Loving My Dentist: SOLT

Yesterday morning, honoring my pj Monday, I came back to my blog and shared my post on my other online spaces and I got responses immediately. But I knew I would be leaving for a trip to the dentist and returning with half of my mouth numb just before I’d be welcoming my guitar teacher after a few weeks of inactivity.
By 11:30 I was out, in cool sunshine, on my to the treatment. I arrived on time with a short greeting at the check-in desk and I took my usual seat in the empty waiting room. Twenty-five years of waiting in this room and I wondered why it looked so sad, so unwelcoming. No pictures on the wall. Did it always look like this?
It’s no secret that I love my dentist. He makes that unpleasant dental experience almost pleasant. I’ve never minded the torture with him and even though he no longer owns his practice he still shows up 3 days a week and for a long time I refused to see anyone but him. I experimented with a string of their dental hygienists but I was miserable and Dr. P. kept taking me back. That was until last September when the last vestiges of his power ran out. He had to give me up along with a large number of Dr. P lovers. Sure he does stop in a check on me and if I needed for serious work, I’d be back in his chair, but I’m not longer a regular with him.
Jackie is not Dr. P but she’s the best alternative and yesterday, in her chair, I did learn more about the world of dentistry than I needed to know. Dr P.’s partner. who bought him out does not own the practice outright. He’s got silent partners, a company owns a large piece of his operation and it’s now more about profits than patient.
I honestly don’t remember what the waiting room looked like in Dr. P’s hands but the atmosphere of care is disappearing. Good-bye to another mom-and-pop operation


I walked back in time yesterday with Tuvia at my side. The Jacob Burns Film Center was running a Jeanne Moreau film weekend and featuring The Bride Wore Black, and I had to see it again. After all, it was my first foreign film experience, along with Shoot the Piano Player: a Truffaut double-bill.

So happy to be in NYC at Lincoln Center with Tuvia at my arm and with my iPhone. Inside we lived Gershwin and Bernstein and I was living my New Year’s Eve fantasy.


