I have a question. We have a groundhog. That is my question.

At first we found it charming and cute. Groundhogs ARE so cute. They’re so fat and sleek and waddley! And our yard has foxes and raccoons and songbirds and squirrels and chipmunks and hawks, and sometimes deer and skunks and turkeys and owls, and on one memorable occasion bears—so why not groundhogs?

Well. Because this groundhog can’t be reasonable. Two burrow entrances, three, FOUR (that we know of)—we still found it charming: we’re not prissy about our lawn. But then a crater a meter across and almost as deep, right in the center of our lawn, with a fifth (that we know of) entrance. My dude.

But what to do. Paul researched it through a wildlife preservation/rehabilitation site, which gave links to places that would relocate a groundhog safely and humanely. He has called all four. One has not returned any of his emails or calls. Another, it turns out, has relocated themselves safely and humanely to another state. The other two were like, WHO said we could relocate it?? They can trap it for us, so that we can relocate it ourselves (which does not seem to be possible/legal, and they had no ideas/leads for us; and when we asked follow-up questions, one of them said things like “Well, I’M not putting it in MY yard! I have a garden!”—which felt particularly unhelpful considering he SPECIFICALLY, VERBATIM, lists “groundhog relocation” on his website as one of the services he provides) (Paul ended up hanging up on him), or they can kill it. Those are the options. We can leave it where it is and let it do its thing, or we can kill it.

I am loathe to kill a living creature for the crime of living in the world and sharing the land we live on, which in a TRULY SIGNIFICANT sense is no more ours than theirs. THE EARTH BELONGS TO US ALL. But also: the groundhog is demolishing our shared property. ONE COULD SAY THE SAME OF HUMANITY, AND THIS PLANET!!!!! But also: right now we are talking about this groundhog, and our yard.

This reminds me of mosquitos. If mosquitos could just TAKE A LITTLE BLOOD, without LEAVING BEHIND A WELT THAT ITCHES FOR TWO WEEKS and/or MALARIA, I would be FINE with it. In fact, I would actively do my part: I would stand outside each day and allow, say, six mosquitos to sting me.

It reminds me of ants. If ants just CLEANED UP THE CRUMBS LEFT ON THE FLOOR, and didn’t have to INFEST THE ENTIRE STRUCTURE and/or INFEST THE FOOD IN THE PANTRY, we would coexist, and even be grateful to them for their service.

It reminds me of mice. If mice just lived cutely in our houses, and nibbled on crumbs and didn’t CHEW THROUGH WIRES AND INSULATION, we would probably be fine with it, I’d even be willing to leave out supplemental food/water for them! Though we might ask them to contain their droppings to particular areas.

It reminds me of rabbits. If rabbits would eat the food in one roped-off rabbit corner of the garden, instead of TAKING ONE BITE OUT OF EACH VEGETABLE/FRUIT, RUINING EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE, we would probably be okay with that. We would probably even have fun planting the rabbit section each year with new things for them to sample.

It reminds me of humanity. If humans could just LIVE ON THE PLANET and TAKE CARE OF THE RESOURCES THEY NEED TO LIVE, WITHOUT…….. Anyway, the groundhog. And maybe it is not ONE groundhog; maybe it is MANY groundhogs. We have only SEEN one groundhog at a time; we have never seen more than one. And yet, statistically: can it be only one? With five entrances to the burrow? that we know of?

Apparently if you hire a service to kill the groundhogs, they block off all the entrances and put a very humane gas into the burrow to make sure they kill them all. Then they block up the burrow so you don’t get new animals moving in there. Don’t you wish sometimes that you could communicate with animals, to let them know what is at stake? “Listen, the first four entrances are fine. The fifth means we are seriously considering wiping out your entire family and then demolishing your house! Thought you would like to know what we’re thinking!”

So I am wondering if you have any…er, groundhog stories. And if you can tell me how they ended. Did you end up having to…..er.

I VERY MUCH ENJOY sending Fresh Cut Paper paper bouquets. They usually cost in the $12-15 range, and they take four regular stamps to mail, and they’re perfect for things like “aunt’s 80th birthday,” where you want to send something kind of fancy and special but also it can be thrown in the recycling when they’re done looking at it. Or, if you are me, you got one from a friend and it’s still whimsically/beautifully decorating your bookshelf a year later.

If you haven’t encountered these things before: there are a ton of different kinds, but here are a few samples:

(image from freshcutpaper.com)

(image from freshcutpaper.com)

They’re folded flat for mailing, and then you pull on them a certain way and they go 3D. And sometimes there are sales, like 30% off certain bouquets, or 50% off all Christmas, or whatever. All of this is to tell you that while I don’t mail these constantly, I do mail them from time to time, and I find it very fun. I sent one of the Christmas trees (the one with an ornament pack rather than the one with birds) to Rob for his first Christmas in a studio apartment far from home.

The company came out with a new line of 3D ANIMAL cards, with little accessory packs so the animals could be decorated for birthdays and holidays.

(image from freshcutpaper.com)

(image from freshcutpaper.com)

I hadn’t bought any of them, because they had like half a dozen different cats and a dozen different dogs and I felt it was too hard to choose: do I match the animal to the RECIPIENT’S animal? What if there’s no animal close enough? Would most people prefer 3D paper flowers over a 3D paper animal? Etc. Then I noticed they were clearing them out and they were 50% off, and I tried not to lose my mind. I reminded myself that I tend to HOARD things like this, “saving them for special.” I pre-scolded myself that if I wanted to buy these, I needed to ACTUALLY SEND THEM—ideally all within a year, so I wouldn’t have to wonder if I’d already sent someone one on their previous birthday. I bought what I considered a REASONABLE selection. Let’s not actually count up how many; let’s just say it was REASONABLE, considering how much I like sales and how much I like sending cards and how much I like sending THESE cards. I bought some birthday ones, but I mostly bought Christmas ones: I love sending Christmas cards, and I thought it would be fun to send these to the families I know with younger kids.

Today, taking the pre-scolding to heart, I am already mailing the first of the birthday cat cards—only a week after the box arrived, so that is PRETTY GOOD. Instead of the usual message in the stamp section about needing four first-class stamps, there was a QR code. I used the QR code, and it said if I was mailing a cat card, it would need four first-class stamps; if I was mailing a cat card WITH BIRTHDAY ACCESSORIES, I needed to consult the USPS. I stopped by the USPS and consulted. It will cost SEVEN DOLLARS AND NINETY CENTS to mail. This is an ENVELOPE. But the birthday-accessory pack means it does not technically qualify as an envelope and now qualifies as a package, and it costs EIGHT DOLLARS to mail it TO THE NEXT TOWN OVER.

Remember I mentioned that it normally takes four regular first-class stamps to mail one of these. That feels right to me, and I don’t do the math. Let’s do the math right now: at the current rate of $.78 per stamp, it’s $3.12 to mail. Fine. I liked it better when I hadn’t done the math, but fine. The birthday/holiday-animal cards cost MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF TIMES THAT AMOUNT to mail. No wonder they are clearing them out! No wonder!!

I took the envelope back home with me to think. There are a couple different things at play here. One is whether I want to spend eight dollars to MAIL a birthday card. Another is how the recipient will feel, seeing that I spent eight dollars to mail their birthday card. And keep in mind that I have ALREADY PURCHASED MANY CARDS. That is of course a sunk cost—but I feel it’s worth unsinking if possible: I still love the cards; I still feel the recipients will like them too; I’d still like to send them.

In today’s particular case, I COULD hand-deliver the card. That saves me eight dollars. But I do feel cards are better and more special when they arrive in the mail. Do I think they are EIGHT DOLLARS better and more special? I’m leaning no. And normally I CAN’T hand-deliver, so this question won’t apply to MOST of the cards I bought anyway.

I know when I pre-pay and print postage from the USPS website, there’s an option to hide the amount and not print it on the label. I could do that. I still pay the money, but we remove the issue of the recipient knowing how much. And since I bought the cards at 50% off, I could choose to see it as me spending roughly the same total mount as if I’d bought the card at full-price but then got the shipping for free. If I’d seen a deal where the animal cards cost full price but came with free-shipping vouchers, I would not have bought AS MANY, but I would have bought SOME.

I could mail the birthday accessories separate from the card. It looks like the accessory pack, which weighs so close to just-over-an-ounce it’s ridiculous, would take a second-ounce stamp to mail—so, $.78 plus $.29, or $1.07. Then the cat card would ship for $3.12, and the total would be $4.19 instead of $7.90. That’s a pretty good savings! I would definitely have thought it was reasonable if I’d had to add 1-2 stamps to the big envelope in order to add the accessories. But it means the two pieces arrive separately, possibly on different days—and, with the USPS as it currently is, this doubles the chances that one piece gets lost or arrives three weeks later. And even if they arrive together, I’d say it definitely lessens the overall impact of the card.

I could look into whether I could do things to make the whole card weigh less and go back to qualifying as an envelope. For example, I could remove the birthday accessories from their separate envelope before adding them to the main envelope. I doubt that would make enough difference—but considering how close the accessory pack is to one ounce, my suspicion is that Fresh Cut Paper did not take into account the postage situation when they were designing these. It’s possible we’re within a fraction of an ounce of making this work. …Okay, I weighed it and it is 4.6 ounces; an envelope becomes a package when it weighs over 3.5 ounces; I would have to remove the entire accessory pack to turn it back into an envelope, so that’s not going to work. Hm.

Earlier today I came home from having coffee with a friend (and her husband??????? more on this another time) to find an apparently half-dead injured baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and was now flopping weakly/grossly on the pavers in front of my door!!!!

And now, a mere seven hours later, I am basically an expert on normal, healthy, uninjured, not-any-percentage-dead fledglings and all the things you SHOULD NOT do (return them to the nest, give them food/water, call a wildlife rescue unnecessarily); and now the half-dead injured baby bird is hopping around like a healthy uninjured fluffy wind-up toy, having made an INCREDIBLE amount of progress in just a few hours; and its parents are constantly nearby, periodically feeding it and also visiting its siblings in a nest tucked in next to the security camera above our door!!! So I am basically this baby bird’s godmother, and I expect to soon be godmother to several more “half-dead injured baby birds that have fallen out of the nest”! But also: should the baby bird’s parents perhaps build a nest that is NOT LOCATED OVER HARD AND UNFORGIVING PAVERS??? MAYBE!!!!

I can’t adequately express how exciting and stressful this whole thing has been. We kept thinking of trying things and then discovering our instincts were UTTERLY WRONG. First we looked into returning it to its nest: WRONG. (It had feathers, which means it did not “fall” so much as “launch normally.” Returning it to its nest would be like gently taking a 23-year-old human out of their first grown-up apartment and tucking them back into their childhood bedroom and saying “There, there: you’re safe now!” Not fatal, but counterproductive—and in the case of a baby bird, it would have to repeat the “fall” out of the nest, which is presumably unpleasant and potentially damaging.) Then we thought we needed to call a wildlife rescue: WRONG. (The baby bird was behaving normally, as were its attentive parents.) Then we thought we would give it a dish of water: WRONG. (Feeding/watering birds, if you don’t know what you’re doing, can be very, very wrong, and can result in bird death.) Then we thought we would put a light-colored towel onto the pavers, to give it a cooler surface: WRONG. (They can get tangled in the terrycloth fibers.) Then we thought we could provide it some SHADE, at least, with an umbrella or something: WRONG. (This can hide the baby bird from its doting parents.) Then we thought we would scoop it gently into the very-nearby grass: RIGHT, gah, finally, a good idea!! Making sure we see bird-parents nearby: RIGHT, yes, right! Leaving it the hell alone and staying away: RIGHT! Watching out the window obsessively and worrying about it for hours: neither right nor wrong, fortunately!

Here is a little struggle I have. If Good Store sends me a 20% off code (SUMMER) for their coffee/tea; and I buy the 5-pound bag of coffee, which is a considerable savings per ounce over the 12-ounce bags (5 pounds, which is 80 ounces, costs approximately the same as two-and-three-quarters 12-ounce bags, or 33 ounces; it’s $.86/ounce vs $2.08/ounce); and I use my “dots” (little reward points that accumulate from purchases) to get free shipping; and of course I got the 20% off as well; then am I really doing much good? I saved so much on the order, I’m not sure there was any profit left to go to the good cause. What is the point of me “shopping to benefit charity” if I am going to reduce the charitable aspect as much as I possibly can? But…I would not have placed the order without those discounts (at a certain price, I start thinking I should just buy my usual $.50-.65/ounce grocery-store sale coffee and send a donation check to the charity), and I am a shopper who is much more likely to keep shopping at a store (especially for gifts, where I’m more willing to spend) once I’ve been lured in by deals. Plus, here I am telling you about it, and perhaps some of you will end up shopping there, too, and maybe that’s a factor. (This is an affiliate link which will give you $10 off and give me some dots.) Well, I am going to have to let the store decide what’s worth it to them.

I can add that Edward liked his 6-month sock subscription (Christmas gift) so much that he asked for another 6-month subscription for his birthday. If we’d known that in advance, we could have saved money (one pair of socks’ worth of money) with a 12-month subscription—but we did NOT know that, and COULDN’T have known it without trying it. There’s the issue of whether someone will like the fit and feel of the socks, and also whether they will like/wear the surprise designs. Edward was yes and yes, but if he’d had a no in there, we would have been glad we’d gone for the 6 months instead of 12.

I keep inadvertently having my social gatherings stacked up together: nothing for a month, and then two in the same weekend. This past weekend, I went to dinner at the house of my former library supervisor—NOT the supervisor who caused me to quit, but the one who ALSO left because of the bad supervisor. Also invited was a former mutual coworker, and another of THEIR mutual coworkers I didn’t know and was nervous to meet—but it went beautifully and it was a great evening and I have a new potential friend now. People used to meet other people like this all the time.

I think I probably prefer restaurant get-togethers over dinner at someone’s house, though. It WAS nice to see the house (I like to be able to picture people in their habitats), and it’s nice not to have bill-splitting issues or to feel like we might be hogging a table for too long—but I didn’t like that one person did all the work, and then we all left and one person had to do all the clean-up. We could take turns hosting—but the thing is, we’re not going to do that, for various individual reasons (the other people in the home; embarrassed about house; no room for guests; doesn’t really cook). We could theoretically help clean up, but it is excruciating to try to help out in someone else’s kitchen. We could try a potluck, but we all live fairly far from each other (45-minute drive) and that makes things tricky.

Anyway, then the next night I went to a get-together of my wine-and-appetizers group. It’s hard to find a time when everyone is available, so twice now we’ve tried smaller get-togethers (three or four people instead of aiming for at least six of the eight), and in my opinion they’ve gone really well and we should keep doing that, in between the larger events. Everyone gets a chance to talk, and there’s more room for long-form talking if someone has a particular situation going on. I’d say the main downside is that it’s a more precarious situation: if two people are planning to attend and then one is unable to make it after all, now we have an entirely different one-on-one dynamic that maybe nobody wants but nobody wants to say so; or perhaps the hostess ends up with NO ONE showing up, and that does not feel good. When we have seven or eight people planning to be there and two duck out, everything is still fine.

We have been undergoing a consuming and distracting Edward Medical Situation (Crohn’s-related) this past week, and things are finally improving: procedure done, fever gone, color restored, eating and drinking normally.

Edward is scheduled to have intestinal surgery (normal for Crohn’s patients, but this is his first so I’m pretty nervous) in August. Because of this recent episode, his doctors are trying to get that surgery moved earlier, but there is not much hope of that: even the August date was lucky, considering they originally said breezily they could do it in May so he could have the summer to recover, and then the actual first available date was two weeks before he goes back to college; if anything goes wrong with THAT date, we have to wait for winter break.

In the meantime, Edward’s doctors are determined to build a nutritional buffer: the surgical recovery will be depleting, and Edward already has trouble with medication compliance and with forcing himself to eat more than he wants. (Boy, I do remember how hard that was when I was pregnant with the twins and was supposed to eat LOTS MORE: it SEEMS like it would be such a TREAT to be told to EAT MORE, but there is a limit, and that limit was much sooner than I expected.) So Edward suddenly has a bunch of new vitamin prescriptions, and will also be having an iron infusion, which is not something he’s had before. Apparently it takes about an hour and a half, and then you have to stick around for another half hour to be observed. Edward is also supposed to drink a prescription Ensure/Boost-type drink once a day.

I am hoping we can sustain the necessary momentum to create this buffer. Edward is a grown adult (not just 18 but 21), and this is a difficult stage for figuring out the parental role: I’m NOT in charge of him anymore, and he SHOULD be picking up these responsibilities himself (and NEEDS to)—and yet, if he is NOT MANAGING TO DO SO, it feels like there is room for a parent to offer help; even at my age, I feel like I can ask my parents for help. But that transitional gap between childhood and adulthood, when the developmental schedule calls for the child to separate from parents—I did not, during that time, want to ask my parents for help. And of course I don’t want to INTERFERE with that developmentally-necessary stage.

That’s how I put it all to Edward, and he has agreed that for this pre-surgery interval I am allowed to get real managerial and pushy about the medications and supplements: not because I am the boss of him, but because he would like some temporary help. We have some time set aside today to fill up a daily pill container. And every evening I am delivering to him one of the nutritional drinks, with a bendy straw.

I love the idea several of you mentioned: that we should have a GENERAL post about aging parents, where anyone can discuss the topic in the comments section. I hope you will feel free to post anonymously if that would be more comfortable. (If you INTENDED to post anonymously but then see that your info has shown up, I hope you will email me and ask me to fix it: it takes about three seconds and makes me feel omnipotent.)

Drafts I have just deleted:

1. Rant about trying to figure out music options in the kitchen, now that Amazon’s Echo/Dot devices have removed the part of the agreement where they say the devices can’t listen to you unless you’re actively talking to them, and can’t record you and can’t use those recordings for their own purposes. Now they CAN and CAN and CAN, and I’m OUT, but my other options suck. What if companies tried making things BETTER instead of WORSE?

2. Wishing I still had a secret blog so I could talk to you about Aging Parents without my aging parents here.

3. Talking about the non-Target shopping options I have been trying—but a couple of those options are non-chain stores in my town. And I could have disguised those (since knowing Exactly Which Store isn’t helpful anyway), but also proofreading it was making me drowsy.

4. This was the whole thing: “You know those bracelets that have rings attached to them with little chains? They were popular when I was in high school, generally in a golden/delicate way. Elizabeth ”

5. Boring, middle-aged complaining about how difficult it is to figure out lightbulbs nowadays. (I didn’t actually say “nowadays.”) Boring, non-funny anecdote about how it took literally THREE DIFFERENT MALE CLERKS to help me choose a replacement lightbulb. (It actually did.)

6. Rant about the proposed changes to the process of voter registration.

7. The entire draft consisted of the words “Heart the Lover”. Apparently I was planning to write something about it. All I remember now is that I’d read so many people raving about the book, and I found it perfectly fine but not particularly remarkable. Though, evidently, I was planning to remark.

8. Very boring post about a haircut. (She cut off FOUR INCHES.) (FOUR. I wanted a TRIM. Why didn’t I say NO.) (She SAID it was “damaged.” It was NOT DAMAGED.) (She also acted like she had never heard of long layers, so.) (AND: when I took my hair out of the bun, she said “Oh…it’s LONG,” as if she was saying “Oh…it’s FILTHY.” I think she was ANTI-LONG-HAIR.)

9. The draft was titled “Mystery of the Credit/ATM Card.” There was no content. It was from 2020. I don’t know what the mystery was.

10. Mixed wailing, right after Target broke my heart with their political actions.

11. A post from when Henry was looking into colleges, asking for help finding a college in an area of the country that had “basically no winter” and was also in a state that was LGBTQ+ friendly and hadn’t outlawed abortion.

12. These notes from three years ago that no longer make sense to me, especially together:

kitten eats spiders
enjoying feeding Henry
keto not working feelings-wise
UTI

I don’t entirely know how to even START this topic, but I want to talk about ways to give money directly and anonymously to SPECIFIC other people.

There are at least two ways I know of for individuals to most effectively give money directly to STRANGERS who most need it, and one of those is to give money to people on the street who are asking for money, and the other is to leave nice big tips for hotel housekeeping staff. But what I want to know is this: what if you have a specific friend or relative or coworker who needs money, and you know that giving someone money is a surefire way to compromise/ruin a relationship, but you want to give them money? How do you give them money WITHOUT THEM KNOWING IT WAS YOU?

One way is to put cash or a gift card into an envelope and then mail it. Ideally, you would mail it from somewhere you don’t live, and you would address the envelope using your non-dominant hand. The USPS has pretty much tanked that option for me by becoming unreliable. It used to be the case that you could count on the mail arriving where you’d mailed it; the success rate was WELL over 99%. That is no longer ANYWHERE NEAR the case. I DETEST paying bills online, and yet EVEN I have started paying some bills online, because the USPS is so unreliable. I did a test with a friend, where I mailed her ten postcards—and she received only six of them. (Though there’s still time! I still participate sporadically in Postcrossing, and I recently received a postcard that had been mailed EIGHT MONTHS AGO.) (But, like, it was mailed to me from Russia. Not from, like, Missouri.)

Another way, if you and the recipient both belong to the same church, is to give the person the money through a church representative. Huuuuuuuge issue is that there is no way to avoid the church representative knowing about it, which is EXTRA problematic if your church is in line with the whole “don’t give braggily/showily” concept. Huger issue, for me, is that I don’t belong to a church.

Another way is to see if you can arrange the payment of one or more of the recipient’s bills directly with the biller. So, for example, perhaps I could go to the recipient’s vet, or to their electric company, if I know who their vet or electric company is, and ask to make a payment on their account. Privacy laws can mess with this, and also there is no way to know for sure that the person you talk to isn’t going to realize that they could keep the money and no one would know. And, like, do I pay with cash, to make sure I don’t leave a traceable trail? I wondered if I could go to, let’s say the vet, and make a cash payment in the name of the recipient (maybe even implying that I WAS the recipient?), and ask for a receipt, and mail the receipt to the recipient? …This is seeming pretty complicated, and it requires knowledge I generally don’t have, such as which vet someone goes to.

I am pretty sure you can ship things anonymously from Amazon or Target. It seems best to give people MONEY, so that they can buy what THEY consider most important. But if you give someone toilet paper and food, then they can use their toilet-paper-and-food budget to buy something else—so that might be CLOSE ENOUGH to giving them cash. I don’t like this, though. I am imagining someone sending me shampoo and conditioner and soap and food, and having those items be very different than what I would have chosen. There are layers of dignity here, and of life satisfaction. It’s one thing if I go to a food pantry, where I know I will be choosing among the things other people have donated; it’s different if someone sends me already-chosen things directly. And there can be all kinds of things I wouldn’t know: perhaps their septic system is picky, perhaps someone has an allergy.

It is of course easier to anonymously give a smaller amount of money. You can tuck a $20 into someone’s coat pocket without a whole lot of thought or subterfuge. But what if you want to give $100? $500? $1000? $10,000? I feel like if there were good ways to do this, they would be known already, and I wouldn’t have to ask. But what if this isn’t a common issue and so it hasn’t been explored? What if hardly anyone is looking to give money anonymously? What if we can be the ones to explore it? What if our hive mind has the answers?

LET’S SAY you wanted to give a particular person $1,000, and you didn’t want them to know it was you: How would/could you do it? Or from another angle: Let’s say someone wanted to give you $1,000, and they didn’t want you to know it was them? How could they do it?

I’ve seen things now and then about the healing and stress-reducing power of touch: how healthcare providers and caretakers can do a surprising amount of good for the patient by even such small things as putting their hand on a patient’s shoulder, or touching them briefly on the upper arm. With one of my c-sections, there was some sort of trainee (EMT?) sitting in, and she offered to let me hold her hand while I was getting the epidural, and it helped so much, and I still remember it a quarter-century later.

And here’s the situation I’m going to apply that paragraph to: I had a very stressful dentist appointment yesterday. I was getting two crowns, and I was getting them with a new dentist, because our old dentist sold the practice between one of my appointments and the next. I had many, many anxieties. One was that I would barf when they used that dental goop to make impressions of the teeth; the dental assistant scolds me that I shouldn’t be thinking of it or planning for it, but the fact is that it’s happened twice (and I WASN’T thinking about it or planning for it the first time) so I feel like I have reason to think/plan—and also I feel like THEY should be GLAD to be forewarned. Second anxiety was of course ALL THE DRILLING, not to mention LONG NEEDLES INTO MY GUMS. Third was the part where they ask you to verify that the bite is right, and it takes a dozen or more tries, and novocaine is involved so it’s hard to tell, and also I have forgotten how I bite. Is it like this? Actually I can also bite like this. Perhaps my bite was off to begin with? Why does this process involve my inexpert subjective contribution??

Fourth anxiety was that the temporary crown would fall off while I waited for the permanent crowns, and I would have to keep going back and having them act like this is a surprising thing, and ask me if I was chewing a pencil or something when it happened. Fifth anxiety was the appointment in three weeks when the crowns were ready, and having to do the bite thing again. Sixth anxiety was the cost: they’d said they’d send me an estimate, but they hadn’t. What if the new dentist charged a lot more? Also: the old dentist had a discount for paying with a check instead of a credit card, but did the new dentist? I would need to bring the checkbook just in case, and I don’t carry a purse anymore so I guess I’m putting it in my back pocket? Maybe it will fall out. Seventh anxiety was that this was a brand new untested dentist (untested by me: he’s been practicing elsewhere for nearly a decade), and I was getting TWO CROWNS as my first experience with his work?? What if it was a disaster?? What if I should have switched practices the minute I heard that this one had been sold?? Why didn’t the old dentist WARN me he was leaving, so I could have quick gotten these crowns done with him?? And eighth anxiety was just THE WHOLE THING, EVERYTHING ABOUT IT, ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT.

Here is the thing I found helpful: I concentrated on any element of human touch. I have to concentrate on SOMETHING while I’m lying there with nothing to do, and usually I concentrate on the sound and feel of the drill, and on worrying that I will suddenly start feeling pain and I will jolt upward and the drill will do something scary to my tooth/mouth, and on the indignity of drool, and on worrying that I am not holding my mouth open enough and/or I am holding it open ridiculously extra, and on the gross feel of the novocaine, and on where I should be putting my tongue and what if I accidentally put it right onto the drill. This time, instead, I concentrated on the way I could feel the assistant’s leg against my upper arm, and the dentist’s fingers on my mouth—sorry, it is kind of struggle to write this in a way that doesn’t sound unintentionally erotic; but you’ve had dental work done, you know we are not talking about that.

Once I started noticing those things, I found I was SIGNIFICANTLY relaxing. I felt my shoulders drop down to the back of the chair, and my breathing changed. I started thinking about things like how kind of amazing it is that two separate people with their four hands can somehow work together in the small area that is my mouth and on the even smaller area that is my tooth. They are working together SEAMLESSLY, without any bumping into each other! How much practice does that take? Do some dentists and some assistants work better together than others? I’m sure they DO. How do they TEST for that, when hiring? Do they do a trial run together, as part of the interview process? Are assistants in dental school trained using hands-on situations with dentists, and the dentist-teachers give them feedback on that? Are dentists likewise trained with feedback from experienced assistants?

I noticed that this new dentist keeps up a steady stream of pleases and thank yous with his assistant, and how nice that is to hear. I realized my old dentist did not do that—but also, I don’t think it’s that he wasn’t polite, I think it was that he’d been working with the same assistant for decades and they probably no longer needed much talking; I don’t remember him asking her for things, either. I noticed that the dentist and the assistant use much lower tones when they talk to each other than when they talk to me, and it’s interesting that they can hear each other over the sound of the drill—but probably they are saying expected things, which makes those things easier to hear. Like when I had a hearing test, and I told the technician I was only able to identify a word because I’d heard it earlier in a louder round, and she said that was on purpose. I noticed that both the dentist and the assistant spoke in soothing, calm voices, to each other and to me, and wondered if that too was part of dental-school training. I wondered if dentists with nicer voices were more successful than dentists with irritating voices.

What I am trying to say is that it shifted THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE. It was still, of course, very unpleasant and stressful—but my goal is not to CHANGE REALITY, my goal is only to cope with it better, and I coped with it much, much better. I think it’s partly the human-touch-reduces-stress thing—but also that focusing on the human touch made me focus on the human element. This is not just Me Having An Unpleasant Dental Procedure: there are two other people in this room, and they are doing interesting work, and how nice it is that there are people who train to do this interesting work so that we are not still in the era where I would be giving someone a chicken in exchange for having these two teeth pulled out with a pliers.

I forgot to mention that on my friend J’s recommendation I bought this suitcase-backpack for our recent trip to the big city: I did not want to have to use a wheelie bag for the one-hour walk between train station and hotel. (We could have gotten an Uber, and we were prepared to do that if the weather had been bad, but the weather was perfect and I thought it would be a nice way for town mice to See/Experience the City a little, considering we were not there for long.)

(image from Amazon.com)

It was perfect. It PACKED like a suitcase, but WORE like a backpack. I’d worried I would look like I had a suitcase strapped to my back, but I had plenty of time to observe the effect on Paul (I bought him the same one in black), and he just looked like he was wearing a backpack. This is in part because of something you may consider a positive or a negative: the sides are not rigid, and they soften even more with use. I was able to re-form the case into a rectangle for re-packing, but then it slumps in a backpacky way when you put it on. I liked this, but I could see how someone else might be expecting it to hold its shape, and might WANT it to look like a suitcase strapped to their back.

It has lots of pockets, some of which were immediately useful and some of which will need time and experience to reveal their best function. It has a strap inside, to keep things snug; I forgot to use it. It has comfortable padded shoulder straps; and even though it was fairly heavy (I TRY to pack light, but by nature I am a four-mule overnighter), I didn’t start noticing it until toward the end of the walk. It has a top-handle and a side-handle, which were nice for getting it into and out of the overhead bins.

I was extremely pleased with the purchase. I’ve only used it once, so I can’t yet say anything about how durable it is, but to my non-expert eye it seems sturdy and well-made. Rather than putting it in the barn with our luggage, I put it right into my closet so it would be on-hand for other short trips. I would also use it on longer trips, as my carry-on—especially for trips where I feel nervous about my luggage getting lost and want to carry with me a toothbrush and deodorant and a change of unders, as well as a book and lots of snacks, and charging cables and a water bottle, and the many other things I like to travel-heavy with.