Take a load off.
Pull up a virtual ($1,000-off!) Costco massage chair. Let it pound your buttocks while a Roomba (guilt-free housekeeping) gently circles.
I’ll put Pandora on to some soothing spa music, never mind that it is neither spa nor music. Let me pour you a glass of “varietal” wine with a fourteenth-century wizard on the label (don’t worry—it has been “decanting” since Tuesday).
Forget the bigger world; let’s celebrate the smaller world. Relax. Enjoy. Have a laugh.
When the world has gone mad, it’s mad not to!
The
Madwoman
and the
Roomba
The Tooth
IT’S THAT MOMENT that comes only in dreams.
I’m standing in my kitchen in the gauzy soft-focus pocket of the midafternoon. 3:15. The quiet space between lunch and cocktail hour.
I’ve just gotten off a family conference call with my older sister Kaitlin, known within the family hierarchy as Eldest Daughter, Alpha Dog, or, to the younger ones, Tiger Aunt K. The territory under her vast military command is that of estates, trusts, elder care, life insurance, property deeds, and safety deposit boxes with possible forgotten silk kerchiefs of family gems.
Sam was also on the call. Affable, seventeen years old, the first Loh grandchild (of five), Sam is applying to college. According to Sam’s perhaps admirably Zen dad (my brother Eugene, an engineer), Sam’s GPA is “somewhere in the high 3’s if you count AP classes.” Sam’s SAT’s? Oblique, slightly tortuously phrased answer: “There are kids who have been known to have gotten into college with SAT scores somewhere in that range.”
Tiger Aunt K has gone around the back, done some digging of her own, reporting that Sam has a 3.987 GPA—basically a 4.0, right?—and a surreally high SAT score that sounds like my weight on Jupiter, but which according to the “new” scoring is apparently well up into the 90s percentage-wise. These stats more than match those of his late mother, who went to Stanford, his first choice, right before UCLA, UC Berkeley, and, for safety, UC San Diego.
The one problem?
The personal essay. Here Sam needed his two aunts’ help. As they say, It Takes a Village. Tiger Aunt K directs a K–12 STEM nonprofit, so is no stranger to energetic grant writing. I am a freelance writer, theater artist, adjunct teacher of science communication . . . I am no stranger to putting a “sounds more professional than it really is” face on things.
He read us the prompt: “ ‘Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?’ ”
There was a beat.
Sam followed it with a sound like “Henh?”
Tiger Aunt K pounced in, eager, Tony Robbins-like: “What are your passions, Sam? That’s all they’re asking. What do you love to do?”
“Well, you know, just stuff.” His inflections now went up, as though tentatively fishing. “Biking . . . ? Running . . . ? Hanging out with my friends . . . ?”
“But what drives you?” she pushed on, inspirationally. “Aren’t you driven to learning, doing, inventing, creating? Think back to your childhood!”
I remembered that when Sam was six, when playing chess, he liked to attack with his king. Those pawns would fan out and, instead of castle-ing, his king would come out kicking, one square at a time. Not a killer strategy, but highly original.
“Legos,” Sam said. “I’ve always built stuff with Legos . . .”
“Good,” I said, encouragingly. “That suggests a native love of building . . .”
“Which clearly suggests,” Tiger Aunt K quickly added, whipping up a heady self-actualization soufflé, “that Sam has a passion for international travel so he can visit African villages that need him to build water towers that are probably solar powered!”
“Yes!” I agreed. Sam’s light protests were drowned out by my sister and I congratulating each other. No matter, her angle was brilliant—he would come round.
I now gaze dreamily out the kitchen window into the backyard. Tree branches sway in the sun. There’s a graceful flutter of leaves. The world hovers before me, I hover outside of it. On the counter the NYT Tuesday crossword sits, not too hard, the perfect one, a quick little reward. I’m enjoying the coolness of the refrigerator, open before me. I find this a most relaxing way to snack, standing, no utensils, just hand to mouth, before a world of possibility. An open refrigerator door is a personal midafternoon wormhole to crawl into, a cosmic way station, a psychic rest stop.
It isn’t really eating. It’s just pausing before a crumpled paper bag of last night’s Zankou chicken. Hello, friend! I pull off a morsel, take a hearty bite. It’s so moist and tender. Though it seems to contain a small round pebble.
Hm. I pull it out—sometimes with Zankou, L.A.’s gourmet Armenian chicken chain, they’re in such a hurry to stuff those blue-and-red take-out bags, a pepper may accidentally fall into your hummus—Though this is more like a popcorn kernel, or little piece of bone—
I fumble around in the reading glasses bowl, a lopsided blue ceramic one of my daughters made years ago at Gifted Children’s Camp— Inside is a snarl of reading glasses, half missing a stem—
Glasses on, I look at the pebble. In contour, color, and sedimentary detail, it harkens back to a more prehistoric time. Burnt sienna, ancient, and mottled, it’s like a small chunk from some caveman tool or terra-cotta pot, from some long-forgotten Assyrian dig.
With dawning horror I take an experimental fingertip up into the left back corner of my upper palate. It’s the location of a weirdly sharp-edged molar that I would call just a bit “squeaky.” The tooth has long had a filling, I think, from early adulthood, that has perhaps understandably gotten a bit loosened—
But no. This is no filling.
I am holding a piece of tooth. In my hand.
I feel my knees buckle. I collapse against the kitchen counter.
Obviously, by age fifty-five, I’ve lived through more than a few traumatic life events: illness, death, birth. (Never mind how I often wished for a martini-strength epidural drip that would begin in the second trimester and last until my kids turned twenty-one.) I’ve lived those totemic bleak life moments—pushing open those double doors to the ICU, or to the horrible new assisted living facility with your panicked aging parent. But with the big stuff, at least, you typically have a moment to pop three Advils, to arrange your face, to arm yourself with a stiff bouquet of flowers from the fluorescent-lit gift shop.
The last time my knees literally buckled was some ten years ago when, after a shower, I saw my towel seeming to breathe with small dark flecks. I shrieked, sprinted to the back porch, locked the door behind me, and called 911. “It’s an invasion,” I told the female dispatcher. “Should we call the CDC?”
“You have lice,” she said. “Go buy some RID.”
But those were temporary visitors. This chunk has come out of my mouth.
I call Charlie.
“Hello?” he says. Then: “Yes, the registration—”
Charlie is at AAA trying to do a “work-around” for the fact that his 2000 VW Beetle rarely passes a smog check. “The car runs fine, it just makes smog!” he keeps repeating to anyone who will listen, as though smog testing is a violation of the bug’s basic right to exist.