The Dentist Will See You Now

You know the dream. You’re strapped into the dentist chair. A small gathering of people are on hand to watch your final moments, their eyes brimming with contempt. You scan the room for the sympathetic face of a friend or loved one, but find only icy stares and the sterile implements of the agony to come.  “I want my mommy,” you murmur. But mommy didn’t get you into this mess, and mommy wants to remember you as you were in better days. So save your tears, big boy.

A last phone call pleading for clemency goes unanswered. As the clock strikes twelve a signal is given by someone in a ghastly teal jumpsuit. Before you can speak, you’re injected with something that makes you feel numb and anxious at the same time. Room spinning, feeling woozy you think, flattering yourself with a puffed-up comparison to Superman fighting off the effects of a close encounter with kryptonite.

Leaving Tijuana

I’m not exactly sure how we wound up in Tijuana a second time. Maybe I was drowsy after a big lunch and grunted agreeably when someone said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to go to a heartbreakingly depressing slum that sells cheesy souvenirs to tourists?” Or, maybe I wasn’t even in the room when the nonsensical decision was made.  Maybe it was just assumed –- me being the fun-loving guy that I am -- that I would gleefully jump at the chance to wallow in squalor and sleaze again south of the border.

The adventure began, innocently enough, with a trip to San Diego to attend a 50^th wedding anniversary bash for my wife’s Uncle Joe and Aunt Aggie. It doesn’t take long to notice that life is good in San Diego. It’s a sun-splashed coastal city with pristine beaches, charming adobe buildings with red tile roofs, historic Spanish missions, and highway signs that clearly tell you how close you’re getting to the border of Mexico.

Tonight On PBS

To anyone who says “there’s nothing worth watching on TV anymore,” I politely but firmly put my hand on their shoulder, look them compassionately in the eye and ask, “Are you getting enough fiber in your diet?”

The question throws them at first (just as I intended), but the cryptic nature of my query also gets them thinking. They wonder who I am. They wonder why I’ve violated their personal space by putting my hand on their shoulder. Perhaps most pressing of all, they wonder whether or not I’m armed.

Sensing their discomfort, I tell them “Yes, I am armed . . . armed with good news about the current state of viewer supported public television.” Now, before you get the wrong idea, I’m not one of those TV snobs who claim to only watch the news and public broadcasting. The truth is, before I downgraded my TV service to basic cable a couple of years ago, my curiosity about “what else is on” was usually limited to random searches for basketball games, Seinfeld reruns, and intellectually stimulating biographical profiles like the E True Hollywood Story entitled “Yasmin Bleeth: The Curse of the Baywatch Bombshells.”

Let There Be Lights

When my wife asked me last week to hang Christmas lights on the house, I became dizzy with anticipation. Not Christmas spirit dizzy. More like impending disaster dizzy.

The problem wasn’t a lack of experience with hanging holiday lights, mind you. Through the years, I’ve successfully hung lights on a wide variety of items living and dead, including: Christmas trees, shrubs and hedges, a fake ficus tree, shelving and furniture, and an un-hung screen door that served as a surrogate tree the year my wife and I started dating.

What was so intimidating about this particular holiday project was that I’d never hung lights on the outside of a house before. Along with the risks and challenges of a guy with a fragile sense of balance standing high atop a low-budget ladder, there’s the issue of how to attach the lights to the house in a fashion that will keep them hanging after you let go. Which, when you think about it, is really the most important part of light hanging.

Clean Freaks

Domestically speaking, I’m a tidy guy. I make the bed.
I hang up clothes. I take out the garbage. I put newspapers in the newspaper rack and books on the bookshelf. I even use an aesthetically pleasing pyramid approach to stacking up mail, with magazines and catalogs on the bottom, postcards and other direct mail pieces in the middle and bills and letters on top. Hey, there’s a right way and there’s a wrong way.

Based on my proclivity for putting things in their place, you might assume that my house would be a pristine environment where visitors take their shoes off at the door and receive a list of do’s and don’ts to follow while inside.  Not exactly. If you want to dig up some dirt on me, here’s my dark secret in a silver dust bin: my tidy streak comes to a screeching halt when it’s time to actually clean anything.

To Soup With Love

I’m very fond of soup. So fond, in fact, that I sometimes invent new soup to get me through those times when traditional options are unavailable. The other night I answered the call of necessary invention with a good old-fashioned empty-out-the-fridge soup de jour.

I heated up some broth in a big pot on the stove and threw in a happy anarchy of ingredients. Tiger shrimp. Sauerkraut. Bow-tie pasta. Artichoke hearts. I named it “Lizzie’s Leftover Lullaby,” not in honor of anyone I know named Lizzie, but because I liked the way “Lizzie” sounded with “Leftover Lullaby.” LLL, as I now lovingly refer to it, turned out to be a deeply rewarding culinary experience that was good to the last slurp.