At last, back to my computer! Oh, the things we covet!
And the things we don't; yesterday, like a bad penny turned up, was "visit to the dentist's day," which, now that we have insurance, comes every 6 months. Each time I step out after the cleaning, feeling like a fetid alligator whose teeth have just been picked by daring birds, they ask if I would like to make an appointment for another visit in six months. Each time they do that, I imagine the season, next time to be in May, when the best instead of the worst weather is before us, and my head spins - it will be here just as I am here now, another season, another 6 months closer to that time that ends all time.
But that is too hard to grasp; rather, and more to the point, I dislike dental visits, even as they undoubtedly save my teeth and save me from constant, often sharp pain. When young, dental visits were always filled with pain; now they rarely are, and the dislike comes from the feelings of the helpless idiot, lying there while machines whir and steel points pick around dental tissue and questionable nooks and crannies. There is anticipation of pain, and there is the mouth open and the dripping slobber and the suction - nothing at all like a romp through the fields on a fine day.
And yet, things happen at the dentist, always. I hear of lives of dentist and hygienist, of faintly hidden disappointments and fears, of the people themselves who lean over my tea-stained teeth. There also might come, as did yesterday, oddly sublime moments that resonate in the quivering overhead fluorescent cylinders. The cleaning machine whirred on, but behind it came the voice and guitar of Bono and band over the ubiquitous speakers, and in that odd light and noise came the sensation of an otherwordly bliss, and with that the humor behind finding this bliss, undrugged, in the hated dentist chair. And in that humor came a memory from the parking lot.
20 or so minutes before, stepping out into the frigid clime before the dental office, I noticed a half-dozen cars parked over to the side. Imitating Sherlock Holmes as I often try to do, I quickly deduced that these cars were the properties of those who worked there, leaving the closer spots open for the paying customers. In noticing them, my Sherlock mode continued as I read a vanity plate from one of the cars: Jelly Bean. Of course, said Sherlock, candy is the stereotypical source of tooth decay, the bread and butter of the dentist. Yes, of course this was a car of someone in the business.
Then the machine stopped, U-2 was replaced by more pop, and the scum and suds was sucked from my mouth. Yes, I could now talk and thought I must show my brilliance by asking about the license plate. "I saw the Jelly Bean plate out there and knew it had to belong to one of you," I grinned, probably dripping with slobber.
"Yes, " she said, "that one's mine."
I figured it had to be one of you, what with candy and cavities and all."
"Well, no, really. It was a nickname my father called me." She was noticeably tired that day and now she got wistful. "His Jelly Bean."
What to read from that? What sadness or nostalgia or disappointments or lost love? And how right and wrong my Sherlock was. Yes, it had been the car of a dental worker, and by luck or whatever, I had made the one in six long-shot by getting the owner. But its meaning was read entirely wrong - except maybe that the nickname presaged her profession, but that cannot be determined. Rather, it seems, I had stumbled onto the truth through faulty reasoning, chance bearing me to a certain point that led deeper than I had imagined.
That is how it often is, then: we think we know, we are led down a certain path by that knowledge, and then we discover that the path leads to something beyond our thoughts, to something deeper, darker, more profound. This, it seems, is our way to knowledge. Like the scientist who yells "Eureka!" while taking his bath, we putter about in an attempt to understand and are then taken by surprise when the true understanding, once beyond our ideas, comes. It is the spice of life and perhaps the heart of our lives, this stumbling and discovery, this bolt from the blue - this seeking and, in the end, this guidance.
And so we are meant to seek, and from that, the meaning often comes, not as a deduction, but as a gift, as if an answer to a prayer. Could it be that all along we seek the answer to our lives, the ultimate answer, in death? Is this our own determined path, our "Sherlock" moment written in life? And won't the answer to come, begged for in our seeking, be beyond any thought that we might have?
But I have gone too far, I know; it is enough to know that grace may touch us in the dentist's chair, and that knowledge may come as a breeze, as a whisper from another place, unknowingly called for by our seeking as well as by our hidden doubt. Always a doubt, for we all know that Sherlock is just an imaginary character after all, and that there is an author that stands behind him, himself more nuanced than any character we could possibly grasp by deduction alone. FK
And the things we don't; yesterday, like a bad penny turned up, was "visit to the dentist's day," which, now that we have insurance, comes every 6 months. Each time I step out after the cleaning, feeling like a fetid alligator whose teeth have just been picked by daring birds, they ask if I would like to make an appointment for another visit in six months. Each time they do that, I imagine the season, next time to be in May, when the best instead of the worst weather is before us, and my head spins - it will be here just as I am here now, another season, another 6 months closer to that time that ends all time.
But that is too hard to grasp; rather, and more to the point, I dislike dental visits, even as they undoubtedly save my teeth and save me from constant, often sharp pain. When young, dental visits were always filled with pain; now they rarely are, and the dislike comes from the feelings of the helpless idiot, lying there while machines whir and steel points pick around dental tissue and questionable nooks and crannies. There is anticipation of pain, and there is the mouth open and the dripping slobber and the suction - nothing at all like a romp through the fields on a fine day.
And yet, things happen at the dentist, always. I hear of lives of dentist and hygienist, of faintly hidden disappointments and fears, of the people themselves who lean over my tea-stained teeth. There also might come, as did yesterday, oddly sublime moments that resonate in the quivering overhead fluorescent cylinders. The cleaning machine whirred on, but behind it came the voice and guitar of Bono and band over the ubiquitous speakers, and in that odd light and noise came the sensation of an otherwordly bliss, and with that the humor behind finding this bliss, undrugged, in the hated dentist chair. And in that humor came a memory from the parking lot.
20 or so minutes before, stepping out into the frigid clime before the dental office, I noticed a half-dozen cars parked over to the side. Imitating Sherlock Holmes as I often try to do, I quickly deduced that these cars were the properties of those who worked there, leaving the closer spots open for the paying customers. In noticing them, my Sherlock mode continued as I read a vanity plate from one of the cars: Jelly Bean. Of course, said Sherlock, candy is the stereotypical source of tooth decay, the bread and butter of the dentist. Yes, of course this was a car of someone in the business.
Then the machine stopped, U-2 was replaced by more pop, and the scum and suds was sucked from my mouth. Yes, I could now talk and thought I must show my brilliance by asking about the license plate. "I saw the Jelly Bean plate out there and knew it had to belong to one of you," I grinned, probably dripping with slobber.
"Yes, " she said, "that one's mine."
I figured it had to be one of you, what with candy and cavities and all."
"Well, no, really. It was a nickname my father called me." She was noticeably tired that day and now she got wistful. "His Jelly Bean."
What to read from that? What sadness or nostalgia or disappointments or lost love? And how right and wrong my Sherlock was. Yes, it had been the car of a dental worker, and by luck or whatever, I had made the one in six long-shot by getting the owner. But its meaning was read entirely wrong - except maybe that the nickname presaged her profession, but that cannot be determined. Rather, it seems, I had stumbled onto the truth through faulty reasoning, chance bearing me to a certain point that led deeper than I had imagined.
That is how it often is, then: we think we know, we are led down a certain path by that knowledge, and then we discover that the path leads to something beyond our thoughts, to something deeper, darker, more profound. This, it seems, is our way to knowledge. Like the scientist who yells "Eureka!" while taking his bath, we putter about in an attempt to understand and are then taken by surprise when the true understanding, once beyond our ideas, comes. It is the spice of life and perhaps the heart of our lives, this stumbling and discovery, this bolt from the blue - this seeking and, in the end, this guidance.
And so we are meant to seek, and from that, the meaning often comes, not as a deduction, but as a gift, as if an answer to a prayer. Could it be that all along we seek the answer to our lives, the ultimate answer, in death? Is this our own determined path, our "Sherlock" moment written in life? And won't the answer to come, begged for in our seeking, be beyond any thought that we might have?
But I have gone too far, I know; it is enough to know that grace may touch us in the dentist's chair, and that knowledge may come as a breeze, as a whisper from another place, unknowingly called for by our seeking as well as by our hidden doubt. Always a doubt, for we all know that Sherlock is just an imaginary character after all, and that there is an author that stands behind him, himself more nuanced than any character we could possibly grasp by deduction alone. FK
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