Tripping at the Dentist

by Debbie Wilson

For me a trip to the dentist is somewhat like preparing for a real trip. It always involves a lot of preparation and additional pre-trips to various health care providers.   It was one foggy Christmas Eve when Santa and the Tooth Fairy co-mingled to bring me a dreaded travel package deal.  It happened Christmas Eve 2006 when a crown disengaged itself from the front of my mouth.  Have you ever tried to find working dentists on Christmas Eve?  Forget it! They are off in the North Pole with wanna be dentist elves celebrating the holidays.  Having to face family and friends at forty-something with a front tooth missing isn’t as cute as it was when you were 5 and it is the wrong season for the tooth fairy.   

A dentist was finally located as well as a dental surgeon for a root canal on December 27^th.  The trip to the surgeon should have involved some relaxation medication but unfortunately for all, it didn’t.  A mere two weeks later, another trip for another root canal, but this time the dental surgeon had insisted on relaxation medication for me or he wouldn’t even walk in the room.  That trip, and many others, involved someone to drive me home, even for routine procedures.  It seemed that my trips to the dentist started to also involve a trip to the pharmacy.  Nice, free vacations of the mind soon followed.  I would look at my handsome dentist and think of him as the tour operator for the gondola ride I was about to take in Venice. The dental hygienist became the hostess at a fancy New York restaurant.  The snag (not of the tooth but in my fantasy) would come when the drilling started.  It is always the drilling that derails any trip, but especially one to the dentist. Just the sound was enough to send shock waves of reality through me.  Whiiiirrrrrr and then the tour guide/dentist would say, “This won’t hurt”. Well, of course it wasn’t going to hurt him and so what if I was numb from my eyebrows to my neck, I could still feel that drill bit! “ Relax” he said, and I think, “Someday buddy, I will be on the other end of that drill and then we will see who is telling whom to relax!”

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A Sixty-Year Love Story from Morocco, Israel and France

by Bethany Ball

Marco and Aliza descended on our house in Nyack New York with their irrepressible energy.  Aliza, who is visiting from Israel, is the mother of our dear friend Sagi. And Marco is her boyfriend visiting from his home in Bordeaux, France.  They were staying with Sagi in his tiny apartment in Williamsburg and had come over to cook a meal for Sagi and his friends. Marco immediately settled in, a spry, fit man in his early seventies, making the most of our ill-equipped kitchen (I asked myself: Where are my kitchen scissors? Why do I not have large cutting boards? Or serving dishes?). Marco speaks French, Portuguese and Hebrew. Everyone who came for dinner spoke a smattering of one or several of those languages. If we got stuck, Marco spoke to Aliza in French and she translated in Hebrew or English. There was moule (en francais), moulim (b’ivrit) or mussels with a butter sauce that we were instructed to drink. Our friend Anthony (a native New Yorker married to an Israeli) brought lamb kabob and sharpened knives. Kristen, a native Alabaman chopped parsley. Sagi worked the grill, along with my husband. Anthony’s Israeli wife Abi and I chased after our not-quite-two-year olds and filled in the gaps--like searching for kitchen appliances and washing dishes. Abi set the table and tore and folded paper towel for napkins (why do I never have napkins?). Kristen’s boyfriend Etay played DJ, chopped vegetables and teased Marco. “Marco! I put on French music! Just for you.”

“Bah!” he said, making a face, “It is Carla Bruni. She does not sing. She talks!”

“Give us some Yves Montand,” Aliza called out.

Marco served my grilled fish, branzini or Mediterranean Sea bass. He called it by its French name, Loup de Mer.

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VACATIONS ARE A NECESSITY, NOT A LUXURY

by Judith Fein

Some people I know, when they are really stressed out, take an afternoon, evening or full day off. The next day, they are back to work. Others kick it for a weekend, and then dive back into the daily routine on Monday morning. I’m flipping through my mental rolodex of friends, associates and family and, to my horror, I realize that I don’t know anyone who really takes vacations.

“What?” you say. “I take vacations. I went white water rafting on the Snake River in Idaho for five days. And last year I spent six in Kauai, hiking and snorkeling.”

I am sorry, amigos, but five or six days are a break, an experience, a change of scene and pace, but not a real vacation.

A real vacation is at least two weeks. And even better is a month. This is a startling idea in the U.S.A., where most people are afraid to take off more than a long weekend because they may lose their jobs. This means we are certifiably nuts in the U.S.A.  Are we born to work, stress, eat, shop, have sex and then croak? Will we actually take our cell phones and laptops with us to the grave, so we can check the headlines on After Life News or shoot off one last post-mortem tweet?

Talk to people from Europe (they will call it “holidays” and not “vacation” in Britain, but I swear it means the same thing).  Ask folks from South America. They get time off from work. Off from work. Not a few days here and there where their nervous systems hardly have a chance for a good yawn, and certainly not a real rest.

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Stalking Karl Rove

by Rachel Dickinson

Last October I found myself in Rosemary Beach, Florida, and while I was there heard that this was Karl Rove's new hometown. Forget Texas and DC - one of the most influential political operatives of the last decade lived in a million dollar home in this upscale New Urbanist community on Florida's Emerald Coast.

I had a plan. I was going to find Karl Rove's house and stand outside it and do something - I didn’t know what - but I felt like I had to make a statement about my complete disgust with him and his cold Machiavellian ways. He left a trail of tanked elections and dirty tricks behind him when he abruptly left Washington in 2007 to spend more time with his family. Since then he's ignored a subpoena by Congress investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department and was found in contempt of Congress when he failed to show up. I felt like Rove had no scruples, no ethics, was a two-faced hypocrite, and deserved to be found and at the very least, mocked.

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Nothing Says Love Like Bacon Grease

by Melissa Josue

Water droplets beat against the bedroom window, which framed a gray sky that poured all day into the evening. But the smell of hot butter browning in a skillet and the buoyant sound of trumpets and keyboard from the radio lifted my mood. I’ve only experienced Mardi Gras through weekend parades leading up to Fat Tuesday. But not the evening often touted on the news as an occasion of unabashed revelry and regrettable drunkenness.

“This must be a nostalgic time for you, isn’t it?” I asked my boyfriend Charles while he browned the French toast in a melted layer of what he calls “fake butter,” a cholesterol-free alternative to butter that I try to keep in his fridge should we decide to treat ourselves to a heavier brunch. I thought he was going to reminisce about stumbling out of the Napoleon House after having had too many beers or talk about the things he and his high school buddies did to get girls to catch their beads.

But instead, he prepared for Fat Tuesday as though it were Christmas. Reminding me weeks in advance to keep the evening free. Pulling out plastic beads to wear to work or offer his daughters. Interspersing the weekends before Mardi Gras with meals containing some variation of grits and cheese, a heavy cream sauce, and way too much butter for the sensibilities of a girl who practiced portion control with a kitchen scale. His shameless use of animal fat was both horrifying and endearing. If a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, he reciprocated by spending equal time over the stove to cook his way to mine.

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A year on the Ground

by Sallie Bingham

2009 is the year I decided to stop flying.

Not flying in my imagination, or flying down a mountain on skis, but flying on the hideous US airlines, dealing once again with the insane security regulations, the rudeness of airline emplopyees, the escalating costs, now compounded by charges for luggage, the endless waits, the numbing cancellations, the refusal to grant travelers even basic amenities like pillows and free peanuts....

So, I will not fly this year. After all, we can stilll remember when we used to drive and take trains; we still have cars and Amtrak still manages to cripple along. So there are alternatives to the gross mishebenavior of the commercial airlines. Why not try them?

Expense? Probably. This will be one of the things I'll track: gas has gone down again, motels are not expensive, meals on the road can (perhaps) be cheap.

Time? Certainly. But what are the pay-offs? A closer relation to the landscape? The opportunity to meet, and talk with, strangers? A better understanding, even, of that mysterious entity, our continent?

Relationships? Strained by extended time together in a car or a train compartnemt? Probably. But, again, what are the rewards?

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