As usual, you’ll find this is sloppy and unedited.
The dentist’s office was short-staffed ahead of the holiday weekend, its front desk covered by one woman instead of the usual two. She was stranded on the phone, attempting to mollify an unhappy caller about a billing miscommunication, and apologetically waved in acknowledgement as I took a seat in the waiting room opposite a septuagenarian who was quietly reading a Daniel Silva spy novel, his wife’s quilted floral Vera Bradley bag in the chair beside him. My goal in every waiting room — and in most social situations in general — is to go unnoticed, so I double-checked that my phone was muted before pulling up a home monitoring app to see if my outdoor cameras had caught any interesting wildlife footage overnight.*
Within a couple minutes of that, a man in his late fifties or early sixties bounded in and stopped in his tracks as he got the same apologetic wave. He selected the seat that was closest to mine and I was quite appreciative of the small water cooler that separated us, for no sooner had his blue jeans grazed the chair than a vaguely pornographic ruckus ensued. I say ‘vaguely’ because the soundbite that came blaring from his phone was not quite sexually explicit. It was the woman’s tone of voice that was unmistakably pornographic as she delivered a vulgar scatalogical announcement that seemed all but certain to give way to something X-rated. He cut the video off with a swipe of the screen and offered an “Oh, I’m sorry” of dubious sincerity. We all kept our heads down and pretended not to have heard it, but I was inevitably reminded of Felix.
Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the iPod Porn, we might call this misadventure, one of several such tales he’s contributed to family lore; it involved Felix, who was on the couch in our parents’ family room, accidentally sharing either the screen of his video iPod or its audio as adult material of a particularly laughable nature played. “How did this get on my iPod?!” he demanded feebly, with all the indignation he could muster — naturally fooling no one, as his internet exploits (and those of his omnipresent friends) had been legendary for many years by then, practically from the moment our family had first gone online.**
Anyway, what I thought would be a half-hour to 45-minute dental appointment took three hours, which I should’ve expected by now since my mouth’s reluctance to open is quite a hindrance in the dental chair. I walked home wearing my first set of aligners — April’s appointment had been rescheduled — and holding a box with the next two sets of trays. Every two weeks I’m supposed to move on to the next set, a process that will last the better part of a year, and every six to eight weeks I’ll swing by the dentist so they can monitor the progress and issue new trays. Today they used specks of adhesive to affix tiny tooth-colored attachments to a few of my teeth; the aligners, which I’m supposed to wear 22 hours per day, lock into those. Removing the trays once they’re hooked in is quite difficult for someone with dexterity issues, but them’s the breaks.
“It’s going to hurt at first,” the dentist warned, suggesting I take my preferred OTC pain reliever every four to six hours for the next day or two. I’d just done so when Crankenstein got home earlier than usual, which is my way of telling faithful readers “Yep, I’ve got nothing good for you tonight.” Feel free to join Muriel in her rebellion: I was gone too long for her liking and returned to find a lightly nibbled Douglas Sirk Blu-ray in one of her favorite spots. She volunteered nothing when I questioned her about it, but her eyes asked “How did this get on my iPod?”
* Bunnies, raccoons and opossums are our most frequent overnight visitors, along with a couple of neighborhood cats. Our trash bin, which used to have a crack in its side, now has a jagged opening that will be of great interest to some of those scamps, so I recently set up a camera to catch them in the act before the city-issued receptacle is replaced.
** I’d long since moved out and didn’t witness the performance myself, but our parents and sisters still chuckle about it years later. “Heavens to Betsy! I demand the rapscallion who sabotaged the phone that never leaves my custody, to step forward at once and restore my good name!” is the first thing I would’ve said had I been the guy in the waiting room.