This is a photo of my dentist.   I asked him if it was okay to write a blog post about him, and he said yes.  He has been my dentist for 30 years, we got started going to him because his daughter worked with my husband.  Over the years I have gotten to know him, his pets, the wildlife around his house (he lives over across the valley on the side of the mountain) and his whole family.

He’s a working-class guy from Pueblo, Colorado.  His father was an Italian immigrant who came to Pueblo to work in the steel mill, back when there was a steel mill.   His father was long gone, but his mother lived to be 100.   My dentist is well past the age when most people retire  (his son the dentist just retired), but he likes his work, and he is really, really good.  When he hit retirement age he got interested in forensic dentistry and learning about new things has kept him going.  He often has stories about cases that he is working on for the coroner, he has done dental identification of corpses, and bite mark analysis in criminal cases.

When I saw him last week I thought to ask him why he became a dentist.   He was studying to be a doctor and working nights at a hospital while he went to school.  He found it too difficult to deal with death, so he switched over to dentistry and as I said he is very good.   The entire time he is working on you he is blathering and telling bad jokes, he must know thousands of them.   Before you know it he’s finished and everything in your mouth is working again.

Unfortunately, he was in a very serious auto accident this week.  He broke his hip, and broke the orbit around one eye.  He’s had one surgery and more are to come.  So now everything will change for him.  I am praying that he recovers, but it will no doubt be a long process.  He’s a good man and I like him and his family a lot.

I had a visit from someone that I met in second grade, many long years ago.   The school we attended was a working-class, Catholic school, run by nuns who mostly hated children.  My friend lived across the alley and like me had a bunch of little brothers.   We started out the same, but life has taken us into much different paths.  Until recently my friend said she had not thought much about the past until she reconnected with other girls from this school via Facebook (and my brother was the one who connected me with them).  I did not like to think about this past because it was not very pleasant to dwell upon, but it is impossible to completely escape.  It is possible to contemplate now because it is the past.   We had our futures marked out as children, playing house to prepare us for our lives.  Perhaps working as a secretary, at a bank, or at a factory.   I took a leap into a different future.   It wasn’t easy, but it was the direction I needed to go.

This is my 12th birthday, I’m the one with glasses

Part of the appeal of my house was that it had a large lot with just a small amount of lawn.   At our previous house it took an hour to mow and lots of watering to keep the yard looking nice.   After the last big drought, my husband ripped out the water hungry blue grass and planted buffalo grass, which only grows about 5 inches tall.   Some of the taller grass re-seeded itself, but I decided to leave it and have a meadow instead of a lawn.   (It will stay a meadow until the city forces me to mow).   My husband was a German, so he liked things to be orderly, but I love the way the meadow looks.

This is some sort of wildflower.

This is oregano that seeded inself into the lawn.

These escaped from the flower bed.  The bare space by the house is where I had to remove the juniper because of fire mitigation.

A weed.  Maybe it will stay and maybe it will go.

After years of faithful service, my right hand decided to retire.  Okay, it didn’t really formally retire, it decided to plague me with carpal tunnel.  This meant that at random times, it would get numb and/or have flaming pain.   So when I went to my new hand doctor (the old doctor had the nerve to retire!) he said surgery was the answer.   After getting permission from my insurance, a week later he operated.

The first impediment is me.  I don’t want the standard anesthesia Versed which leaves you walking and talking with no idea what you are saying.  So we compromised with a nerve block and a local anesthetic.   While the hand guy is operating,  me and the anethesiologist had an nice discussion on the history of surgery and anesthesia.  It was quickly done, they loaded me up with pain killers and sent me on my way.

It was my other hand that had been left out of the discussion.  I hate to admit it, but my left hand is rather stupid.  It does not know how to do the simplest things.  I never thought that picking up a fork and shovelling food in could be a challenge.  The right hand shows it how to do something, then the left hand gives it a go, for at least the next ten days.

In yesterday’s newspaper the advice columnist (agony aunt) answered a person who did not like the personal nature of conversations among women at work.   She gave some sort of sappy advice, my advice to the complainer would be to go back into their cave!   If you can’t share your life and concerns with your friends, who can you share it with?

I belong to several different groups of women, we come together for different reasons, and each group involves a different amount of sharing.  The Mennonite book group is obviously not made up of wild women, but they have all had a life and offer an interesting and different world view.   The same is true of my sorority and my exercise group.  But my quilting and knitting groups, supposedly the purview of traditional, conventional, staid women is a different matter altogether.

We tell stories about: stupid things that men do, sex, family, health, menopause, etc. and laugh and commiserate.   What we occasionally forget is that it is a public gathering and that sensitive souls could be shocked by the frankness of us old dames.  We also talk about books, movies, art and culture,  food and recipes, and our actual projects.  As far as I can remember we have never discussed the latest fashions, except to laugh at young women who wear them.

However, there are a few rules for me about what kind of women’s groups to belong to.  Any woman’s group with a president and a budget will involve endless, and I do mean endless, discussion of how to spend the money.   At these events I find my self wishing to do anything to escape, including formulating plans to dig an tunnel, pulling the fire alarm, pretend to have a seizure, etc.   There are some poor souls who apparently have no opportunity to express themselves, once they have the floor they will not relinquish it save for an earthquake occuring.   Then there are the know-it-alls, they are to avoided at all cost because they don’t actually listen, it’s all about them.

It is freeing to be able to discuss anything with a group of women, we are not necessarily like-minded, it provides a forum to share our concerns of life in general and our specific experiences of being women.  At least one husband would be murdered if his missus did not have a place to vent.  The groups let us turn trials and tragedies into funny stories about the essential comedy of life.