I’M JUST A HOPELESS FOOL
9, February 2012
I woke up this morning with one side of my face looking like an unhappy chipmunk. Yesterday was dental surgery: if you like details, I had deep scaling of the gums, upper and lower left side and oral surgery to remove soft tissue where an implant fell out 2 months ago. I also had 5 needles. The good news, for those of you following my lurid dental adventures, is that I could swallow. The very good news is the steady stream of nitrous that filled me with the wonder and glory of, well, everything. What is it with that stuff?
It didn’t hurt, either, that the dentist has a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling collection of blues and rock CD’s and that he, as they say, had my number. I’ll tell you, floating down memory lane on a nitrous raft is pretty exhilarating: Dave Clark Five, Scott Walker, Herman’s Hermits, Freddy and dreamers. So white, so sweet, so…naïve. I was flitting in and out of pubs, bopping down Oxford Street and in and out of flats in early, mid-60’s London where we danced and partied every Friday and Saturday night, often to the new releases of The Beatles and The Stones. I was right back there, wearing my favorite mini-dress, a Mary Quant PVC slicker, or my black bell-bottom cords, my hair long and straight with a curtain of bangs that kissed my eyebrows.
And you know it wasn’t just the gas…it was a great time. Sure we drank a little, smoked cigarettes and had a lot of sex, but it was before the drug scene arrived, so there something innocent about it and there was hope bordering on belief that our generation would change the world. “All you need is love, ta,da, dada, da…"
But I’m too long in the tooth to fall for bliss, no matter how much you turn up the tank. So when Gerry and the Pacemakers started singing “When You Walk Through A Storm” I found myself balking at the lyric “Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.” That line used to make me sob. Now I have no idea what it means. More specifically I don’t understand the word “hope.” Nor do I understand why, if you have it, you’ll never walk alone. Who else is with you? A bunch of people for whom hope, according to Webster’s definition, is the “wish for something with the expectation of its fulfillment.” Oh boy. Sounds like the march of the doomed.
There’s a wonderful saying “between hope and expectation lies disappointment.” And here’s a mind-bender: “hope against hope.” In other words, to hope with little reason or justification. To me hope is synonymous with doubt. As in, I hope I can hold onto this feeling of nitrous euphoria but I doubt it. I wonder how Obama is feeling about hope these days? And no, I am not a pessimist. I’m a realist and I do choose to see the glass as half full.
The next song up was “Everything’s Gonna Be All Right.” Everything IS all right, isn’t it? We just don’t like everything all the time. I certainly didn’t like the sound of the dentist’s medieval digging tool rooting around in the space where a tooth once resided. I thought to myself, oh, everything is not going to be all right when the Novocain wears off.
The good news is he took good care of me, and my mouth. The bad news is I look and feel like crap today. But it’s no use wishing I’d taken better care of my teeth all those years. As someone once told me many years ago, “You have to give up all hope for a better past.”