picture as a whole, and then again so that they could pick out the little detail that I thought to point out.

I believe the kids enjoyed my performance of this story. When I read about Mr. Hatch sharing his candy with the people at work, the kids looked at me with wide eyes, as if they could imagine somebody sharing candy with them. And when Mr. Hatch was so sad to learn that the package had been delivered to him by mistake, and he gave the heart-shaped box back to the mailman (minus the candy, of course, that had already been eaten), and then when Mr. Hatch says, “Oh, you better take this, too, it goes with it,” and handed the mailman the card that said “Somebody loves you,” the kids looked like they were going to cry. Even though they knew the story would turn out alright, they felt the poignance of this moment.

What the kids seemed to like the best, though, was when I decided to expand the part of Mr. Hatch playing the harmonica. Instead of simply reading the line, “Mr. Hatch played his harmonica,” I, too, “played a harmonica” using my fingers with a note-changing “bwooop” as if each finger was a different note. The kids seemed joyfully taken aback by that. So I said, “what kind of music do you think Mr. Hatch played? You think maybe it was like this,” and I began to wail a kind of bluesy “wah wah wawawaa” on my fingers (my favorite kind of harmonica music) and the kids all began “wah wah waw”ing on their hands, too, until the teacher finally had to settle them down again. (My bad! Except that I loved it.)

Then the story was over and one boy shocked me by saying, “That was a really long story. A REALLY long story.” I glanced at my watch and saw twenty minutes had gone by. Was that long by their estimation?

Well, I wasn’t through yet, I felt, and said, glancing at the teaching assistant, “So, do you now want to hear the other story?”

Several kids shouted, “Yeah!”, but many others said, “No!” Again, that took me aback (what do you mean No?), so the teaching assistant took a vote: “How many want to hear another story, raise your hands.” And it looked like a LOT of kids raised their hands. “How many want to go do something else?” And that was obviously the clear majority. So she said to me, “Well maybe we can save it for another time,” even though I knew there was going to be no other time, at least, not for these kids, as school ends next week.

I left the classroom feeling somewhat sad. I remembered the time I ran for class president in high school and in a field of three candidates, came in last with 32 votes. (Me, high school class president? What a joke.) My parents and friends all said, “Just think of those 32 who WANTED you.” And I thought that there were a heck of a lot of kids in the class who had wanted me to read the other story, even though the majority wanted to do something else--so let’s concentrate on those who had wanted it. However, what really made me feel better was my realization about how when I go to a movie, I don’t then want to see another one for a few days. I kind of want to live in or “veg” in that one movie for a while. Two movies in a row is just too much. So why would it be any different with the kids and the stories? See, I am still learning from kindergarten!

Then the next day, I was invited back into my beloved class of first graders, the ones who enjoyed the Australia lectures. The teacher had a gift for me, and all the kids had signed a card. Prior to receiving the gift, I thought of what might be the perfect gift that they would give me, and thought a coffee mug decorated in Aboriginal art, except I thought you could NEVER find such a thing. Well guess what, that is exactly what they gave me, a beautiful coffee mug painted with not only Aboriginal art, but with examples of ALL the styles of Aboriginal art. It was perfect!

And then something else that I thought was amazing happened. I should explain that there was an idea I had come up with several years ago after substituting in several of the middle school classrooms. It seems that whenever I went into those classrooms, the teachers hadn’t organized any particular lessons for me to teach (although sometimes they had), mainly because they had been called away suddenly and I was mostly being used as a baby-sitter, or maybe as some kind of adult resource to generally help the kids with whatever projects they were working on. But what I experienced was that many of the kids mostly just wanted to talk with me. It seemed that what was valuable to them at the time was not a “teacher” so much, but an adult who could explain things or answer things in an unrestrained way, and by unrestrained I mean an adult who doesn’t have a mandate to impart a particular lesson or curriculum point. Instead, this adult could be a freeflowing knowledgeable person who was completely off the track and yet willing to discuss whatever was on the kids’ minds.

This never actually happened in a formal, organized way, but more haphazardly (but no less valuable for that), yet I figured that what would really be cool would be if I would be able to say to them that while I was there, it was a time for “questions and answers" about whatever was on their minds. It is hoped that such a thing would have no limitations at all (although I guess that would be impossible), but my idea would be that if they were mature enough to ask, they were also mature enough to get a real answer. I think kids learn that they are NOT always going to get a real answer from an adult (and thus are separated from the very resource that they need), so how wonderful it must be to actually get reliably honest information for a change. At least ever since the beatnik 50s, youth have become members of what Robert Bly called “the Sibling Society,” which means that they are closed off from learning anything significant from older generations, but are left figuring everything out from only themselves. The semi-blind leading the semi-blind.

In first grade, receiving that gift, I was placed in a seat of honor at the front of the classroom and I did not simply sit there silently and receive the gift, but talked freely about various things, and my talking led to several children raising their hands and asking me various philosophical questions that they had been wondering about ever since my talks (and anyone who has experienced young children way more than I have certainly knows that children think philosophically and have an infinite number of esoteric questions!) and I gave answers, which led to more questions. While these questions were all logical stepping stones stemming off from the original subject, we did quickly get out into new territory and the children were quite delighted, as was I. We could have gone on until the children were quite exhausted, but schools are organized around periods and apparently this teacher had wisely allowed for one whole class period to be devoted to this “gift-giving” and the ultimate question-and-answer session that was bound to follow (this teacher knows both her students and me very well), but this period did have to come to an end, with snack time and a recess.

I later told this teacher about the difference between her class and the kindergarten class, just one year younger, and she said that there was a WORLD of difference between the two grades and the attention spans of each. For the kindergarten class that I read to, the maximum seemed to be 20 minutes, whereas for this first grade class, it seemed to be 75 minutes.

After having the pleasure of being in that class, I went back to my office to find several parents working on a project that involved double-sided copying color pages on our upstairs copying machine. They were having quite a lot of frustrating trouble getting the machine to produce the final product that they wanted. Well, I have produced several brochures or manuals that have involved various copying and formatting tricks, so I volunteered to help them figure out this very frustrating problem, and anything we could figure out would help me with later projects. What you put in is not what you get out, because the pages somehow get all turned around upside down and backwards when you do double-sided copying, and stapled in the wrong place. A quick statistical calculation revealed to me that with this particular project, there were something like 2,048 possible combinations of paper placement so that trial and error was basically not going to get you the result you want, and when several minds and voices are all throwing out their suggestions, the most certain result is that you will simply give up on the project--either that, or you will want to hurt somebody, or damage the machine. The parents had nearly gotten to that point when I got there, and pretty soon, I nearly got there, too.

Well, all this effort used up all the time that the parent in charge had allotted to the project and she had an appointment elsewhere and said that she would have to leave and come back later this afternoon. So I said that with everybody gone and everything all quiet, I would FIGURE THIS OUT and have it all ready for her when she came back. She seemed doubtful, but I said that I would have to do it with pen and ink and written notes and observations of what happened to each sheet, but ultimately I would end up with a pattern or template that she could follow in her duplicating.

It actually took me almost a whole hour, and the result (disappointingly) was that it was IMPOSSIBLE to do it exactly the way they wanted it, because the automatic stapling happened in only one place on the machine, stapling up from underneath into whatever corner was southeast (looking down on it) on the landscape pages presented to the machine’s staple. If your cover sheet was facing down, so the staple would be right-side up, when you took the finished product out and looked at it, the staple would be on the northeast corner, which is not where you want it. But if you disc-spun the pages around 180 degrees, the staple would then be on the southwest corner, which was again wrong. If you arranged it so that the cover sheet came out on top, you could have either the staple in the southeast (wrong again), or the northwest, which was the right SPOT, but the staple was upside down. That final position ended up being the best choice, if the parents could stand having the staple in the right place, but upside down. It was either that, or else staple them by hand, but as they were producing several hundred copies, hand-stapling was not a good option.

It was so frustrating, because I kept thinking that it absolutely HAD to work if only I could figure out how to make it do what I wanted, but it was only after careful observation that I saw that it was impossible. It’s like trying to find something that you think is lost, but is actually NOT there. How long do you keep looking. What I had to do was figure out a way to prove to the parent that it was impossible, not that I had given up--without spending another hour on the project.

I’m not sure if this mother ever completely got that it really was impossible, or did I settle on only a pretty-good measure and then call it a day. She had, however, appreciated my efforts (or what she expected to be my perfect result) that she arrived with a gift for me, a Starbucks bag filled with a large cup of coffee, another cup of milk, and two packets each of all three sweetening choices: Sugar in the Raw, Sweet ‘N Low, and Equal, plus stirring sticks and a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers. Certainly this isn't something she needed to do, but I thought that this was nice beyond belief and, of course, I noticed how thoughtful she had been to bring whatever I needed in the way of creamer and sweetener to match my choice regardless of whatever it was. I feel that very often this level of thoughtfullness matched with extreme detail orientation characterizes so much of what our school’s parents do for us and continually demonstrate in their actions.

It's fascinating how what seems a routine or simple human transaction can turn into a universal lesson. On a global scale, people who “do not have,” whether that is someone from an impoverished third world country or someone of “entitlement” mentality here in our own country, excuse their situation by blaming “the exploitative rapacity of the capitalistic west” or the "unfair advantage” that others have and therefore demand charity, reparations, or “equalization.” But it has been demonstrated time and time again concerning third worlders and the entitlement people in our country that these people have various attitudes, perceptions, or orientations that point the finger of failure directly at them. Basically, they are more concerned about the advantage of the moment and do not look forward or plan for the future. Examples in backward countries such as “localized corruption,” minor government functionaries demanding bribes for every task (and therefore never organizing their economy into a safe and protective rule of commercial law), or price-gouging whenever possible (such as it is a good idea for a westener to establish the price of a ride before getting into a taxi) and therefore killing trust and destroying repeat business, or operating via the inefficiency of bargaining or negotiating in every market transaction where the interest is more in cheating the buyer with a bad bargain than it is in providing the best product at a fair price, or being casual about appointments or deadlines and promises and therefore taking a very long time to accomplish very little, or being exploitative themselves of their OWN environmental resources by eating up every single bird egg that gets laid in a season or every seed instead of culling out some for the next generation of resources, or never planning an education or saving a portion of one’s money, but instead spending all the time and money now and therefore never having any means for advancement.

The people who are parents at our school are at the utter opposite of third world "never got theres" or American "I'm entitled to every kind of assistance because I am disadvantaged", but are extremely successful people who cannot be blamed for rapacity or unfair advantage; instead, they look beyond the moment toward a future they want to create for themselves, nurture their own talents, give generously, plant seeds, and think of every detail even in tiny, what might seem as insignificant tasks. We’re supposed to be the school, but so often the parents can be the teachers of the employees. Sure, a lot of what they understand are things we all already know, but they put these things into practice and to have their example is like having the textbook and the quizzes...it helps to have it all enhanced with actualized external models and the solidification of repetition via human interaction. Helping them helps us.

I so much love being “a teacher”, who can continually learn, so school, for an employee, is still a school. Besides, the kids are so darn cute.

Old and Young, Giving and Blue

I’m starting to miss them already, and we still have a week and a half to go. Well, I’ve said before that there is a final picnic for the students outside on the lawn and then suddenly around 2:00 P.M., there is absolutely no noise at all coming into my office window. It’s as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on the school grounds and all life has disappeared, but the structures still remain. The birds don’t even sing! And it’s amazingly depressing, even to those employees who had expressed eagerness at getting rid of the little devils for the summer.

Of course, the kids, themselves, are mentally pretty much through with school at this point. They’ve got to be occupied with various events, games, and other special activities to keep them grounded at all; otherwise, for sure they’d sail away like let-go helium balloons.

Last week was grandparents’ day, in which they got to have their grandparents spend the morning with them on campus, ending with a wonderful lunch on tables spread outside all over the campus. It’s one of the most beloved events of the school year.

Last night was the sports awards night when all the fathers were invited to a big ol’ steak barbecue and to see their kids’ teams pick up whatever trophies they had earned, and maybe even proudly watch their own son or daughter receive one of the very special sportsmanship awards.

Today for the kids was a pajama day--maybe our third one this year, but it’s always a popular event with everybody. We, too, can wear our pajamas if we want, but since I sleep in my birthday suit.... For the first pajama day, I did wear some sleepwear that I had gotten for a school overnight trip, but today I just had too much other stuff to do to fool with it. But the kids couldn’t possibly be cuter. I’ve said for a long time that it’s a matter of evolutionary survival that kids are cute, anyway. Otherwise, our species would never have progressed beyond the Paleolithic Era. Those screaming babies would have been left behind on the grass of the veldt as sabertooth tiger bait. But no, they were just too cute and our ancestral parents simply couldn’t let go of them. How much more helpless, sleepy-sweet, cuddly, and precious do the 21st century versions appear when they are in their soft flannels? Sponge Bob Square Pants, Little Mermaid, Super Heroes, Hello Kitty, Sesame Street, Army commandoes, Finding Nemo, frilly lavender robes for pretty blonde-haired princesses, it’s almost like a kinder, softer version of Hallowe’en.

Pretty soon, the school will have “Super Stars Day,” which will be kind of like an Olympic “multi-athalon” in which the school is divided into competitive thirds (the Red, Blue, and White teams) for a day of relay races, games of skill, and contests of strength. In my own personal “all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten” vein, I used to be “on all sides” by wearing all three colors, but last year, I had forgotten about the event but wore a white shirt and happened to walk by a kindergarten class that particularly liked me because I had been a mystery guest reader in their class several times and had engaged them in some pretty lively discussions. These kids used to call out “hi” to me whenever they saw me (calling me by my first name!). I walked by them on the morning of Super Stars Day as they waited to go into class and saw me in my white shirt and asked me if I were a “White”. Sharp-eyed and quick, I saw from what they were wearing that THEY were “White,” so I said that yes, indeed, I, too was a "White". Well, I had hardly ever heard such cheering and excitement that I was on their team. I learned from that experience that in a contest, you HAVE to choose sides, and never had I enjoyed a Super Stars Day as much as I enjoyed that one. (The White team won, by the way, and of course I know it is because I was a White.)

This year with a whole new crop of kindergarteners, I didn’t get to read in that class more than once. So I didn’t get to develop the special relationship with this class that I had had with the class before. However, I developed a special relationship with a first grade class in which twice I had given guest lectures and twice I had been a guest celebrating their unveiling of special writing projects. So this year, I thought I would be on the team that this first grade class will be on, and that will be the “Blue” team. Yesterday morning, I e-mailed their teacher and told her that in their honor, I was going to be a “Blue” this year. She e-mailed back that she would tell the kids. As soon as lunchtime, I ran into several of the first graders who asked me what team I was going to be on. When I said, “the Blue team,” they cheered, saying that what their teacher had told them was right! So it’s happening again!

Also, today was a special thank-you luncheon for the lower school teachers and so that all of them would be able to enjoy the luncheon, it was asked if any office staff members (who don’t normally do lunch duty with the kids) would be willing to volunteer to do their lunch duty for them today. I had volunteered to do it last year, so this year said I would definitely be happy to do it again. Enough of us volunteered that all of the lower school teachers were free to go the luncheon, while we (about seven of us) got to watch hundreds of kids in their pajamas eat their lunch and play in the playground. I have to say it again--they couldn’t have been cuter!

While I was out there, several first graders came up to me on the playground and said that their teacher had told them that I was going to be a “Blue” along with them, was that true? I was amazed at the impact it had. One girl said that she was so glad to have Mrs.-- as her teacher, connecting the dots between having her as a teacher, the teacher having me as a guest lecturer, and me caring enough about them to choose to be on their team in spirit with them. They all know that their teacher is the only first grade teacher to have a guest lecturer, and the only guest lecturer is me.

Then another amazing thing happened, two different kindergarten boys, at different times, walked by me and said, “I remember you, you read to our class, I wish you would come read to us again.” I came across their teacher at the end of the lunch period and told her what the boys had said, so she said, “Well, then, we will have to get right on it!” Knowing that we probably have time for only one more mystery guest reader (whom I hope isn’t already scheduled), I did get right on it. I’ve already figured out one of the books I will read, but my assignment for this weekend is to find a second story to read (there’s time for me to read, and discuss, two).

You love them, and that’s what it’s all about--you love them. They are pure and know that love is what matters the most and that is what they appreciate the most.

Beyond all this, what I mostly got accomplished today was send out letters acknowledging the receipt of employment applications. We get so many, so I save them up and do them in batches. We have no teacher openings, having now filled all available slots, and that’s what most of the resumes I get are for. One guy really stood out and impressed me in several ways. For one thing, he wrote a very nice letter to me personally, because he had left me a voicemail asking if we had any openings and I had called him back and said that even though we didn’t, he should send me his resume anyway, “because you never know; I keep those resumes and when we need somebody, I pull them out for consideration.” He had liked my manner on the phone (first of all, the fact that I called him back), and apparently felt well-cared for and was now even more eager to get a job at our school if there ever were any opening (actually what he said was "if other people at the school are like you, I can tell what a wonderful place it would be to work.")

He also had his picture like a little logo on his resume, which was a good idea as he was extremely good-looking, almost as if he were being “cast” in the part of being the ideal young male teacher. Something about the photo said “head shot” to me, this was anything but a crappy little snapshot, but was professionally done with an eye to a particular effect.

He was, however, really a teacher, that is to say, he was beyond the student teacher phase (too bad, because we still do need several teaching assistants), and he now had his credential, but up to now had only done substitute teaching. I really wanted him working at our school, though, so instead of sending him my standard response letter, I wrote him a special letter suggesting that he might want to consider listing as a substitute teacher with us. It’s phenomenally hard to get a teaching job at our school, but successful subs not only get a foot in the door, they have a leg up toward getting hired (I’d say we hire any of our proven subs who actually want a full-time job--they’re actually the first ones we think of, as they’re practically “here” anyway).

But there were some other intriguing things on his resume, such as the stories he had published and the small film he had written, produced, directed, and starred in. When I got home, I did an Internet search for the film (which sounded very intriguing and was something I would like to be able to see) and was led to several small film festival sites that had awarded that film various “best director” or “best lead actor” awards, and also found his own website, full of photographs (and that photo on his resume was, indeed, a professionally-taken “head shot”), links to his theater, television, and film work, and other personal things. I was pretty sure that most of that work was “background player” work (more commonly known as “extra” work), and so to that extent his experience was similar to mine, although it looks like he had more actual speaking parts than I did, and he did have a starring role in one film (that probably was a straight-to-video production) beside the film that he wrote, produced, directed and starred in.

Seeing all this made me wonder if he were using teaching like most Hollywood-hopefuls use waiting on tables, a way to make some money until they make it big. But our school would be reluctant to hire a person as a teacher if show business were their true goal; however, working as a substitute teacher would be fine (if they are a good teacher).

I surmised that this guy was young enough (in other words, had enough time ahead of him) and already accomplished enough to be able to make it in the industry if he stuck with it and if it were what he really wanted. Many do get to where he is, though, and realize that it is not what they actually want after all.

I thought possibly he was a bit too much “young L.A.,” where he was so interested in the L.A. lifestyle and in a good enough position that he could reasonably see himself rising to some kind level in that dream-desirable life, which others have found to be putrefactive and rotten to the core. I know from experience that “Hollywood” is at once not as bad as some people think, and not as good.

In short, I figured that I liked him. His website was very funny and he’d write clever, self-deprecating things like, “I was cast in a small, but unimportant role...” which showed he understood more about it than he was, on the surface, letting on.

He’s also engaged to be married, to a woman who has the same initials that he has. One of his links was to a “wedding” website, but he had filled it with enough interesting and funny things that I was drawn to look through all of it. The story of his proposal (on a commercial airplane) was at once funny and heart-warming, where he recruited a stewardess to help him with champagne and to produce at the opportune time the engagement ring that he had entrusted with her, but somehow what he was going to do had enamored the whole crew of stewardesses, so with all their attention, he felt he was in danger of being considered a terrorist by the other passengers and whatever air marshall might have been secreted on board but who would not have been in the know about this proposal. However, all went well and he and his girlfriend who had tearfully said “yes” were treated to the pilot’s on-air congratulatory announcement and an airplane-full of thunderous applause.

The wedding website also led to their bridal registry and here was where I really got to liking them. For one thing, I loved their taste, very clean, modern, and trendy in a substantial way (almost as if their taste were Finnish or Scandinavian) and I was also impressed that everything they selected was, while beautiful, amazingly inexpensive: “Small serving plates, $.59 each, number desired: 2”; “Wine glasses, $2.25 each, number desired: 6”; “Bed sheets, $19.99, number desired: 2”; that kind of thing. I had gotten so used to other people’s bridal registries (and then, later, their even worse ‘Babies R Us’ registries) where every little can opener or candlestick seems to cost several hundred dollars, and where I have to comb through every page to find something that I can possibly afford to buy that I feel good about giving instead, of say, “linen napkin, 1, $79.00”, that I felt that I could manage to give to these lovebirds each and EVERY thing on their list. And they had selected so many things that I liked well enough that I WANTED to give them, that soon enough my brain hatched the idea of “well, why not, actually give them something?”

I mean, I certainly wasn’t invited to the wedding, the woman doesn’t know me at all and the man hardly does, short of one brief phone conversation and a note and resume he sent to me. But it was just too delicious of an idea, the idea of supporting who they were and what they are doing, so I went ahead and selected on-line a gift I thought was wonderful from their registry and had it sent to them. On the card I said, "I love what you're doing, so why not send some love from a 99% stranger (100% crazy and impetuous)?" and said my name and then "(WHO?)". I hoped that maybe my resume acknowledgment letter and the gift would arrive at approximately the same time so that they could figure out who the heck that gift is from (and the “why” I’ll just leave up to them).

Like I said in the earlier portion of this piece, children know that the most important thing is love, and I think that, for a time, newly-weds know that, too, and from being a guest lecturer in a child’s classroom to being a non-guest wedding gift-giver, giving love is what I like to do, and I do it whenever I can.

Not a Shallow Ebb, But a Deep Flow

Wonderfully, the weather is nice enough this Sunday afternoon to be writing this on my laptop outside on the patio by the pool. While I have often sat out here to read, I’ve never written here before. I feel like I ought to have brought out with me some kind of an alcoholic beverage in one of the plastic, “pool-side” drink glasses I saved from my Carnival cruise of a couple of summers ago, which I do when I read, but I already feel a little “looped” from having gone out to a Sunday brunch and had my fill of champagne. Okay, so for this afternoon, it’s only a large cup of coffee, served in a cool fat-bottomed Starbucks coffee mug that one of my favorite parents at the school gave me as a “thank you for what you do” gift last year. This particular mug with a rubberized bottom is designed, I am sure, for use on a boat; it won’t slip and slide with the waves or tip over (and that’s how ultimately I would like to use it). So, it suitably adds to the outdoor, “waterside” theme.

After a week of hard work yet with a feeling of much accomplishment, I had been looking forward to a quiet weekend of solitude. However, it didn’t exactly work out that way, although these days (these past several years), I feel that I am much more “in solitude” even among crowds than my normally-extroverted self has ever been before. I have been moving much, much more into the internal realm of my self than I have been outward in my focus, and wonder if that has more to do with my advancing age than anything else. No, I think that must be less due to a particular “number” than it has to do with my perception that my time is running out and I’m somewhat dismayed at my focus having turned more toward sentiment for the past and less toward excitement about the future. I view that as a bad thing. Because, after all, if my health holds out, I actually could have more productive years ahead of me than I have already had in the whole of my adult life. So, I’ve got to work on that.

Despite wanting solitude at home this weekend, I saw that I had the third and final play of the “Reprise” season to go to Friday night, and I had been invited to somebody’s birthday party Saturday.

I remembered how on the day of the previous play of the “Reprise” season there had been that episode of the crane falling down across the 405 freeway just one side of the 101 interchange, which fouled up traffic all over the westside for four or five hours after that. The traffic from the school to UCLA (the Reprise plays play at the Freud Theater at UCLA) was so heavy that even with me taking back roads, I didn’t get down there soon enough to have dinner beforehand. This time, even with no traffic obstacles, I decided to head to UCLA right away and have dinner there on campus.

This time, I was armed with a listing, operating hours, and campus maps of all the places one can eat on the UCLA campus. None of them are really “restaurants” as such, but are more like food courts at a shopping mall. I selected a Mexican one at the North Campus Student Union and sat outside on the patio to eat. Being around 6:00 on a Friday night, I was the only person outside there eating. A group of skateboarders arrived nearby and began to practice their tricks. As usual, I was amazed at their grace and skill. I feel that skateboarding doesn’t have the respect it deserves, perhaps because it seems to mostly be practiced by rebellious, disaffected youth, maybe “losers” in some distorted high school catalogue of status that puts “real jocks” at the top and “skaters” somewhere down in the lower reaches. But I’d rather watch them (or be able to do what they can do) any day than, say, execute a perfect slam dunk or a touchdown.

The skateboarders kept it up until one of them seemed to get hurt a little too much (they are able to take quite a bit of punishment, but ultimately there IS a limit)...an older adult official of some sort came by either to help the hurt boy or else to police the area, I couldn’t tell which, but immediately after, they all disappeared and I was left with a feeling of how chilly it had turned outside.

I hurried up with the meal and then went on a long walk around the campus. There was some sort of graduation going on (as I observed from afar as an outsider), maybe the real “official” UCLA graduation, but somehow it didn’t quite look like it (gosh, are we at graduation time already?). I imagined the “real” UCLA graduation being a huge deal like the Berkeley ceremonies that fill up the football stadium. This one involved thousands of temporary chairs set up on the flat land of the campus proper, pretty enough, but not much more ceremonial than a high school graduation. However, the only frame of reference I had was when I served as an extra on a Beverly Hills 90210 episode which was a college graduation, filmed on the Occidental College campus in Eagle Rock. This ceremony at UCLA looked much like that one, so maybe the Berkeley ceremonies are unusual as far as college graduations go.

Still, despite this somewhat “inferior-looking” graduation ceremony, I felt I’d rather send a child of mine to UCLA than Berkeley. While I LOVED Berkeley when I was a student there at the tail end of the sixties, now that I am middle-aged, I view the atmosphere at present-day Berkeley with alarm. I can now sympathize with my parents who regularly phoned me with fright in their voices--of course, that was after seeing on TV police, the National Guard, and barbed wire all over the Berkeley campus. Nowadays Berkeley doesn’t seem to host civil unrest, just crime, homelessness, and heavy drug dealing. Not so with UCLA, though, which is very pretty, respectable, and filled with students more interested in making money than instituting socialism.

The play I had come to see was not one of the more popular, well-known Broadway musicals...in fact, I had never heard of it...but I do not bill myself as an expert on Broadway musicals. It was No Strings, notable for only three reasons: 1. It was the first musical written by Richard Rodgers after the death of his writing partner, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, and so while some of the music was lush and beautiful, the lyrics weren’t much to write home about. 2. The musical featured for the first time an “interracial” love affair among the lead characters on the musical stage (South Pacific had an interracial love affair between a pair of minor characters). 3. There was one memorable song coming from this musical, “The Sweetest Sounds,” but all of the other songs were forgettable.

Interestingly to me, seeing this musical came right on the heels of a conversation I was having with my usual lunch-time eating partner earlier this week. She was lamenting that “we”, meaning “her and her fellow Democrats”, had no winnable upcoming presidential candidate. “It’s really only Obama or Hillary,” she said, “and I just don’t think the country is ready to have either a black or a female president.”

“Well,” I said, “Obama is only half-black. And it is tempting to say that Hillary is only half-female.”

“With Obama, half black is still black, I’m afraid” she said.

“For people to whom being black matters, I guess even 1/16th black is still ‘black’,” I agreed. Which led to us discussing what was “really” black, and what about it even matters. Is “black” a matter of racial genes (of a certain proportion), or is it really cultural, or economic, or a perception of a social-historical background (“once upon a time, we were slaves”)? Somewhere along the line, it becomes a ridiculous distinction. What about a person who has African genes but whose father was a doctor and whose mother was a psychologist and they had a home in an upper middle class neighborhood and all the kids graduated cum laude from Ivy League colleges? How much do they identify with or relate to what has traditionally been thought of as “black”? And contrast educated, conservative people like that but who nevertheless have black skin, with lower class white kids who go around wearing hoodies listening to hip hop and making gangland signs with their fingers every time somebody takes a picture of them? What if those wanna-be-gangsta white kids have installed “grillz” on their teeth? Just what really IS black or white, anymore, or who’s this or that?

Seeing this play featuring an “interracial” love affair carried on those same questions for me. The love affair in No Strings took place in Paris between a couple of American expatriates. The woman was a black woman who escaped Harlem and ended up in Paris as Vogue’s top and most celebrated fashion model. The actress playing her looked like Audrey Hepburn with a cocoa suntan. That vaguely dark tint to her skin and her ancient memories of life in Harlem were really the only “black” things about her. Otherwise, she had a long, lean, possibly over-skinny body, straight, elegantly-coiffured hair, Caucasian features (whether through genes or plastic surgery, I do not know), and spoke elegant, educated English and French. And in Paris she suffered no apparent prejudice against her, but was taken strictly on the face of her beauty, talent, and abilities. She was also more successful and more sure of herself than the male partner in this love affair, a white man who had escaped from the rock-bound cost of Maine to become a writer in Paris. He had long ago written a novel that had won a Pulitzer prize, but had since then lived off of his fading fame, making do as a party-boy among the rich who sought to elevate their cultural standing by consorting with “artists”, but he had failed to write a word since.

It was obvious to me that the man would be attracted to the woman, everybody else was, too, and it would have been ridiculous for the issue of “race” to be a deterrent for him (which it wasn’t). That the woman would be attracted to this man was a little less reasonable, particularly since he was an American and she (apparently) expected the fact of his nationality to stir up the racial issue that she had successfully escaped from. However, she was intrigued by the fact of his previous writing success and wondered at his present failures. No sign of his writing talent had been demonstrated in the script and had only been mentioned as a given, so it was up to the audience to accept on faith that there was something valuable in this man that was worth the woman’s while to get him back into writing again, even though he now felt that that portion of himself was dead and buried.

So for me the value of the story was the aspect of resurrecting the man’s writing talent and it took his love for the fashion model to do it, even though, ultimately, the fact of their race ended up being a wedge that was going to temporarily pry them apart, as it was detemined that the only way he was going to successfully write again was to return to the solitary rock-bound coast of Maine (away from all the social distractions of France), where the fashion model could not follow because she would not be accepted in American society (so the racism was America’s, not the writer’s). But the woman was the only person who was “real” in his life, and in order for him to be with her, in reality or in his heart, he needed to be “real” himself, too, and for him “reality” was really writing, not partying among the rich. Presumably once he got his writing back, he would be strong enough to return to France and back into the arms of the fashion model he loved.

I know from personal experience that total isolation is way over-rated when it comes to writing. Everybody thinks that they need that (and certainly they do in small, temporary doses), but it is only among people and adventure that you get any worthwhile material for writing. Also, if you really are a writer (instead of somebody wearing that mantle as a persona) people stimulate you to keep on going, rather than distract you from the task. Going off to live alone in the mountains or wherever seems to lay an even heavier blanket of writer’s block over onto you, whereas if you sat and wrote in a noisy pub or sidewalk cafe, you’d find yourself writing reams. To use Ernest Hemingway as just one example, he got so much writing done in Paris or Pamploma, Key West or Cuba, interspersing his writing day with bullfights or deep sea fishing, but suffered overwhelming writer’s block in Idaho where he died of a (some say) self-afficted gunshot wound.

By my not being familiar with No Strings, I was surprised to see that the song “The Sweetest Sounds” was from this play. That song had been used at the beginning of the Disney-produced Cinderella movie of the week (which they called Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella) that I had been a heavily-used extra in. It was so glorious to be involved in the filming of that song (and the whole movie, actually) while first Cinderella, and then the Prince, sang their verses in separate sections of the village while out among the people (and I can be seen about a dozen times throughout that whole song). Being in the movie was one of the highlights of my filming work in L.A.

This particular Cinderella was the famous “interracial” Cinderella, which Whitney Houston produced, originally planning on casting herself as Cinderella (and I wonder if at that time her idea was to make it a strictly “black” Cinderella, similar to how The Wiz had been a “black” Wizard of Oz), but ultimately decided that she was too old to play that part, so cast the young black singer, Brandy, instead, while she, herself, became the Fairy Godmother. The play evolved into an interracial one, with an Asian Prince (Paolo Montalban), a white king (Victor Garber), a black queen (Whoopi Goldberg), white ugly stepmother and stepsister (Bernadette Peters and Veane Cox), a black second ugly stepsister (Natalie Deselle), and a whole village of mixed racial citizens and ball-guests, of which I was one of the whites.

In my view, when you think of “interracial”, performers like Brandy and Whoopi Goldberg stand in as more representative of blacks than does a cocoa-skinned Audrey Hepburn look-alike, and it makes me wonder if that same criticism applied to the use of Diahann Carroll (not black enough of a black woman?), who was the fashion model in this musical when it first played on Broadway. I would almost go so far as to say that Whitney Houston and the other producers of this version of Cinderella had been disappointed in the too heavily “whitened” No Strings as a satisfactory interracial love story, and figured the time had finally come to do it up right with this Cinderella, with music also written by Richard Rodgers, and extracted the one good song out of No Strings to apply to the musical line-up of this meatier interracial love affair musical.

Other than these issues of “only nominally a black/white issue” and there being only one good song, this Reprise production of No Strings was a passable production of some interest, although it was the least good play I have ever seen coming out of Reprise. Probably the most outstanding feature of it was that it was costumed by Bob Mackie and peopled by an ensemble of appropriate beautiful girls and boys for those costumes. How very French and “St. Tropez” it all was, with the women decorated in amazingly huge and broad hats and brightly-colored flowing body-revealing capes and harem pants and the like, with the guys with tight, form-fitting, several-sizes-too-small striped t-shirts and boxer-cut shorts tighter and smaller than Speedos all looking like they stepped right out Jean Cocteau sketches or the homoerotic photographs of Pierre et Gilles. Nothing says “surface” and “temporary” better than a perfect-bodied young person dressed in high fashion; it’s the ideal rendition of a velvet trap with steel-jaw teeth. No wonder the top Vogue model craved for the writer to resurrect his talent and create something immortal.

And I understand how I, still, can be allured by that trap. Only recently have I figured out what the evil of fashion marketing really is. And what it is, is the selling of something that except for a miniscule portion of society, is something you are not, and never will be, which explains the disdainful scowling expressions of all the models. You’d think they would sell better with friendly, welcoming smiles, but no, it is similar to how liquor is sold in print ads with monsters painted into the ice cubes that alcoholics see when they suffer from delerium tremens. (I used to work in advertising market testing, so I know the technology. Really look into some ice cubes resting inside of elegant crystal Old Fashioned glasses and tell me what you see.) It’s marketing by obsession, trapping you in the shadow world of your fears and failures. The scowling high fashion model is no less of a demon than that which tortures the alcoholic (or the novelist with writer’s block, for that matter), who say to you with their face that their only regret is that that they have to endure the yearning stares of the likes of you as they saunter disdainfully down the runway, telling you by their every step that, “rest assured, you will never look like me no matter how much you want to, but that will not stop you from spending as much money as you can trying to.” (A subset of that type is the MySpace youth whose only words in his blog are the requirements for “being added” as his “friend”, a friend you don't need and certainly don't want but you feel your own page is enhanced by having his picture on it.)

Never fear that the entire entertainment world suffers from that same complex except in cases where there really is true talent. Do you get eaten up and spit out, like a Brittany Spears or a River Phoenix, or a boy band, or some pretty girl group, or do you survive out the other side of it like a Frank Sinatra, Katherine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, or Sir Lawrence Olivier?

The birthday party I went to proved to be yet another subset of these issues, this time within the alternative art world as it operates in Los Angeles. (I had already experienced this for a year working at The Getty, which I described as a snake pit. The deal with the Getty was that Los Angeles always felt second fiddle to San Francisco when it came to culture. Now all of a sudden Los Angeles had the glorious appearance of the billion-dollar Getty Center, which really was more “building” than it was “museum”, more like a movie set with nothing but emptiness inside, and attractive to those people who had money but no culture and to whom the illusion seemed quite the thing and, again, like the alcoholic drunk on liquid “spirits” instead of finding true spirit, were stuck with one foot inside the gate and had gotten no further.)

This was celebrating the 70th birthday of an artist who had been an art teacher at our school, but had retired last year. I had always liked this particular teacher (he seemed to have an appreciation of the kids) and I felt that I understood his art somewhat, although as time went on, it became clear that from his point of view, things were much more about HIM than it was about anything else, including the children he was teaching. Well, we’ve all heard “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach”, that insult to teachers which pre-supposes that a certain “doing” is superior to “teaching,” as if teaching were something inferior. The thing is that at a school, the “doing” IS teaching, so where one CAN’T teach is when they think their own “doing” is superior. As I understand teaching more and more, I understand that teaching is a form of surrender of the teacher's ego needs to the needs of the students in a way similar to how parents must surrender some of their selfish desires in support of the needs of their children. It’s a passing of a torch in a grown-up, mature way in which the ego of the torch-passer works in service to support the ego of the torch-receiver. The spirit of this is the same as the spirit of Santa Claus, that force who has the power to MAKE magic is also the GIVER of magic. Children are the unabashed RECEIVERS of magic, free and clear without strings or obligation, and this goes on until the child has learned enough to make their own magic, and then they pass it along themselves, moving over from being receivers into being givers. To fail to do that is to remain immature.

Surely the artist has learned how to create magic and it therefore should NOT be felt as a lessening of their role to pass that magic onto receivers, but if the ego is still thinking of primarily wanting and needing to receive ITSELF, then that magic is only partially given, and partially withheld, which gift becomes stagnant and polluted, like instead of fresh milk flowing straight from the cow, is a milk that has sat around in a bucket in the sun too long until it is really no longer fit for anybody to drink and therefore will be “given” away. (From sour grapes to sour milk....)

I could see that this artist and retired teacher still had those ego needs, and one of the ways that was demonstrated was in how he received the birthday gifts that several party guests (including me) had proffered to him.

What can you give to a retired 70-year-old who by now must have everything? I, myself, did not want to spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. I went to the party with another retired teacher who made a better attempt at it and was more successful at it than I was...she had asked the artist’s wife what he was into these days, and the answer was “golf, boxing, and fishing,” so she bought him two books, one was a biography of a boxer and the other was Chicken Soup for the Fisherman’s Soul. I didn’t want to copy her idea, but did briefly consider getting him the novel The Legend of Bagger Vance or else Michael Murphy’s Golf In the Kingdom, but as I didn’t think of him as being particularly spiritual, I felt those would fall on blind eyes. So instead I did what counts as almost nothing...bought him a bottle of wine. I thought back to the countless gallery receptions of his that I had gone to and how much wine had been served (which also was served at this party), and figured that would be an acceptable token.

But I guess not really, even though wine was mostly what people gave him, except for a few gag gifts or else things like fish-shaped keychains and other novelties. It was when he opened the bottle of wine that I had picked out for him (the selection of which had taken SOME thought), he finally said, “For a non-drinker, I sure have gotten a lot of alcohol.”

How many guests at that party had any idea that he was a “non-drinker”? Apparently not many, and certainly not me. Is that how you receive gifts, by explaining their unsuitability? If people didn’t know that he was a non-drinker, it was now a bit too late to advertise the fact.

After the dam had broken, he continued to stress his non-drinking status which each successive bottle of wine he received. “I don’t drink, but here is another one.” “I gave up alcohol in my twenties.” “I don’t like the taste of alcohol.” “I don’t like what alcohol does to me.”

Finally, in protest, one of the guests (whose gift of a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne had been similarly rejected) said, “Well YOU may not drink, but your GUESTS certainly do!”, but which really takes us right back up to what I wrote about his teaching--it wasn’t ABOUT his guests (or his students), it was about HIM. Which may go a long way toward explaining why people love the new art teacher we NOW have so much. A very common comment that I have heard frequently this year is, “Now, finally we have a lower school art teacher!” Okay, so now we may no longer have a “famous” artist on our teaching staff, but instead, what we have is a true art teacher, and NOW you should see the output from the students! Never before has our end-of-the-year “emerging artists” show been so beautiful and wondrous, and never before had it brought so much joy to the viewers (not to mention such a justified celebration of their teacher).

I’m still a long way from 70, but I nevertheless do have an eye forward to what my life is and what it should be, and what, if anything, might be left once I am gone. The important thing to understand and accept is that I WILL be gone, that’s a fact of life and death, and therefore my self ultimately will be insignificant and unimportant and all that matters is how I lived while I was here. What does remain is an ever-continual stream of life that flowed before I was here and will flow after I am gone. With that stream being much, much bigger and more powerful than I am, it ought to be relatively easy to surrender myself into its flow and be satisfied with at least not polluting it a bit with sour milk or sour grapes. I can’t hurt the infinite stream, but how much better I would feel knowing not that I couldn’t, but that I DIDN’T.

Stairway to Fitness

Ye gads, it’s hot, but I love it. It really feels like summer, although I know it will “gloom” down next month and then perk back up again in July. But I’m enjoying it as much as I can even though it probably isn’t long-lived.

I feel great, now that the root canal was finished this morning. The endodontist said that things are looking good. The tooth is all cleaned out and sealed up, and he put my temporary crown back on. Once the final crown is made, my regular dentist can put that on and I will be finished with this. [The endodontist just called me a few minutes ago and asked me how I was doing. “Great! Just great!” I said, very enthusiastically. Then I added, “And I’m not on drugs!”, because I sounded to myself kind of like I was (and I have them), but I haven’t taken any of them. I’m sure my claiming to not be sounded even more like I was, but he just laughed and said he was happy that I was doing so well.]

In my previous post, I wrote about starting back on an exercise program once we move into our summer schedule (end work at 2:30 and Fridays off). However, with this good weather and my feeling so good, I started it today. I have a great book, Stairway Walks In Los Angeles, that maps out 18 different walks in the Los Angeles area that take the walker into hidden, beautiful, and sometimes fascinating neighborhoods that one doesn’t normally go through or really even know about. Despite being such a “car town”, L.A. can be quite fascinating when experienced on foot. I decided to use those different walks as a basis for the walking phase of my program.

One thing that links the majority of these walks is that most of them feature some portion of the route that includes stairways. You wouldn’t think there would be that many (or any), but there are many, many locations in the hilly areas that have public stairways that connect sections of the streets, going inbetween the houses and saving pedestrians the trouble and distance of having the follow the switch-back road down out of the hills (or up them), but can, instead, make quicker descents down these stairs. So this maybe tells you that these walks are much more intense exercise than simply walking down the street, because you walk up and down very steep roadways and stairways. It’s also quite scenic, due to being up in the hills, and the houses in these kinds of areas tend to be beautiful, cool, unusual, impressive, or in some other way worth seeing and mentally “oohing” over as you walk by.

For my first stairway walk, I chose one that I could do right from my apartment, so I didn’t have to drive to it. It was walk number 11, “Lower Beachwood,” subtitled “Churches, Temples, Monasteries, and Mosques.” Interestingly, that is something you definitely do find on this route, including the Vedanta Meditation Center, a house where Krishnamurti once lived, the Hollywood Presbyterian complex that covers two and a half city blocks, a Russian Orthodox mosque, and a Dominican monastery. Beyond all the religious buildings were countless houses of all shapes and sizes, each one amazing in some way, including shaded courtyards with fountains (very inviting-looking in this heat), awesome decks on various levels, and unusual examples of archtecture (lots of Spanish and Moorish architecture). Despite the crowded maze of streets and very difficult parking (although it seemed that most of the houses had garages or plenty of parking room on their property), I can see why people like to live in the Hollywood Hills. Technically, I, too, live in the Hollywood Hills, but at the very brink of it and about as “lowland” as you can be while still officially being in the hills.

I took in too much hot air as I panted up pyramid-steep hills and pretty soon the entire inside of my mouth and throat felt like a dry, cracked leather boot. Note to self: Next time, bring a water bottle! (I quickly filled my water bottle up after I got home and now have it chilling in the refrigerator, ready for my next walk.)

As I walked, I thought of how I should organize my exercise, and figured I ought to alternate something aerobic with something weight lifting. So tomorrow is weight lifting, although I will start doing this with equipment I have at home instead of going to the gym. I’m sure I’ll start going back to the gym in a few weeks, but for now, I like the convenience of doing this at home until I really get into it.

To make the aerobic phase more fun, I want to do other things besides simply walking all the time. I love swimming and there is a convenient public swimming pool quite close to where I work, so that’s a place I can go to on the way home. I checked out their website to get the scoop (hours of operation, cost, etc.) and saw that Los Angeles has a whole aquatics program that includes, among a lot of other things, kayak lessons and rentals at the Hansens Dam and Balboa lakes. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea for the weekends, so I am going to check that out. I’ve wanted to do some kayaking, but didn’t really know how, or where.

Bicycle-riding sounds like a good idea, too, and I can easily fantasize how great it would be if I could get into riding a bicycle to work. I could imagine how much weight THAT would help me to lose, and with gasoline on the brink of $4.00 a gallon, the money savings is a good draw, too. But all that’s a HUGE if. It is a very difficult ride to the school, because first I have to get up to Mulholland Drive and that is a very long, steep, curvy hill up Cahuenga to there...and then there is the remainder of the eleven-mile journey on this up and down and curving all around mountain road. (I don’t know how long such a trip would take, and it would have to be done twice a day.) I do not at all have the fitness for it and can almost imagine that I NEVER would have the ability to get up Cahuenga to Mulholland Road. I’m not sure how to even develop that ability. Practice, practice, practice with going up hill, I guess, but for me, that would have to be in frustrating five-minute increments, I think. But sometimes one has to accept success coming in miniscule increments (that’s what I learned from physical therapy), and success DOES come.

Riding a bicycle on the streets of Los Angeles sounds horrible--too much crowding traffic, very dangerous. Mulholland is a different animal altogether and there are several bike riders up there that I see every morning when I am driving to work (you know, the arrogant frou-frou kind, all covered in multi-colored spandex, thinking they are Lance Armstrong but will squeal like stuck pigs if you drive too close to them). So, if I can’t handle Mulholland, I wouldn’t want to ride a bicycle except at the beach or on mountain trails. So this puts me in a quandary of not knowing what kind of a bicycle to get--a mountain bike, a road bike, or a hybrid? Oh well, I’ll figure it out.

What’s great is that the mood is on me and I am excited. I need to get going and keep on going so that I get addicted. If this great weather holds out, that will be no problem, because I WANT to be outside.

Meanwhile, as I wrote before, I’m enjoying my home-made (non-diet) meals! Tonight I had a great dinner of left-over Amish creamed chicken and corn souffle. I heated up some tomato basil soup, but the other dishes filled me up, so I didn’t take any soup (gee, it probably had minus 10 calories). Good appetite control, but honest. Anway, exercising like this is one way to pay the piper. But it’s gotta be fun, that’s the key for me.

The Joy of Cooking Again

During the days of my "youth" (actually, it would be more accurate to say "my young adulthood"), I was quite into cooking. That seemed to have started due to my first apartment, which was in Manhattan. The apartment was small, but the kitchen (also small) was marvelously laid out as efficiently as the interior of a sailboat and stocked with every kind of cooking tool and device, including a hefty library of appealing cookbooks.

That got me off to a great start, which I continued, and then enhanced, when I went back to California to go to law school. The school had just built a brand-new apartment building on campus that the students could rent and this was a population of renters viewed with great respect who presumably were headed toward being in the moneyed class (if they weren't there already) and therefore required suitable housing to prepare for it (in other words, this was not "slum" or typical "student" housing). As it happens, the kitchen in that apartment was perfect and remains to this day the very best kitchen I have ever had. So I really got into the cooking there, going so far as to making my own bread, mayonaise, yogurt, jams, and other ordinarily packaged things in addition to frequently holding elaborate dinner parties. A friend and fellow-student at the school said that he and I were the only ones who didn't let having to brief cases get in the way of keeping our kitchen clean! (He however, actually went on to become a lawyer, something I decided not to do, maybe because I soon realized that I had greater interests elsewhere.)

Somehow, once I was out of school (a youthful, high-energy setting for generally everybody), I seemed to settle down into "sedentary working adulthood" and for some of us what comes along with that is putting on weight. Thus as I moved into working life in Los Angeles, I also enrolled myself into what is apparently a difficult-to-escape-from cult--that of the eternal dieter.

Surely you've heard this somewhat confusing aphorism, "dieting makes you fat" and studies have pretty much shown that this is true. Well, sure, dieting also can make you thin, in the short run, at least, but suppose you think of being on a diet as being somewhat like being forced to always have sex with someone who doesn't turn you on. Maybe this is what happens in marriage--the spouse becomes dull and unattractive, and so the impulse is to have an affair. So one could say that "marriage makes you unfaithful" in just the same way that "dieting makes you fat".

What makes you fat in dieting is the yo-yo effect of (a) living with a severely reduced calorie (and flavor) load, which (b) lowers your metabolism and (c) makes you finally get the hell off the diet and binge eat (maybe for years), which leads to (d) making you twice as overweight as you were before the diet, until (f) you get so miserable with your body that you try the whole thing over again with a new diet, which takes you back to (a), ad nauseum (or, if you are a teenage girl, "ad bulimium").

I've been there, I know all about it.

That started when I lived in L.A. "the first time" (that is to say, before I lived here, moved away, lived a dozen other places, and then came back here this time), where, incidentally, I had a really cool apartment but a lousy kitchen that got me into the habit of not only eating reduced "something" food (low calories, fats, carbs, or whatever) but also not enjoying the process of preparing whatever it was that I was making. I realize that there are all sorts of diet cook books out there that cater to every diet fad there is so that you can take out whatever ingredients or items you think are to blame for your being fat. I even bought myself a huge Weight Watchers gourmet cookbook that in size and appearance is somewhat akin to the complete cooking guide published by Le Cordon Bleu, but something about its artificiality (or artifice) never lured me and so it sits gathering dust on the shelf.

I had lost all interest in cooking, because I had lost all interest in eating anything that I prepared myself, because I would only allow myself to prepare diet foods (so instead I enjoyed eating out all the time).

And to think that this attitude of denial and suffering lasted for over thirty years--this constant alternation between fortitude and failure and all the time getting no pleasure except in illicit eating, and from that, whatever pleasure it contained was diluted by guilt, which was mentally like a little e-coli along with the hamburger.

Can't last.

Well, this go-round I lost more weight than I had ever lost before, but it was only half of what I needed to lose, yet suddenly it just had to stop. I couldn't stand Weight Watchers any more, even though just previously I had been singing its praises for how good-looking my body was becoming. I couldn't stand not looking forward to any party or eating occasion. I couldn't stand eating the same old "partial" foods any more. I couldn't stand feeling that I had done something terribly wrong by having a waffle or ice cream. I couldn't stand the lecturers at the meetings whose advice was always about how to eat miniscule portions ("at Trader Joe's they sell almonds in individually-wrapped one-point packages") or manufactured fake foods ("at The Heavenly Diet Shop they sell low-carb pancake mix and at Humphrey's Frozen Yogurt Shop they have sugarless frozen yogurt"). But most of all, I couldn't stand the OTHER people at the meetings. The meetings and the people there are supposed to "give you support". What support? Nobody ever really says anything unless it is to complain about how (once again) they failed at this party or that restaurant. "I was so hungry I just went ahead and binged on chips and dip," or "At first I was going to order pears for dessert, but I found myself going ahead and ordering a Mud Pie, instead." And the advice always is "So, you learned from your mistake, didn't you, well next time, eat a big salad, drink lots of water, and don't forget to ask the waiter to take the bread off the table."

Worse, perhaps, was that when I participated (and my version of that was to share some philosophical point of view that seemed to get me over a hump, such as "While I couldn't see how I could enjoy this cocktail party without eating a lot of stuff, I realized that if I engaged my other senses, such as appreciating the beautiful setting or really got into people's conversations, I could enjoy something other than food"), the room would be dead silent while some people turned around to look at me strangely as if they were thinking let me get a look at this freak, or whoever you are, you arrogant bastard, I wish you would just stop. I mean, I have to say it, but most of the people who are in Weight Watchers meetings are not really working to change too much. What do I really have in common with them? And then there would be the sudden shocks to my consciousness (okay, so I admit I'm an arrogant bastard), such as when somebody new would join: why, they're so fat! I know that is awful to say (my mother would really be shocked when I'd confess it to her), but that's really how it was for me. I mean, duh, this is Weight Watchers, there are going to be fat people! But somehow I kind of expected the whole world to slim down while I was...I was seeing the world from slimmer eyes and the fat people mucked up the viewscape.

So I knew that it was no longer working, but I didn't know what to do as a substitute. I kept rotating my mind around the idea that "I need to have it be organized somewhat like a school," you know, like you enroll at one end, take classes, do homework, take exams, and end up with a degree at the other end. But then one day I saw a video on YouTube by a man who was telling high school kids how to get a college degree really cheaply. His suggestions included taking all the AP courses and getting as much college credit for high school courses as you can, going to free or very low-cost junior college for the lower division courses, and doing as much independent study as you can for the upper division courses. He said, "If you can't study on your own, you aren't mature enough to go to college." Wow, that really hit me. Here I had been saying that I couldn't lose weight without being part of a "college-like structure", and he was saying that a college student ought to be able to do his studies on his own (all you need is a good library, who cares about the renown of the professors?). So I was shamed into understanding that I had to lose weight on my own (let's be grown up about it). I couldn't need some person or some group standing over me, making me do it (i.e., the old Weight Watchers "weekly weigh-in").

If I had to do it on my own, then I have to really understand it. The science of it. How it works. It's no longer acceptable to have an organization tell me how much food I have to eat, or what foods I should or should not eat.

So here are some things that I have learned:

1. Much of what we are told by organizations (corporations, governments) is wrong.
2. Things natural, traditional, and primitive are healthy; things manufactured, packaged, processed, adulterated, and marketed are unhealthy.
3. A vast variety of different foods is far more healthy than a limited selection of the same old stuff.
4. Two pounds of weight loss a week is too much for most people, who have to eat below the lowest acceptable minimum daily amount of calories in order to have that level of weight loss, which means that they are injuring their body, not getting enough essential nutrients, are losing lean body mass, and are lowering their metabolism, which makes them gain more and more stored fat on less and less food.
5. We have lost our natural appetite-"stat", eating according to a schedule or chart or diet plan or habit or addiction instead of eating what we really want and need, so we need to sensually reconnect with our body so that we will become aware once again of what we should eat and how much.
6. We also need to use our bodies more in movement, work, and play (making this fun instead of a chore), which will increase our muscles which burn fat and improve our metabolism so that our body weight will normalize; this is putting an emphasis on burning up excess calories instead of eating fewer calories.
7. We have to ENJOY EATING AGAIN, with real food full of natural nutrients. Get rid of the guilt, just get in touch inside. Then it is no longer deprivation, and we are no longer fat, having broken out of the "dieting makes you fat" viscious circle.

So now I have regained my joy of eating things that I have cooked at home. I got four new cookbooks, all of which I have been using in making exciting and delicious new meals. The first one I got was The Coconut Oil Miracle, which I had gotten from the same source where last summer I had gotten the book on how healthy the sun was. There are two corporate myths exposed--it is essential that we get out into the sun, yet people are afraid of it ("skin cancer"!), but the truth is that the diseases caused by vitamin D deficiency are gigantically more common than skin cancer. The sun CURES diseases.

Coconut oil, the much-maligned saturated fat "tropical oil" (thanks to self-serving marketing distortions by the soybean producers) is probably the healthiest oil a person can get. Unsaturated fats, particularly "poly" unsaturated fats, are cell-damaging free-radical producers, whereas saturated fats are anti-oxidants that clean up free radicals. Coconut oil is a medium-chain fatty acid that gets immediately used for energy and is NOT stored on the body as fat, and in its metabolism, kills infections. Few people on Earth have been more beautiful and healthy than the Polynesians (prior to their replacing their healthy natural diet with Western-produced processed canned and packaged junk food that makes those who indulge ponderously fat) and there in Polynesia you have the abundant use of BOTH these maligned sources of health, the sun and coconut oil.

So I started with the fun of making some of the recipes in the coconut oil book, which led me to desire a broad cookbook of native Polynesian cuisine, so I got a beautiful one from Amazon.com. Then, during spring break, our school had its annual trip back east and two of the participants brought back cookbooks as gifts for me! One was a uniquely wonderful book of Early American recipes, publishing the favorite recipes of early American heroes such as William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and dozens of others. That book really hit the spot with me. And the other gift book is a true treasure of traditional Amish cooking. The Amish are one of my favorite and highly-admired cultures and they still live naturally and minimally-technologically off their eastern Pennsylvania farmland and it has been quite a treat to start making some of their wonderful recipes. All of a sudden, eating is very exciting again (and shouldn't it be?) Later today, I am going to make three dishes from that Amish cookbook.

So, did I blow up like a balloon with jumping off of my "diet" and eating, instead, "salmon and rice with coconut-cream sauce" or "William Penn's favorite potato omelette" or "Amish cornbread"? I've been on this for about a month and the answer is no, I haven't gained a pound. I haven't seen weight fall off, either, but my weight loss will be rather slow until I increase my movement (I don't want to say "exercise" any more than I want to say "diet".) But our reduced summer schedule is right around the corner and I will be doing things outside a whole lot more. I expect to move into autumn being somewhat thinner (10 pounds worth, maybe?) and with the renewed enjoyment I have been having lately with NO suffering, I'd say that would be a delicious accomplishment.

Rooting For a Root Canal

You have to understand that at this point, I never ever expected to even get a cavity. Whatever the chemistry of my mouth is, it isn't a cavity-causing environment. (Gums, now, now gums were a different matter. Floss floss floss! Brush with a Sonicare. But even that I felt I had under control. I didn't even need to have more than the requisite "twice a year" check-up and cleaning.)

So it was with some combination of horror and ignorance that I got a toothache. I was polite about it, of course, just didn't complain TOO much, said that while it was certainly correctly called a toothe ACHE, it wasn't REALLY a toothache of the "electric cautering iron fall down on your knees in shock" kind of a toothache. But actually in that, I was fooling myself...this was a genuine toothache (of the "it's going to be very expensive" kind), as I gradually was to discover.

After a weekend of trying every natural/alternative pain relief method I could find on the Internet (none of which worked, by the way), it was finally simply a dose of Aleve that I took late on Sunday night that did the trick. I was even able to go to work on Monday, and then go see my dentist on Tuesday, embarrassed at even coming in at all, me with the trouble-free mouth.

My dentist sat down in front of me and very patiently listened to every word of the history of my complaint. While I HAD hurt before, I tried to minimize it, because the truth was I didn't want it to be something serious. I hoped he would have a perfectly decent explanation for the whole thing, such as, "There's some kind of new strain of flu going around that makes the teeth ache, but as it has now stopped, you've probably kicked it." You know, something like that, the explanation of "you had something, but now you are well."

However, what he said was, "It sounds like you might have a cracked tooth. Those are very hard to see, but let me examine you carefully." And what his careful examine revealed was that I did, indeed, have a fractured molar.

That sounds serious, doesn't it? That sounds like something you can make other people cringe with when you say, "I really had a right to complain about my pain, I had a FRACTURED MOLAR!"

"Okay...so what do you do about a fractured molar?"

He explained the process of holding the tooth together with a crown that also capped off the top so that bacteria couldn't get into the tooth's root through the crack. He talked about how it was a two hour job that entailed him having to grind the tooth down in size so that a cap could fit over it with the whole thing ending up no bigger than the size of the original tooth. I was thinking "crown, hum, that's a procedure level III on my dental plan, they only pay half, how much is this thing going to COST me, anyway?" but I said nothing about cost, only specified that I wanted the cap to be porcelain (well, it's going to be porcelain over metal).

Okay, so I left the dentist depressed about how I was going from perfect teeth to now having one of them half-way to artificial. How did I suddenly get into "procedure level III" territory? Well, a fractured tooth can happen at any time, particularly a molar, although I have no idea HOW this particular thing happened to me, or when. It could have happened a long time ago, slowly getting worse, until now it was noticeable.

In the week I had to wait before my first appointment for the crown, my tooth pain came back and I had to take ever-increasing doses of Aleve in order to get through my days at work. However, miraculously (I thought), the pain stopped by that weekend, so I didn't need to take any more pain pills. Apparently, though, that was really a bad sign.

I will say that the "novocaine-receiving, tooth-grinding, impression-taking, temporary-crown-making" process was utterly UNpainful...well, I guess I really thought as much (in these modern days of dentistry) and only worried about receiving the novocaine shot, but even that didn't hurt one bit. However, just because nothing HURT didn't mean that the procedure wasn't quite uncomfortable and stressful. I was prepared for it to be much worse than it was, though. I thought I would have to lose myself almost entirely on a meditative-like visual journey similar to what I had to do in order to not become a raving sceaming claustraphobic maniac during a couple of CAT-scans I had to have a few decades ago. I was prepared to just go into a mental trance and ignore everything that was being done to me until it was over. However, really, thanks to the "local anaesthetic" (apparently "novocaine" is not really correct, they use something else), I could have just placed full attentive consciousness on the whole procedure. In fact, I wonder if it would be of benefit to someone having this done to ask to be shown all the instruments and devices that were going to be used for this, because whereas I had previously been afraid and didn't even want to LOOK at anything, it ended up that the extreme mystery of everything made the experience worse than it needed to be.

Definitely, for me, the very worst thing was this rubber-spongy-prop-open kind of thing that my dentist jammed into my widely-stretched open mouth like a medieval bondage brank. It's purpose was mainly to keep my tongue out of the way (that my dentist described to his assistant as an "aggressive tongue," and I thought to myself, "Yes, you ought to ask my lovers about that"), but it all but threw me into a panic. I couldn't imagine that I could tolerate that thing in there for two minutes, let alone two hours, and the helpless, frightened feeling it gave me immediately threw me onto the brink of panic. However, thankfully, I was able to get a grip on my mind and float off into my meditative visualization and did not lose my mind, but pretty much got so I forgot about the thing in my mouth soon enough.

The very best thing that happened, and I admit that it is odd for something like this to give so much pleasure, but I absolutely LOVED the taking of the impression of my teeth. I think this is something that can really scare some people (like the mouth-prop-open thing did for me) because it flickers toward their gag reflex, but because the whole back half of my mouth cavity had no feeling at all, I was only conscious of the device around my front bottom teeth. In a strange way it was at first quite erotic, as if my teeth were a penis and the impression material contained within this curved holder were the depths of a vagina; it was amazingly pleasurable to sink my teeth right into it. But then I understood that this was more comforting and embracing than it was stimulative of a sexual thrusting power, so I realized it was more like being back in the womb. I felt so thoroughly held and embraced and loved by this thing and I never wanted to come back out of it. But even the eventual taking of it off, the way the dental assistant had to rock it a little and the sensation of the suction of the material against my teeth as it released its grip, that felt good, too.

But all the rest of it was one long session of grinding, grinding, grinding, and the sizing of the temporary crown was that, too, grinding and grinding and grinding, over and over again, until I finally felt that it was no longer sitting up too high in my mouth. Determing that, though, was along the same order of difficulty as deciding which ophthalmolic lens is better, "this one or this one" during an eye exam. "I don't know! Let me the first one again. And now the second one again." Back and forth, back and forth.

The dentist informed me, though, that although he had now taken the impressions and carved my tooth down to size, he wasn't going to order the crown from the lab, yet, because there was some troublesome motion in my tooth and he wanted to send me to an endodontist, first, for a consultation. I thought this meant the consultation was to determine whether I needed a root canal, or not, which, if I did need one, the endodontist would be the one to do it.

Despite my now having to leave one dental office and make an appointment for another one, I lucked out in that the endodontist was able to see me more or less right away. He just had to eat his lunch first, said the front desk person, but that would give me time to get there.

It wasn't that far away...I had to go from Mid-Wilshire over to Century City.

The endodontist was surprisingly young and handsome. I don't know what I had expected, but this was a pleasant surprise. He proceeded to examine my condition by testing me for feeling with a probe and then with something that was cold. I felt that I was passing the test by not feeling any pain or cold, except I did in some places, and I reluctantly indicated those areas, feeling that those were failures, but actually, I was failing, because my lack of feeling meant that the nerve in my tooth was dead and where I did feel something were areas that were peripheral to the fractured tooth.

It ended up that this consultation was not to determine whether or not I should have a root canal, but whether I COULD have a root canal, or should the tooth be EXTRACTED. The root canal was the "better" of the two choices. I was so shocked to realize that not only had I entered into crown and root canal territory, but that I had even gotten into possible tooth extraction territory. So now the idea of the root canal (something I had understood that I should be very afraid of) was actually something to be happy about and to WANT! So I went into that procedure gladly and actually, it didn't hurt me one bit, either, and neither did the four shots of local anesthetic I received in preparation for the procedure. Also the root canal work was much less stressful and uncomfortable than the crown work.

After my mouth and face had been numbed by the anesthetic was when the front desk woman happened to come in to inform me that while my insurance policy covered root canals (I know they pay 50% after I meet the $50 deductible, but their total coverage for one calendar year is $1,000 and I have no idea how much they have already covered for my routine exams and cleaning, and I don't know what the crown will cost), they required a pre-authorization for the procedure. Somehow that meant that they weren't able to tell the endodontist billing person over the phone that day how much of the procedure the insurance company would cover and how much was my portion, so the upshot of it all was that I had to pay for it in full today, and the medical office would file a claim and the insurance company would pay me the portion that would have gone to the doctor. And the full amount was $1,300. Okay, whatever, yes I could pay that today.

Once the money piece was settled, the root canal could begin. There was one thing peculiar in this procedure to me, something unexpected, and that was the aspect of the dental dam which at first appeared from my fore-shortened view to be something like a big yellow balloon that the endodontist presumably was going to attempt to stuff into my mouth. In actuality (I say without having looked at it from a normal perspective), I ascertained that it was somewhat like a flexible latex ring that was bigger than the circumference of my mouth, with a molar-sized hole in it over near the outer edge of the ring. The tiny hole was stretched down around the tooth itself, isolating it from the rest of my mouth, leaving it protruding up all by itself to be worked on above the field of the dental dam.

The endodontist told me that a molar would have three or four roots, so I was counting the number of times he drilled in order to ascertain when he might be finished. However, after the third drilling, he suddenly put all the tools down, ripped the dental dam off, and left the room, saying he would get back to me. He closed the door behind him and left me there alone, bewildered by myself in the closed room. I felt that this could not be good.

When he did finally come back, he told me that he couldn't finish the root canal today, that there was so much pus and active infection inside the tooth that he wanted me to undergo a course of antibiotics, first, to clear all that up. Up until that time I had had no idea that this infection due to bacteria getting into the root via the tooth's crack was so bad, but already it had killed the nerve and who knows, it might have even damaged the bone (which is what I believe my tooth's motion had indicated to my dentist). I could see that this fractured molar was getting to be more and more serious than I had ever thought.

The traffic back home was horrible, hardly moving at all, and I saw that I was nearly out of gas. I wasn't familiar with the locations of gas stations in that area, so I took the first one that I finally came to, a Mobil station that charged $3.90 a gallon. If I weren't already depressed enough over all these tooth difficulties, it cost me more than $50 to fill my tank and I see that we really are on the brink of paying $4.00 a gallon these days. Suddenly I felt very poor and helpless against a rising tide of difficulties.

I was supposed to start the medication right away, plus I was worried about what I would feel when the anaesthetic wore off, so I was eager to get my prescriptions for the antibiotic and pain pills filled. Rite Aid was inescusably slow, until it was as stressful to sit there in their waiting room as it had been to be in the dental chairs. They said the prescriptions would be ready in an hour, but it ended up being an hour and forty-five minutes. The extremely low price was very pleasant, though, $16.00 for three prescriptions, thanks to my health insurance plan (and dispensing generics instead of brand name drugs).

By the time I was finally home, it was after 6:00. I really had spent ALL day on all this dental work.

Later that night, my dentist called me to seriously discuss the ramifications of my procedures and to help me decide how to proceed. He was very worried about the fact that it seemed 50/50 regarding whether I should finish with the root canal and crown or instead have the tooth extracted and have an implant made and installed. If I chose to try to save the tooth, that is, finish the root canal and have the crown, but then later complications arose so that the repair work failed and the tooth had to be pulled after all, the insurance coverage wouldn't cover any of the repair work. An extraction and implant would cost $2,100 he told me, and I would have to cover that entirely by myself.

But ultimately, I care more about saving the tooth than I care about the money. Which in a way is strange, because the tooth seems pretty much gone already. The endodontist did not put the temporary crown back on, because he said if the infection flared up, it would hurt me like hell for him to pry the crown off, so he's just leaving it off until the infection seems gone. When the temporary crown had been in there (only long enough for me to drive from the dentist office to the endodontist office), it looked almost like a real tooth, but now what I can see in there is my ground down real tooth, looking like it was cut off right at the surface of the gum line. I guess in reality it is a little taller than that, but that's how it looks to me. So just about the only difference between the "crown" solution and the "extraction" solution is that instead of the crown being attached to a metal pin as it would be in the "extraction" solution, it would be attached to my tooth's root in the "crown" solution. Still, this is the choice that both the endodontist and my dentist recommend, so long as I understand the financial ramifications of my choice.

But I'm more positive than they are. While they see a 50/50 chance between their work succeeding or failing with this tooth, I feel that while a cracked tooth, itself, can't be fixed (it won't grow back together like a broken bone, and "cementing" it together and holding it with a cap is not as strong as the real thing), I feel that what could cause failure would be continued infection destroying more of the bone so that the bone can't hold the tooth in, but in my view, I CAN kill the infection, and BONE can grow back. So as long as as much of the natural components are still there, I feel that the odds are in my favor.

"It's good to think positively, I guess," said my scientific, statistically-minded dentist, but he didn't seem to really appreciate the power of such thinking. Okay, whatever happens. I'm still thinking positively. None of this should have happened, but somehow it did, but I'm not about to assume that the bad luck will just keep on happening like a column of dominoes. The bad luck stops here