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Grinding to a Fault

Some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.  -- Ogden Nash

About a month ago, Flannista began to notice a dull ache around her upper back left molar.  "Shouldn't have eaten that bite-size Heath Bar," she thought.  "Probably cracked a tooth or loosened a filling.  I'll need a crown or root canal.  Damn, 'cause I've got no dental insurance."

Yesterday, Flannista opened her mouth wide for her dentist and got the hard-to-swallow diagnosis: unbeknownst to her, she had been grinding her teeth so badly at night that her gums had become inflamed enough to push up her lower molars into the upper ones.  The dentist was stunned as he had measured the gum between Flannista's teeth less than five months earlier and declared them, "very healthy.  Good for you for flossing so regularly!"

Yesterday he asked: "Have you experienced a lot of stress over the last five months?  Everything okay?"

Flannista wanted to respond: "You mean like having to euthanize my beloved cat and dealing with blood family issues and sitting down to write more of my own story?"

Instead she said, "Not any more stress than anyone else.  You know the economy and all."

The dentist then shared that more and more of his patients are grinding their teeth.  "Like after 9/11," he said.  "The recession is stressing out everybody."

In Flannista's case, teeth grinding damaged her gums.  It can also cause other problems and should be treated as soon as possible.  Four Novocain shots and 2.5 hours later, Flannista got up from the chair, the gums on the left side of her mouth scrapped free of bacteria.  Today, the right side.  Then six weeks of special rinsing and a nighttime mouth guard.  All in all, about $1,600.00.

Part of the price of unexpressed anger.  And unexpressed grief.

What about you, sistas and mistas?  Do any of you grind your teeth?  Have gum disease?  If not, could you please share a dental experience, anyway, so Flan has something interesting to read while in the chair today to face this ALL OVER AGAIN?!

Better Than Coors Light

On Saturday, the space shuttle Discovery and its crew of seven returned to Earth, successfully wrapping up a construction mission at the international space station.

Discovery's 13-day flight was highlighted by the installation and unfurling of the station's last pair of solar wings.  The $300 million addition brought the orbiting outpost up to full power, a vital part of NASA's plan to double the space station population and boost the amount of science research in a few months.

Working solar wings are one thing, but what about that thing pictured to the right?  That silver contraption with bright yellow CAUTION stickers all over it?  The thing casually mentioned at the very end of an article about Discovery's mission?

That's a recycling machine.  Inside are four to five liters of recycled water that had been the astronauts' urine and sweat.  NASA hopes to have the water samples tested within a month.  If the toxicology results are good, the three space station residents will start drinking the recycled water again.  AGAIN.  Apparently the residents have been drinking this water for some time, but the old recycling machine broke.

How'd they know the recycling machine had broken?  The water taste funny?  How'd they get their urine and sweat into that thing?

The Sassistas!^TM know that the global water shortage is a very serious crisis, but would you drink your own urine and sweat?  Straight up?  One olive or two?

The Lowest Trees

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat,
And slender hairs cast shadows though but small,
And bees have stings although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs,
And love is love in beggars and in kings.

Where waters smoothest run, deep are the fords,
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move:
The firmest faith is in the fewest words,
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love,
True hearts have eyes and ears no tongues to speak:
They hear, and see, and sigh, and then they break.

-- Sir Edward Dyer (1540-1607)

The Truelove

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

 

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

 

Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,
  

who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

 

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,

 

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,

 

so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t

 

because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

-- David Whyte, The House of Belonging

March 2009 Open Mic

The sassosphere microphone is open, sistas and mistas. 
Please step up and dish whatever you like.  We're listening.
For those new to the sassosphere, The Sassistas!^TM sponsor
Open Mic the last Friday of every month.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

The Sassistas!^TM would like to acknowledge and thank treesta for dishing today's sass.

When I returned to my job as the principal of an elementary school after caring for my mother (Julia) for several weeks during her final illness, I found a stack of handwritten condolence cards from my children –- or should I say from my little philosophers -- waiting for me on my desk.

There’s an essay that’s popular within educational circles entitled, All I Need to Know, I Learned In Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum. Within their cards, my students taught me the important things I need to know about death and dying and losing a parent. Here, I’ll tell it in their words:

• It is very sad when somebody dies.
• Sometimes life can be ruf but thats the way life is.
• Sometimes you just have to let go!  Your mother is still watching you so you better do the right thing.
• She is in a beter place called Heven, and Heven will take care of her.
• You know that your Mom is in your heart. She will be with you everywhere.
• The good thing is that shes with her Mother and thats what madders.
• Don’t worry just believe and you will dream about her. 
• …like I always say “when one goes another comes.”
• It’s really ok. It’s just the circle of life.

What can I say? Who needs Hallmark, anyway?

Revelation

Flannery O'Connor would have been 84 years old today, and as she is Flannista's matron saint, Flan is requesting that the sassosphere take a few minutes to remember O'Connor.

These days O'Connor is popular again, thanks to the recent publication of Brad Gooch's, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.  Francine Prose, in the March 2008 issue of Oprah Magazine, praised Gooch's "keen eye for the many real-life inspirations -- the small incidents and large events, the acquaintances and loved ones -- that this literary master transformed into art" (p.134).  Flannista is only half way through the biography, taking her time, like she was sipping a fine pinot noir.  But she's read enough to know that Prose is correct in her assessment of O'Connor's real-life inspirations . . . which brings Flannista to her favorite O'Connor short story, "Revelation." It was also O'Connor's favorite.

The action in the first half of "Revelation" takes place in a doctor's office, a place known all too well by O'Connor who struggled for 15 years with lupus, a disease that would finally claim her life in 1964, when she was only 39 years old.  She finished writing "Revelation" just three months earlier in a hospital bed.  Here's a synopsis that Flan found on line, but punched up a bit:

Mrs. Turpin and her husband enter their doctor's waiting room and immediately Mrs. Turpin (a "good Christian woman") begins to judge the other patients: a pleasant, well-dressed lady; a "white trash" woman and her mother and son; and a fat adolescent with acne. She and the pleasant woman strike up a conversation about the importance of refinement and good disposition. They discuss, for example, how you have to be nice to "niggers" to get them to do any work. The "white trash" woman counterpoints with comments that indicate her ignorance and poor breeding.  Realizing how fortunate she is to be so well bred, Mrs. Turpin exclaims aloud, "Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!"

Upon hearing Mrs. Turpin's cry of thanks, the fat adolescent throws her book (entitled Human Development) at Mrs. Turpin and tries to strangle her. The girl is subdued by the nurse and her mother and the doctor sends her by ambulance to the hospital.  Before being taken away, however, she viciously whispers to Mrs. Turpin, "Go back to hell where you belong, you old wart hog!"  At dusk the next day, while hosing down her pig pen, Mrs. Turpin confronts God. She demands, "Who do you think you are?" As the sun sets, a "visionary light" comes over her and she has a vision in which the "niggers" and "white trash" march on the bridge to heaven ahead of good, respectable people like her.

Here is the actual last paragraph of "Revelation":

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to her house.  In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

At the end of his book, Letter to a Man in the Fire: Does God Exist and Does He Care?, Reynolds Price includes a section entitled, "Further Reading, Listening, and Looking."  Among his recommendations are the short story, "Revelation" by O'Connor as well as her letters, The Habit of Being.  He adds, "No recent artist, in any form, has worked in the oncoming face of premature death with more strength and grace."

What revelations have you experienced because of challenges, illness, mistakes, thoughtless judgments or just plain hypocrisy?

Tater Tots

Animal, vegetable or mineral?

Sassquiring minds want to know.

Quick sassearch tells us that Tater Tots were first created and produced in 1953 by Ore-Ida as a way to use potato shreds from french-fry production.  They first became available in stores a year later.  Today, Americans consume about 70 million pounds of Tater Tots a year.

That's a lot of Tots, sistas and mistas.  But what exactly are Tots?  Yes, Tots are a side-dish made from deep-fried, grated potatoes, and, according to the Ore-ida website, Tots come in many fun shapes and flavors!  In other countries, Tots are known as: "Potato gems," "potato pom-poms," "Oven Crunchies," and "Spud Puppies."

But again, what exactly ARE Tots?    Is there a difference between restaurant Tots and institutional Tots, like the Tots served in schools?  And even though they are edible, can Tots be used in other ways?  For example, how about this use?  And this one?

Could Tater Tots be used as mortar for brick building?  Or as an adhesive for hanging favorite paintings and photographs?  What about chess pieces?  And what about stale Tots? Could they be "re-purposed" as ammunition?  Imagine David slaying Goliath not with two small stones, but rather two small Tater Tots.  Wouldn't more kids want to read those classic Old Testament stories? 

What uses can you think of for Tater Tots? Also, do you believe Tots are made from real potatoes?  If not, what ARE they made of?

When Our Children Die

At the time of this writing, Natasha Richardson's body is being laid to rest at the upstate farm where she married Liam Neeson 15 years ago. According to the opening of a New York Times article:

The sudden death of a famous artist in his or her prime is always sad and unsettling, a reminder that life is an easily breakable possession even for those who abide in the waiting room of immortality, which is to say celebrity. But the death of Natasha Richardson last week, after a skiing accident in Canada, struck many with particular force because Ms. Richardson was not merely a well-known actress but also a member of a great British theatrical dynasty.

The most famous member of that great British theatrical dynasty is Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave (pictured right with Natasha in 1968).

Flannista is a Vanessa Redgrave groupie, willing to travel anywhere on the East Coast to see her perform on stage.  She has seen Redgrave as Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey into Night" and as Joan Didion in Didion's stage version of the best-seller, "The Year of Magical Thinking."  In 2005, Matissta gifted Flannista with tickets to see Redgrave in "Hecuba."

"Hecuba," written by Euripides, begins after Troy has fallen and the victorious Greek coalition forces are on their way home. Hecuba, once queen of Troy, now a prisoner of war, is being transported back to Athens with other women of Troy.  Having lost her home, her husband and most of her children, what does Hecuba do when she is asked by her captors to give up her daughter’s life having discovered on the same day that her only surviving son has been murdered?  The play ends with Hecuba, inconsolable, unleashing a deep, dark, despairing shriek -- "the otherworldly shrieks resound across the ages" -- wrote one reviewer of Redgrave's interpretation.

Redgrave's shriek haunted Flannista for days back then and insistently faded in with the heartbreaking news of Richardson's death.  Parents should never have to bury their children.  "When our children die," says Henry Ward Beecher, "we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear."

Also insistently fading in was the memory of Flannista's mother at the March 16, 2001 funeral of her daughter, Karen, poignantly captured in this excerpt from a recollection written by babysis who attended the funeral:

Her mom's starched shirt collar seemed as stiff as her posture, but upon closer examination I detected a slight tremor of the head . . . I imagined her grief gently and quietly trying to shake its way out of her tightly closed body.

Afterward in the funeral home parking lot, Flannista asked her mother how she was doing.  Without hesitation, without emotion she replied, "I feel like shrieking."

Parents should never have to bury their children.

Playing with Numbers

This morning, Flannista is reading the Old Testament lesson at church.  The passage is Numbers 21:4-9, and it's kind of weird:

From Mount Hor the Israelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food." Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live." So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

To make the reading less frightening, Matissta sassgested that at the point where the Lord tell Moses what to do, Flannista hold up a sock monkey hand puppet, change her voice, and let the sock monkey give the instructions about the poisonous serpent.

Whaddya think?  Any better sassgestions?