Every decade after my happy first, the Tooth Fairy has bestowed a new, unwelcome dental truth upon me: in my 40s, via a root canal. An uneventful one, as these things go. Only six hours passed between the throb that woke me up and the needle that dialed me down and the little saw that stole the pain away forever. I didn’t even have to get a crown. My tooth was still my tooth. Till yesterday, when I brought a loose thread hanging from my sweater to my teeth and realized I could no longer feel how hard to bite. 
I’ve been writing these stories since 2001 and have, at last count, polished off 817 of the things—81,700 words—or something like a whole novel’s worth of disjointed thought.
Word today of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library (or as Dubya calls it, “Lie-Berry”). It is a remarkable honour for a man who darkened few library doors in his youth. Had events unfolded differently, this might not have been an issue; after all, his focus was going to be domestic. Well. Unschooled in world affairs, he had to rely on his national security “dream team”. Perhaps if he’d read more books he’d have formed his own opinions; he might never have invaded Iraq, or based his post-war strategy on a flimsy pop-up book, Democracy Made Easy.
Photo: Sari Garden by L. Leclair
Guilty as charged, I’m a little shallow. But I bet you also I’m not the only one. And is it really shallow, when you look at a photo of the apprehension of a guy who allegedly – though his aunt in Toronto doubts it – pressure cookered a marathon and wreaked havoc on a city and ran over his own exploded brother with the getaway car (awkward!), and is now intubated, sedated, and reviled by his uncle, is it really shallow in this instance to look at the guy and find the first thing comes to mind is, “Hey, he’s really ripped!”? 
What a shame that the idiocy of two boys has monopolized the news this week. Twisted and unforgivable but nothing that folks in the West Bank or Pakistan or even Europe haven’t been dealt on a daily basis. They grieve and vent and then move on. But because this happened in America there’ll be ribbon campaigns and concerts and anyone who looks like my son will be under increased and fearful scrutiny. That is, unless they want to buy a gun at Walmart. Forget looking in space for it, the God Particle is alive and well and living in Congress.
“Who wants pie?” Mom demanded after we’d cleared supper.
I inherited some surplus baking supplies from a pal whose daughter worked on one of those elimination cooking shows. Every time I crack open the jar marked “rice syrup” I wonder how it all went wrong. When did it become entertaining to watch people cook like they were bailing water from a paper lifeboat? What must all that anxiety taste like? Give me an hour of Julia, Martha, the cagily Sinovescent Yan, or even the avuncular but dodgy James Barber anytime over witnessing some idiot sweat into his Saskatoon berry reduction while another bigger idiot rips him a new one. 
The Smithsonian tells us we share 98.8% of our genome with chimpanzees, but that hardly reveals us to ourselves in any new light. Now, from Belgium, comes a study showing we have 96.3% in common with annelida oligochaeta, the common earthworm. So very many nuances of human nature are explained in this fell swoop. The lingering popularity of the name Ann. Our affection for undergrounds, whether inhabited by the French Resistance or by hobbits. And of course, the disarming comforts we feel around tubes. Think tube tops, toddlers lulled by toilet paper rolls, and jagged mornings smoothed with Euro caviar.
We’d eventually take over a house the bank had repossessed, that someone had left in a hurry, taking the stove and the fridge on his way out and tossing what food he still had in the sink.
The second time through, we still weren’t entirely sure, but that certainly didn’t stop me from taking along a few things to clean up a house I didn’t yet own, gathering up the worst of the garbage, soaking the kitchen with Lysol, and doing what little I could to get rid of the stink of the previous owner before the heat kicked in.
«Es-tu mal au ventre, maman?» Every year on her birthday, mom would ask her mother if her stomach hurt. Mémé, who produced a bakers dozen, never got the significance. But most of us remember birthing our babies. Twenty-two hours of labour took me from insisting I deliver in a salt-water bath, the air replete with the sounds of whales and patchouli-scented vegan candles to maniacally screaming “Get that fucker out!” By the time the catheter arrived, I saw yoga and sheep breathing for what they were: chimerical hippy hogwash. But I’d have done it again in a heartbeat.
Photo by P. E. Reid
Yesterday two Popes lunched. We smiled; it seemed so sunny. We should've been afraid. I don’t mean just Catholics worried that Benedict might cleave the Church with a chance utterance about preferring pickerel to cod. Rather, as the moral majority of Star Trek viewers should've known, a space-time discontinuity had formed. Francis is but the first of the Popes who’ll be popping in from alternate dimensions. Come Tuesday, Popes will fill our screens, like in the old “Which twin has the Toni?” ads. About a week later, the exponentially-growing mass of Popes will tweak Earth off its orbit. Goodnight moon.
On our trip back from the Jersey Shore, we passed through the town of Intercourse, a small town in Pennsylvania with a shop on one side of the road—selling assorted knick-knacks and quilts made by the local Amish—and a lonely motel on the other. I insisted we stop, hoping to find something to add to my collection of kitschy souvenirs, but we really should have stayed overnight, if only to have the town come up in conversation one day, and so allow us to dismiss it with the weary cynicism of the seasoned traveller: “Been there, done that.”
When Zeno finally landed himself a girlfriend, he soon learned she liked to take things slow. It was three dates before they held hands; months before she let him kiss her with his mouth open.
