I don’t mind telling you folks that I’m tired after another Easter with Mom. I mean, it’s not like we have an Easter kegger, or anything like that, but our family traditions are exhausting. For instance, Mom doesn’t hide Easter eggs in the yard. She hides Easter rabbits.
At least that’s what she told us back when there were six kids in the house and not a lot of money. If we ever caught one, she said, we could eat. We had crackers for Easter dinner most years.
I’ll never forget the year I brought my college friend, Joe Lavelle, home for Easter break and while gopher hunting in Orville Crawford’s pasture, the Philly Kid drew a bead on a big old jackrabbit loping along in the wind a good two hundred yards away. The thing was about the size of a four-point buck.
“Impossible,” I said. “Don’t waste a .22 shell.”
The rabbit dropped. We never found a bullet hole. I still think that old thing just dropped dead of a heart attack. Stretched out, it was as long as Joe was tall. He proudly presented it to my mom in the kitchen where she was cooking crackers.
Worst. Easter. Ever.
I was a little off my game this Easter. I’ve been dealing with an abscessed tooth.
Question. What’s worse than being marooned by a three-day blizzard? Being marooned by a three-day blizzard with a toothache. Imagine a world in which you’re looking forward to a root canal.
Even though penicillin quieted it down, I’ve been taking enough over-the-counter pain relievers to kill three elephant livers and enough of the good stuff to be a rock star.
Anyway, they stopped me before I dragged home the neighbor’s poodle. So, crackers again.
You probably think our holiday traditions are terrible. That’s nothing. One Christmas morning we woke to find Dad had tied an reindeer to the Christmas tree. If we could kill and gut it we could eat. It got pretty bloody. I got gored in the calf before Prancer escaped through the picture window.
More saltines.
I don’t even want to talk about Halloween.
Perhaps you think all of this is far-fetched. You know what’s even harder to believe?
This is a column about dentistry.
Must be the Advil.
Anyway, I used to heckle my dentist, a Montana transplant, on my radio show in Juneau, Alaska. He was a gangly guy, about 6-5, and I made him out to be a real hayseed. Told everyone he used Black & Decker drills and that he sold chewing tobacco approved by 4 out of 5 dentists. That sort of thing.
He was a pretty good sport. If you were there for a filling, you might hear my show in the background defaming, slandering, libeling, and besmirching his good name. I discovered I had a gift for that sort of thing which is how I eventually got into newspapering.
Anyway, one day, I was in the waiting room, a mother and her grade school son beside me, when the swinging doors burst open, and there he stood, towering over me with a purple kid’s cowboy hat perched on his head, a string looped around his chin—Dr. Ichabod Festus.
“Yippee-Ki-Yay,” he yelled, and I swear to God, he lassoed me and dragged me back through the swinging doors. I think the mom and son made a run for it.
At one juncture, Dr. Festus referred me to an oral surgeon to have my wisdom teeth extracted, which I suppose explains a lot of things. I’ll preface the rest of this by explaining that although I can handle reindeer gore, compound fractures, and do-it-yourself appendectomies, I’m squeamish about the little stuff. I panicked the first time an ophthalmologist put contacts on my eyeballs. Hyperventilated.
Before the procedure, the oral surgeon, X-rays in hand, explained in minute detail exactly what they were going to do to extract teeth that apparently had roots down to my toenails.
I was so relieved when they brought me around. Thank God that’s over.
Then, I learned I’d fainted during the explanation. I was a little embarrassed. More than a little irritated.
“Why didn’t you do the job while I was out?”
“Protocol, something, something, blood pressure, something something, America…”
“So you brought me around to put me down again?”
I’m two weeks out from the root canal. I hope my liver holds out.
© Tony Bender, 2023
