• Tag Archives dentist

  • Leave Taking

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Woodpecker Moon

    At the dentist this morning I told them Kate and I planned to use a dentist closer to our home here in Andover.  This was what got me thinking about leave taking.  We’ve been with Centennial Dental for over 22 years and making the change was not a trivial decision.

    In part we switched because our new dental insurance doesn’t include them, reason enough for sure; but, this was more a decision about not wanting a trip to the dentist to take three hours or so.  Centennial Dental is in Edina near the Macy’s Homestore.  They are great dentists.  That’s why we stayed so long.

    After that, a nap, and then off to Champlain High School and my third and last, for now, class on the Adobe Creative Suite.  This class is on Adobe InDesign. I’m cranking up to sell my books on Amazon, through the Kindle store.  InDesign will let me format my books myself and save them in a file congenial with the Kindle operating system, perhaps others, too.

    Then there’s the verdammt melancholy.  After the dentist I drove right at a car coming from my left.  I missed her, but my attention was not there.  Vacillating now between acting as if I’m fine and seeing if that will lift my spirits or biting the bullet, calling my old analyst John Desteian and my gp Tom Davis, take arms against this sky of clouds and by opposing them grow more cheerful.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Feelings Third Phase 📎and tagged

  • A Jumbled Up Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

    Finalized the Rio plans today.  Gonna stay in Ipanema, within a block of the beach.  Chose away from the ocean since we will have spent 39 days on it.  Plenty.  Our Brazil visas are classy, nice pictures, gold striping and good for ten years.  A bargain for $180 each.

    Dentist today.  Regular cleaning.  My current dentist, Mahler, retires in two weeks.  Two years or so ago his partner, then my dentist, Moghk, retired.  The older you live the more the health professionals you’ve counted on begin to leave practice.  A bit unsettling. My internist of 20 years moved to Colorado three years ago.

    The cloud gray skies around noon today appealed to me.  More of the coming inside, writing and research weather that I love.

    We’ll miss much of it this year, but we have chosen to cruise during the peak hurricane season.  That’s why the prices were so good.  I’ve begun paying attention to NOAA.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Retirement Travel Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Teasing Out the Pagan Lovesong

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar rises 29.89  0mph NE dew-point 67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

    Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

    I saw the dentist today, oh boy.  He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.”  Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?  Does to me.  Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace.  Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative.  Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist.  No, seriously.  He’s a keeper.

    The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them:   This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

    What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me.  I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now.  This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling.  And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do.  Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s.  That’s all right.

    The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis.  I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking.  I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me.  Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side.  Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.

    Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I  touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared.  There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it.  This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.

    This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species.  Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm.   Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.


    📂This entry was posted in Dreams Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work World History Writing 📎and tagged