New Mexico Root Canal

[Yes, it all comes 'round again, but hear me out...]

It had to be done, and I wanted it bad.

As I drove south to Santa Fe in the morning for a “re-treat” of another dentist’s root canal work, I didn’t think about the appropriateness of having an expensive physical ordeal accompany the cataloging of my sins, but it was all of a piece. Somehow my wife and I had awakened at just the same moment a couple of hours earlier, faces close enough for nearsighted me to see the flash of her smile. The image hovered in the back of my mind as I careened through the canyon, the blue-green water of the Rio Grande flowing swiftly over the rocks just beside the roadway, and I couldn’t believe the things I’d done: not that we had come in the first place, but the way I took to get us here. [Note: please see BUFFALO LIGHTS.]

It had all been so unfair to her, and yet she came forcefully, more engaged than I was! We had both given up so much, it still hurt like hell to think about it. That’s what had been welling up in me like a geyser over the last few months, after 10 years, surprising me with its clear, avenging strength: I had given terrible advice. I let a tenured professor quit her job 10 years before retirement. We sold our house before the housing boom. I hadn’t taken care of us like I’d promised. In the interim, we’d aged 10 years. Lying in the dentist’s chair waiting for my jaw to go numb, I gazed out at the snow-capped Sangre de Cristos but saw her face again, smiling at me from her pillow, and started tearing up. How could I have not delivered for that us? And she was still here…

Meanwhile, I had my second root canal. The treatment was extraordinary: compassionate, painless, reassuringly professional. I was on my back for 90 minutes, and not one of them was wasted. How can the same procedure 70 miles away and two months distant be so different? But impressed though I was, my mind was still clouded.

Upon my return, I had the late afternoon and evening to myself and needed them. I was finished, washed up. How could I ever recover from this? Every time I thought I had, the guilt and regret came rushing back with even greater vehemence. And yet, nobody had ever ventured any advice counter to our project at the time. That’s as it should be, I suppose, where guys in their 50′s aren’t presumed to be idiots. But cumulatively, looking back, it was as if I didn’t know how to be a man, to put it bluntly — at least not a sensible one — and I realized my poor father had never taught me. I’ve been aware of the general affects of a largely-absent father on my upbringing for years, but I’d never felt it quite that way before. (The bastard never taught me, because he was too busy trying to figure it out for himself, of course.)

And then something opened up:

I realized I was indivisible from my past!

This is a biggie. In other words, I suddenly saw as clear as day that there was no absolute progression of events that I was separate from, no external empirical reality I could have interacted with and didn’t. I was integrated with my time and space:

If we had stayed, that would have been a DIFFERENT reality. There might not have been a housing boom. Bush might not have invaded Iraq. I couldn’t say that if we hadn’t moved, we’d be there still and have the house paid off — there was just no way to know. If we had stayed, I might have been hit by a truck as I walked out to get the mail. Life didn’t run on rails: it was all a BIG MUSH!

Suddenly something flipped inside my head. The past fell into a quantum soup that filled the sky from end to end, and the focus of my awareness snapped from dwelling on it to the space immediately round me. Surprisingly, I felt instantly better. INSTANTLY! Not euphoric, just… better… I was sitting in the front yard — a bare dirt strip between the front door and the driveway — looking at the elm tree sticks and branches the windstorm of a few days ago had scattered pretty much everywhere. It was typically messy and depressing like a lot of Taos housing, and I didn’t like it, but this time I did something different: I got up out of my chair and starting picking them up. I dug out the leaf rake and collected sticks and twigs from the flower beds. I pulled out a broom and swept our little sitting area by the door. It felt so good, I swept and raked and rearranged until the sun went down and the air turned chilly. Wow. You don’t suppose…

(This is what my daddy didn’t teach me, you know — and no, I don’t mean yard work.)

Tonight my endodontist called me from Santa Fe to ask how I was doing, just like he said he would. I don’t think any doctor or dentist has ever done that with me before. I told him I was fine and how grateful I was for the attention and expertise. He said that was good to hear, that things had gone well today, and told me I could “move on to the next event.”

For a substantial moment, in the vast arena of all possibilities, no one was talking about teeth.

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