Knitters-Knitters

Not My Tooth

I'm guessing you don't want to hear about the ironic betrayal in which I cracked my problem tooth while biting into one of my birthday gifts, Violet Pastilles.  And you probably don't want to hear about the appointment I just returned from, which involved Dr. Teeny Tiny doing lots of filing and jamming of extra-long needles into my gums and ended with the insertion of something very much not-my-tooth, to serve as a placeholder until the thing still-not-my-tooth-but-close can be made.  LB has a remarkably short attention span for descriptions of the uneasy disambiguation happening inside my mouth, the disturbing sense of Otherness experienced by the lower left quadrant of my jaw.  I'll bet you don't even want to see a picture of the broken shard of tooth in the oval tin with the remaining pastilles: one of these things is not like the others...

Scared you for a second, didn't I?

Here's some pretty things to look at instead: birthday buttons, from LB's mom.  I was so excited when I opened these that I did flappers-flappers.  I'm going to bury them in my backyard this evening.  Then, I'll spend the rest of the night standing on my hind legs with my front paws against the window.  Barking.

Here's Olive doing the monkey game with LB.  Namely, you pick her up--all 50 pounds of her--then let go while she hangs on with her arms and legs.

Here is the fan cardigan I've been working on ever since I was 43.  I'm so close to what I suspect will be my favorite part: picking up stitches around the back for the collar.

It's very handy that this pattern has separate, specific instructions for making long sleeves or short.  Almost as if Marianne Isager knows.

Accidental Journey

Today I went to the dentist's office with the 5 big kids (Olive had already had her check-up).  Two Mexican women sat next to us and began speaking to each other, in Spanish, about Sabina and Anatole's missing left arms--wondering aloud why they weren't wearing prosthetic hands.  One of the women speculated that perhaps we didn't have enough money to buy them, and the other one answered that couldn't be it because the older girl had braces on her teeth.  They started getting louder and more obvious in their discussion, adding hand gestures into the mix, to the point that one didn't need to speak Spanish at all to get what and whom they were talking about.

I stared at the younger woman, hard, and she asked me if I understand Spanish.  I said yes (I'm hardly proficient, but I got the gist of it) .  She asked me if I'd understood everything they'd just said, and I said yes again.  Then the older woman said, without missing a beat, "¡Ay, qué bonitos los niños!" as if she'd been saying nice things about us the entire time.  After that the younger woman made small talk with me, asking about my knitting, pretending to be interested, saying a fond good-bye when they left.  I smiled like an idiot and told her about the patchwork blanket I was making, acting as if everything that had transpired was wiped from memory once the discussion switched to English.

At the time I was wryly amused and I told LB about the exchange (out of the kids' earshot).  He laughed and said it sounded like something our beloved G-Lo could use in a routine.  I still wasn't done telling this story so I called my mom, and in recounting what had happened I realized that I was not amused or even "over it," not at all.  I was, at least temporarily, back in the land of why don't your children wear prosthetics?  I have not been there in ages, since long before Olive was even born, and I wasn't expecting to end up there this afternoon.  These days I spend so much time on Planet Autism that at first, I didn't get why these two women were staring at Anatole when he wasn't even yelling plah! plah! plah! or doing pincers-pincers in the air.  I'm much more fluent when it comes to fielding the confrontations inspired by those types of anomalies.

I know these women didn't intend for me to understand them and did not mean any harm.  But it would have been nice if, at the very least, they'd have done me the favor of looking embarrassed.

Hands

I love my dentist.  Even though she found three cavities today, involving both sides of my mouth.  Even though she accidentally shot one of the Novocaine injections directly into the pocket between my left cheek and lower jaw, causing my tongue to have a teeny-tiny seizure, not numbing the tooth in that area at all so that I felt that first rotation of the drill like the piercing of an arrow, which made her have to inject even more novocaine.  Even though my entire face was so numb afterwards that when I tried to smile, the upper lip pulled to the right while the lower lip went left, the eyes drooped, and my facial expression was turned into that of a peaceful llama.  Even though she sent me home with no fun prescriptions and I was too shaken by the horror of the experience to thoroughly enjoy my trip to the Sweden Shop afterward. 

I think I love her because she has the hands of a hummingbird and she always tells me how brave I'm being, as if all her grown-up patients enter a state of anxiety that mimics the appearance of full rigor and have to be reminded to breathe.  And I love her because she dove right into my jaw to fill those cavities without making me come back another day, even though I'd only booked a teeth-cleaning appointment.   Mostly I love her because she actually manages to get her hummingbird hands into Olive's mouth without incident, and if I didn't have LB to tell me how her part of the appointment really went down, I'd think Olive cooperated fully and calmly.

I did manage to buy something at the Sweden Shop.  Her name is Little My, and she's now scowling over my kitchen.  I like how wikipedia describes this "fiercely independent" mymble:

When she wants something done, she does it straight away.