(Dumb)

Yesterday, I took Sophie to The Nice Dentist and then to The Nice Neurologist. On the way across the city from The Nice Dentist's office to The Nice Neurologist's office,  I listened to The Public Radio and learned about The Trumplican vote to not call witnesses and while I sort of expected it, given Dear Leader and The Sycophants Who Follow Him, I felt sort of hopeless and depressed for a few minutes. This isn't accurate chronologically, but despair isn't either. I was looking out the window at the backs of cars and then into the rearview mirror at Sophie's pretty face and the radio kept talking and then there was a Muslim American who was talking about the vote and getting out the vote and how we can't stop hoping because, he reminded us, Frederick Douglass thought it was a country worth fighting for. Martin Luther King, too. And Malcolm X. So, the list goes on.

To despair is a luxury, in particular for a white person. For me, it's sort of dumb. Dumb. 

Speechless.

When I walked down the coffin hall from The Nice Neurologist's office to the elevator and then out into the Pasadena Sunshine, I felt not a little despair. I felt like a dragon my tail The Past and my goddamn inability to Just Let It Go. No matter how many times I read about PTSD it doesn't stick. Back on the road I heard that Michael Bloomberg who is running to overthrow Dear Leader is spending several million dollars on an ad that will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday. Actually, I think The Newscaster said that a one minute ad during the Super Bowl costs $10,000,000 (Ten Million). I think The Ad features a fat, grotesque Dear Leader chasing after a golf ball or something and will be played in front of the several billion people who will also be entertained by Buffalo Wings, Mostly Black Men bashing their brains to oblivion and The Singer Known Fondly As JLo dancing her insured million dollar ass around during The Halftime Show.

What's there to despair about? What's dumb? (speechless)

Report from the Dentist: Is it Safe?*

So, I'm going to moderate my tiny little mother mind™ words of this morning -- or at least temper them -- by saying that the anesthesiologist with the famous physicist's name turned out to be a wonderful guy. Really wonderful. He was gentle and kind and told me I was a saint. I told him that I most assuredly was not a saint and that he didn't know me from Adam. It turns out that he has a sense of humor, too, because he looked at me and said, You're right. You're probably dark and evil on the inside. Those were probably the truest words ever said, but only ya'll know that. It turned out, too, that Sophie had no cavities but needed her impacted lower wisdom teeth removed, and when I say removed, I mean right then and there. I felt boxed in when the dentist came out to tell me. She's a surgeon, and she specializes in treating people with special needs so there was room in the box, but still. I basically hyperventilated in the waiting room over the next four hours, in between texting with a few good friends and reading about Melania Trump in The New Yorker. That made me stop hyperventilating and start praying to Jesus for our salvation. The anesthesiologist with the famous physicist's name walked me to my car when it was all over. He lifted Sophie out of the wheelchair and put her in the front seat of my car, fastened her seatbelt and then helped me to fold up the wheelchair and lift it into the back of the car. So except for the hourly wage, I have to eat my words.



Also, it's my youngest child's birthday today, and he's fifteen years old. I'll devote a whole post to Oliver tomorrow, if I make it through the night. We're having Vietnamese food for dinner and a peanut butter chocolate birthday cake for dessert.

All will be well. All will be well. All manner of thing shall be well.



















*Prize to the first person who knows what this line refers to!

The Semi-Annual Visit to the Dentist in Beverly Hills

So, yes, I stood across the street from that black sports car and took this photo while my boys went inside the building behind me for their semi-annual dental check-up. It's a Lamborghini, Mom, Henry said, dismissively, and it might cost $1,000, 000. I think he was serious, but don't quote me as you know I tend toward hyperbole, and certain apples actually don't fall far from the tree.

Anyhoo.

The fact that I'd just given him a hard time for wearing his gray, polyester gym shorts to the dentist that he picked out at Target despite my protestations (I despise athletic shorts when they're worn as clothes and not for athletics), made his dismissal of the million dollar car and the subsequent posturing of the various large men positioned everywhere, cameras hanging from their necks, seem even more jarring to me, still a bit of a star f**ker when it comes to celebrities. I might be reading War and Peace, but when it comes to star sightings, I'm as excited as the next moderately overweight middle-aged woman to perhaps glimpse Johnny Depp or, if lucky, Javier Bardem. Just the other night, I walked in front of Annette Bening at a local restaurant as she waited for her car, and I admit to a frisson of pleasure that I'd come full circle. It was just a few years back that I stood on the steps of Royce Hall during an intermission of King Lear, looked to my right and noticed that it was Warren Beatty standing right next to me. I nearly jumped into his pocket.

Reader, I imagine you're wondering whether a moon, worns as if it had been a shell  has lost its devotion to all things disability related and might be morphing into a gossip rag?

So be it.

After fifteen years in Los Angeles, a city that I never thought of as anywhere in particular other than the cover of an Eagles album when I was my sons' ages, I'm still a bit freaked out that I have two boys who are Angelenos. We're from LA, they say when we go back east, and I startle like I did when I took my first husband's last name and whenever I uttered Elizabeth Supercalifragilistic, saw the words in a cartoon bubble coming from my mouth. Being born in Los Angeles doesn't mean that you have blonde hair and skateboard in empty pools or even surf in Malibu before school, but it does lend a certain insouciance to the sighting of million dollar cars and people, and I guess that's a good thing.

I waited a bit outside the dental office and tried not to crane my middle-aged neck too far to notice who the paparazzi were waiting on, and after a few minutes someone came out from across the street, there was a bit of shouting and jockeying, the other big guys with the even bigger camera lenses pulled them up to their faces,  and some very large men pulled up right in front of the million dollar car and blocked it with their Exxon Valdeez cars so I really didn't see anyone or anything. For all I know, it was Beyonce getting a hair extension or buttock implants. I pretended to be a native, turned away and walked into the dentist's office to retrieve my sons who both got a good report -- no cavities, sparkly clean, and when Oliver asked why his teeth were sort of yellow despite brushing them all the time, the dentist told him that only million dollar teeth are that white. As reward for no cavities, I bought them each a cupcake from the fancy cupcake machine up the street, and then we walked up the stairs of the parking garage, got into our sexy white Mazda  and sped off.

It takes a village.

This is Henry, holding Sophie's legs at the dentist. I'm sitting on a stool, torqued at an odd angle, holding down her hands and keeping her head straight so that the hygienist can clean her teeth.

Going to the dentist with Sophie ranks up there with going to the hospital  or dealing with a seizure in a public place as one of my very least favorite things to do. While Sophie doesn't mind having her mouth propped open or even the actual cleaning, she does struggle with the lying down part, and in order to do an effective job, the hygienist needs help keeping her head straight and her hands down. There's no adaptive chair at the dentist, and because I'm just so grateful that this particular dentist is incredibly sweet and good with her, treats her at all, actually (did you know that dental care for the disabled is something that is hard to find?) and works hard to not have to sedate her, I willingly bend my body into pretzel-like shapes to keep her in the chair and prevent her from folding her own legs up in her customary pretzel-like shape. This time I had Henry, though, who kneeled on the floor and kept one arm over her legs and played a video game all at the same time.


Am I lucky or what?