My Teeth Again.

Here's something I can write about. This week, I went back to the dentist, or I should say the hygienist, and she finished cleaning my teeth. And I have an appointment on Thursday with an oral surgeon to have one pulled because the filling has fallen out and it's a wisdom tooth and the hole is close to the nerve so it's easier and cheaper to just yank it. I can't describe the joy this brings me, to know that I'll soon have all the filthy, stinky rotten stuff out of my mouth.

I also feel a twinge of sadness about having a permanent part of my body removed. (Not so permanent, after all.) Being here with my aging parents, I've been thinking so much about getting older in terms of what you give up, the accumulation of loss: the people around you who die one by one, the activities you can no longer manage, the shrinking of your zone of travel, the narrowing of possibility in general, and things like bone loss, memory loss, vision and hearing loss, loss of elasticity in your skin. And the always accelerating contraction of the number of years you have left. All of it.

It's just a damn tooth, but that's how it starts!

Sorting Things Out.

I'm at a loss for what to write about these days. There's lots going on in my head for sure, some of it pretty fascinating if I do say so myself, but most of it has to do with unpacking my neuroses in light of my parents' habits. I would be an ungrateful son, not to mention a rude guest, to paint what would surely seem to them an unflattering portrait of my parents here. What I want to do, what I wish I could do, here and in my brain, is forgive my parents and paint the unflattering portrait of myself.

I've been here for 4 weeks now. It's been stormy on and off the whole time. But enough sun that the spinach Mom and I planted the week I arrived is big and leafy, and I thinned the basil so there are about a dozen seedlings now about 3 inches tall. I saw a sleek, black spider on one of the spinach leaves this morning and was glad that I found it and not my mom. They gleefully kill everything here, smash spiders with newspapers and Kleenex, lure chipmunks into cages where they shoot them with guns, rig the lawn with Medieval contraptions that impale moles as they commute in their tunnels under the grass. And god help the dandelions, the lepers of the suburban plant world. Poor little yellow things. So pretty and doomed.

Yardwork.

I won't mow the lawn. Well, I suppose I would if my dad asked me, but he hasn't and I'm grateful to the point of tears. Mowing grass might as well be the eternal flames of hell. I can't think of any worse torment. And it's been raining a lot since I got here, so the grass needs to be mowed every few days. "Needs to be mowed," they say, but I think it looks beautiful when it gets all long and green and lush. I have to admit that I feel guilty watching my 74-year-old father push the lawn mower back and forth -- but not guilty enough to go out there. I think he enjoys it. I'm going to assume he enjoys it.

I feel such a strong urge to be writing one of those usually icky articles like "what I learned about life and myself while taking care of my sick parent," but I have this rule about not writing personal stuff about other people. It's a tricky rule, and I'm usually very uncertain where to draw the line. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't be interesting to you to read about my mom, but I don't think it's my story to tell. At least, not right now in the middle of it.

Just to reassure anyone who might worry: Mom is doing very well. In fact, you wouldn't even know she'd been sick. Yesterday she had me drag all the furniture from the screened-in porch out onto the lawn so she could scrub the mold off with bleachy water. I'm not sure if I should insist on doing these chores for her, because it seems to me that this is what she does. This is what her days consist of. Taking care of the house and the lawn and the gardens. Because her immune system is compromised by the chemotherapy, she's not allowed to dig in the dirt this summer. I try to keep up with the weeding, but I know somehow that's not the point. Someone else weeding is fine, but it's a distance second to doing it herself.

I can say this without betraying anyone's privacy: I am in a foreign and mysterious place where bushes get pruned to the bloody nub and all the condiments are in upside-down plastic bottles. I miss my wild, overgrown yard, and I miss the sound of a butter knife against the rim of the mustard jar. And I miss J.

War and Whiskers.

My dad is a Civil War buff. The military stuff doesn't interest me much, but the politics do. Over the last two nights, we watched Gods and Generals (it's almost 4 hours long) and he's watching Gettysburg tonight. I'm wandering in to catch bits of it, but I can only take so much. Great acting, and beautiful photography, but the ponderous tone wears me out. I know there's a case to be made that this class of people in this time were more eloquent and sentimental, but was everything that came out of their mouths so lofty?

The best thing about these movies -- and the Civil War era -- is the facial hair. It's infinitely varied, elaborate, masculine, and very sexy.

Indiana Wants Me.

I got my teeth cleaned today! Well, at least the first stage. Apparently since I hadn't had my teeth cleaned in 6 years, I needed some kind of super comprehensive cleaning. Today they did a "total mouth debridement" (translation: chipping plaque off the teeth with a chisel) and I have another appointment in two weeks for what I think they were calling a "fine scaling," to get whatever the chisel left behind.

I don't have any new cavities, only one where a filling cracked and fell out. The dentist said since it's so close to the nerve I might want to just have it taken out. The tooth, that is. It's a wisdom tooth. Yank it out, I say. That way, I won't have to worry about it any more.

I feel giddy. I had become so self-conscious about my breath that I was avoiding public gatherings, I was really avoiding meeting new people, and I got terribly anxious going into any situation in which I might have to speak with anyone at close range. Any time I had to talk to anyone at school I found myself muttering out of the side of my mouth. But I am an outcast no more!

I'll be in Indiana until some time around the end of July. I'm staying with my mom and dad while my mom recovers from surgery she had a few weeks ago, helping with gardening and cooking and anything else they need and enjoying the nice long visit with my family that I haven't been able to have for many years. My sister and her family along with her in-laws -- they all live about 45 minutes away -- are going on a trip in mid-July, and I'm going to house-sit and cat-sit for them. They're going to pay me for it, which I feel a little strange about because it is something I would happily do anyway, but the money makes it possible for me to stay here for this extended time. So it all works out.

I was also counting on my $600 check from the IRS to help me get through the summer, but now I don't think I'm going to get one, since everyone I know has gotten theirs or at least a letter saying that one is on the way. Not that I necessarily deserve $600 from the federal government, but if everyone else is getting it I want mine too. I deserve to be pandered to as much as anyone! (I don't know if I was excluded because I earned so little money last year, or because I'm a student, or what.)

Yummy Pig Meat.

I don't remember how the subject came up, but shortly after I arrived in New York, T mentioned that he hadn't ever had really good pulled pork in New York. The only barbecue he could find was smothered in thick tomatoey sauce instead of the thin vinegar sauce that he remembered from childhood. I said, "I can make that, easy." So I did.

T wanted me to write down the recipe for him, so I thought I'd share it here, too, since I have it all typed up. I have a large slow-cooker at home that will easily fit half a shoulder roast, but if you have a regular size crockpot, you might want to have a whole shoulder cut into 3 pieces.

This recipe is bare bones, using only what T had handy in his kitchen. If I were making it at home, I might add a couple bay leaves and a big pinch of coriander. But it turned out absolutely delicious. We made 3 meals out of it.

PULLED PORK

Pork shoulder roast with bone
2 or 3 small onions, or 1 big one
8 or 10 garlic cloves
orange juice
1 lime
brown sugar
cider vinegar


Sauté the onions and garlic over medium-high heat in olive oil with a few pinches of salt until they have lots of brown charred spots (but not burnt). Transfer them to the crock pot. If you have carrots or celery around, you can brown them in big chunks with the onions. They’ll add more flavor.

Salt and pepper the roast generously. In the same pan, brown the roast well on all sides. Don’t burn it, but the more char you get on it, the better. Transfer it to the crock pot. Deglaze the pan with orange juice, scrape all the yummy brown bits off the bottom of the pan, and pour it all into the crock pot. Add more orange juice to about 1/2 full. Add a few peels of the lime, more salt, some red pepper flakes.

Cook on high until it starts to simmer, then turn to low and cook until the meat falls apart easily when you stick a fork in it -- it’ll take a few hours. Remove the roast to a plate and let it cool enough to handle, then separate the meat from the fat and bone. Strain the liquid and skim off the fat (I put it in the freezer in a cup while I’m picking apart the meat, so the fat coagulates and is easier to skim off.)

Make the sauce: Heat about a 1/3 cup of orange juice, 1/3 cup of cider vinegar, a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, the juice of the lime, and the liquid from cooking the roast. Boil to reduce by about half. Pour over the meat and let it sit for a little while to absorb some of the liquid. Add salt to taste.

When you eat the leftovers the next day, splash a little vinegar and/or lime juice on the meat when you heat it up. It’ll brighten it up.


COLE SLAW

Shred half a head of cabbage. Toss with 2 tablespoons of sea salt in a colander and let it sit over a bowl for 2 or 3 hours. Rinse well and pat dry with paper towels or a non-fuzzy kitchen towel. Toss with just enough mayo to lightly coat it and a splash of white vinegar or rice vinegar. Easy!

T and I ate the pork topped with cole slaw on potato rolls. I can't think of anything better to come home to late after working all day and you're famished.

New York.

I’m in New York. The noise and crowds and traffic are so out of my system now and they stress me out in a way they never did when I lived here. Or, more likely, when I lived here I accepted the stress as a baseline and didn’t read it as stress. I wanted the excitement so badly, I had looked forward to it for so long, and I ate it up and loved it. I had no idea how numb I had become until I left. New York is like white noise: it’s nice for sleeping.

Yesterday, when T and I were driving around midtown, I remembered that during a visit to New York in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I moved here, I witnessed a gruesome murder where two guys hacked another man to death with machetes a few feet away while I was eating dinner with friends at a sidewalk café on 43rd St. and Ninth Ave. It was shocking to be sure, but I don’t remember reacting to it with the kind of horror that I’m sure I would feel now seeing something like that. It was just part of the excitement of New York.

That sounds so perverse when I think about it now. But New York was different then. The subway cars were covered with graffiti, porn shops and prostitutes lined 42nd St., drug dealers descended on you when you walked through Washington Square Park or along First Avenue in the East Village, there was filth everywhere. A machete murder was just part of the mise en scene. New York was scary, and that was a big part of what I loved about it.

We drove down to 26th St. to look at a rehearsal studio. Afterwards, T and his little boy T went to a movie on 125th St. and I caught the A train back to T’s place on 200th and Broadway. It turns out that on weekends, because of some construction in the subway, the A train stops at 168th and you have to catch a shuttle bus for stops farther north. It was a warm day, so I decided to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the bus. 32 blocks is about a mile and a half, which is nothing, and I’d never really seen Harlem and Washington Heights.

Even though it was a mild day, the kind of jacketless day that’s rare in New York, everyone looked grim and gray, and I was depressed by the time I got home. People are so burdened by their lives here, so defensive. I’ve caught a cold too. I haven’t had a cold in years. (My allergies have gotten worse in the meantime, and don’t even talk about cedar fever, but I haven’t had a real cold for a long time.) I’ve been taking mega doses of zinc, which, much to my surprise, works.