Disappearing Man.

My friend The Gardener has disappeared. (I also wrote about him here.) We only saw each other every two or three weeks, and it was a new friendship but, I thought, a deep one. We'd have breakfast on a Saturday or Sunday morning at Los Altos, the dirt-cheap Mexican restaurant just up I-35. We talked about sex and politics mostly. He usually paid, and a couple times he took me out for ice cream which totally made me feel like a girl. In a good way.

He's a sweet man and I think our friendship was getting richer as we got to know each other. I was slowly getting over my urge to lick his neck every time I saw him. But he never introduced me to his long-time partner. I'm sure it was partly because we saw each other so infrequently and there probably wasn't a time when it would have naturally happened, but, also, I felt like maybe he was keeping me to himself. Not that we were having "an affair," but I felt like there was at least a little bit of "the other man" about it, which I liked because it kept our friendship in some small way erotic. Could be all in my head, who knows. At any rate, The Gardener disappeared.

He stopped answering emails. After a break of several weeks, he did reply and say that with the summer he was spending less time at the computer. But then after that, nothing. And I don't have his phone number any more. It was in my cell phone, which I got rid of.

I guess I'm a little worried. His mother died early this year, and a friend killed himself not long before that. He didn't seem particularly thrown by either death, but he's a stolid man, ex-military, not the type to get real emotional. Now, that can mean he has a very healthy attitude, he's philosophical about life and death and deals well with the big stuff. Or it could mean he keeps it all inside and it builds up and he has a meltdown later on. I haven't known him long enough to have an opinion.

I've been thinking of him a lot since I've been here in Indiana with my mom and dad.

You Mess With Us, and You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning With a Condom on Your House.

Jesse Helms is Dead.

I've been wondering today where all the hate goes when somebody so hateful dies. Does it decompose along with his corpse? It seems like it would at least linger like an odor, a whiff of sulfur. He wielded it with such implacable force, bruised and battered so many people and institutions over so many years that it's hard to believe such hate wouldn't be a hard, solid thing.

Hallelujah, Thank You Jesus.

The tooth is gone. I like that it was tooth #1 on the big master tooth chart (did you know they're all numbered?). He showed it to me after he pulled it out, and it was nasty-looking: huge and discolored, with a big hole in it.

The whole thing took 15 minutes tops and I didn't feel a thing, which is a drag because the oral surgeon was cute. As I was leaving, he said, "Call me if you need me."

Um, I need you!

Young Love.

My nephew L, who is 12 and cute as the dickens (as my grandma used to say), has a girlfriend. He asked his mom (my sister) if he was allowed to "date," whatever that could possibly mean at 12. She says L and the girl are texting each other all day long.

When my sister told me, I was incredulous and maybe even a little appalled. 12? Isn't that extremely young? He hasn't even started puberty yet. I'm sure I had no interest in dating at 12. But then I remembered (duh) of course I was interested in boys at 12, but my interest didn't lead me to ask my mother if I was allowed to go on a date. I knew that if I ever told anyone about the evil growing inside me, I would spend the rest of my life being raped in jail, and even if I didn't tell anyone I would spend eternity roasting on a spit.

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.