This will come as no shock, but the following story has nothing to do with wisdom teeth. However, given the theme of this collection it felt wrong not to include at least one tale with that title. After all, wisdom teeth do have a storied history.
Aristotle, for just one notable example, wrote about them in his gripping account, The Story of Animals. (Or was it a grinding account?)
He wrote:
«Τα τελευταία δόντια που έρχονται στον άνθρωπο είναι γομφίοι που ονομάζονται« σοφία-δόντια », τα οποία έρχονται σε ηλικία είκοσι ετών, στην περίπτωση και των δύο φύλων.» [Greek! We are so sophisticated!]
I think we can agree that this is both gripping and grinding!
Wowza!
It seems our hominid ancestors made good use of those third molars because they ate a lot of uncooked plant material.1 Their jaws were stronger than ours—living in this era of late-stage capitalism when we eat a lot of soft foods like mac-n-cheese and yogurt—and more thrust forward; consequently they had fewer problems with making room for the extra four teeth.
Impacted wisdom teeth are essentially a woe that beset us due to what is often referred to as “progress.”
But is it? Is it really?
I recall reading about studies of the !Kung2 people, gatherer-hunters on the edge of the Kalahari desert, which found they only work a couple of hours a day to garner everything they need for a happy and healthy life. They spend the rest of their time singing and telling stories and fashioning little whatsits and, one supposes, diddling, since they do make more copies of themselves.
But here's the thing: They don't make too many.
This is why we ought, if we care at all, to consider the development of agriculture as our original sin, closely associated with the use of fire to cook what we grow. In this light I think it's reasonable to interpret the widespread experience of wisdom-tooth pain and subsequent removal as God's punishment3 for our transgressions. [Or our “debts” if you're a Presbyterian.]
Which leads us to the story part of our story.
Bernard Milton, Ph.D., is an agricultural researcher.
Rather was.
Oh, he's fine, not having reached his expiration date at the time of this writing, but he dropped out of ag.
“Fruitless,” he told his friends. “Fruitless.”
Now you know (or “no” if you're one of my readers who dropped the extraneous consonants after reading “Gnawing Desire”) (oh, page 69 of the print edition if you've forgotten) when a professional agronomist comes up with a one-word utterance including both a noun denoting “the usually edible reproductive body of a seed plant”4 and a suffix indicating a lack thereof … well, things are looking pretty darn serious.
Professor Milton used to work in what might be called the third wave of the much ballyhooed Green Revolution®, the application of modern agronomy to the problem of feeding an exploding human population. New varieties! More land! More water! More fertilizer!
Ooopsie.
If agriculture was original, GR® has to be seen as carnal. (Though I suppose we'd have to check in with the Pope® per our definition.)
As a young scientist Milton was full of buoyant hope, and optimism, and confidence that the world would be fed.
Only a dozen years along did it sink in that the principal effect of GR® was to produce more hungry people than ever. The boost in nutrition created a boost in reproductive capacity which therefore created more mouths to feed which made the inevitable variations in rainfall, locust infestations—and, of course, politics in this era of late-stage capitalism—worse, resulting in greater numbers of people starving.
Then he learned that any and every approach to reducing global warming seemed to require planting billions of trees, unless some mechanical form of carbon sequestration proved viable. That would necessarily require conversion of farmland to forests, a prospect that seemed entirely unlikely.
He lost hope. He quit. And here, I guess, is where the actual story part of this story begins. [Sorry about that. I suppose I've squandered two whole pages—pages we will never get back, not at all unlike the twelve years of agronomic effort our disappointed protagonist devoted to a lost cause].
[Insert pathos.]
But he was only in his mid-thirties when that bomb dropped.
“Where did he land?” [I hear you thinking.]
Why, at the U.S. Postal Service, to be sure. He's a letter-carrier, and like Samantha's third husband, Frederick,5 was, he is a happy, happy man. Putting the correct letters and parcels in the correct mailboxes involves certainty. At the end of the day Bernard knows that he has made the world a little better, or at least a little more organized.
The fact that he is required to deliver a whole lot of junk mail is something of a downside, but he's smart enough to know that the USPS needs the income from the commercial trash in order to help subsidize its great engine of democracy. Moreover, having labored in a fruitless field for as long as he did, Bernard has the kind of perspective unavailable to that other “Sam,” who some of you may remember, “went postal.”6
Bernard can ride this one to retirement, I'm pretty sure.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't want you to imagine that he's let his years of education and experience go to waste! He has a hobby that makes full use of that deep background knowledge in a way that will live on long after he expires.
盆栽7
Practitioners of 盆栽 create heritage-type art, do they not? Things that can be passed along through the generations, becoming more fascinating as they grow into maturity.
Some examples I've seen are well over 100 years old, gnarled and substantial in their diminutive way, offering a living testament to the effort and forethought of someone long gone.
It's clear to me that our protagonist's work in the fields and laboratories will not be long remembered, and his postal service, while honorable and necessary, will be replaced without a ripple. But his 盆栽! Indeed. Indeed.
1 See the story “Chewy Chewy” on page 105 if you missed it.
2 Per the discussion in the story “Gnawing Desire” on page 69, I suspect the exclamation mark in “!Kung” is to inform us that the “K” is not silent. These are clearly not the UNG people who are traders in natural gas. In the words “Gnu” or “Know” for example, the lack of an exclamation mark can thereby be interpreted to indicate the silence of the opening consonant. These !Kung are very, very civilized. Is !Kung another language?
3 Metaphors be with you. There are no gods.
4 Thanks to our friends at merriam-webster.com.
5 Sadly victim of a letter bomb. C'est la vie!
6 In the dramatic closing scene of “Sam's Club,” found on page 52 of the amusingly named Can We Have Archaic and Idiot? 2, BUB, 2009
[ROFL!]
7 Language #9! Note that we went for Greek on page 163. (Or #10 if we include Brit.)
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