Fillings
Teeth? Fillings? Apropos tale from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths
Fillings
Not bonbons this go-round. No, no, no. Believe we’ve had, so to speak, “our fill” in that arena. Made me a little queasy just thinking about Mary Anne downing 14 ounces of cocoa and sucrose and what all, non-stop. Kind of makes my teeth hurt.
Nor are we going to make the completely obvious plot move to dentistry suggested by Harrison’s song and my suddenly aching teeth. That would seem so lame at this point, some kind of attempt to fashion an artsier assemblage1 than “Savoy Truffle?”
Puh-leez!
We are going to turn to “fillings in,” and find that we have a wide range from which to select. For one example I could enjoy a little fun at your expense and expect you to “fill in the blanks.” [Letting myself off the hook regarding character and plot. A very, very tempting thought for a busy author!]
Let’s see. Oh, right. Back on page 15 we referenced “a story for another day.” Here we go.
As for the raccoons, well you would likely feel ________
to learn that they got into ___ ____ and _____ ___ so Susan2 decided the only way forward was to use a Havahart® trap and move some of them to ___ _____ ______. Little did she suspect that instead of the preferred prey she would trap a _____. Now, that was a problem! A tetchy, tetchy problem.
But that was far from the _____ __ __ ___ ___.
That reminds me of something else that happened that same week which is much funnier. [You know me and memory and telling the truth.]
During the time frame when Susan set out to catch raccoons but ended up catching a skunk and having to get it out of the trap without getting dosed (which she managed, to her great good fortune) she trapped herself!
Naked!
If nakedness doesn’t make a reader sit up and pay attention, well, I really don’t know what would.
Susan was alone in the woods. Our neighbor, Larry, and I had headed to an island off the coast of Maine for a week, to go fishing and do some repairs on his sister’s cottage. In the evenings I was wrapping up the third draft of my all-too-easily-forgotten novel, Illiamna.
Forgotten because unseen by the world. It still calls to me from a cardboard box underneath my desk, crying out for a re-write to which I reply, “Later.”
[Which, like equal pay for women and racial justice as described by MLK Jr. in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” basically means “Never.”]'
[Also note; I think this was the summer of 1981.]
[The world still begs for a majestic and powerful novel that includes illicit dogfighting in Florida, domestic violence artfully punished, a salmon fishery and plaisir mining in Alaska, an improbable love affair and a hunting accident resulting in … but nope,sorry, no spoilers here.]
I think that’s explanation enough for why Susan was alone in the forest, and inclined toward nudity. Taking it all off is a familiar idea, seems to me. Have any among you not skinny-dipped? And if so, do you have a wrinkled clue what you have missed out on?
It was a sunny July day in woodland New Hampshire and a patch of dry weather had largely driven the usual swarms of black flies and mosquitoes to ground, at least around noon. Susan decided to wash Buckwheat.3 Being far from public view and having decided that the sun would feel good everywhere, she got naked.4 Why not? It’s a free country!
Who are you to judge? (You non-skinny-dippers, you.)
So in short order she and the car were sudsy and she rinsed first herself then the auto off with the hose,.
That’s when she noticed that the drains from the vents in front of the windshield were clogged. They had FILLED IN5 with leaf mould or airborne dirt and detritus. Being of a mechanical mind-set she knew there were drain tubes under the dash.
So Susan ran inside for a dish pan, opened the passenger door and leaned in, placed the pan under the outlet, pulled the rubber hose off the fitting and … nothing.
What comes next is the funny part. So, no coffee, okay?
You can easily understand that it wasn’t possible to look up into the aperture. It was awkward enough just bending over the passenger seat to get at the problem. But, clearly, there was some manner of blockage.
What to do?
The drain opening looked to be about the size of her pinky.
It was.
She poked her little finger in as far as it would reach.
And … __ ___ _____!6
Well, here we’re left with an awful lot of blank space. (I mean blank space which I see in the moment, from the line above to the foot of the page, but because I will continue to type, you will not view it the same way—is that clear? See, previous blank pages have left me feeling a little guilty.) Which seems a shame, really. So now that I’ve left you “filling in” the blanks above perhaps we can move along to fillings-in of a different sort.
Looking back I see that I mentioned Charles and Danielle on page 134, but we haven’t actually checked in on them since last summer in the earworm-driven tale, “Kookaburra? Not.”7 And even there we were looking back about a year before the current“time of cholera.”
Since one or another of you readers may not have that volume at hand, I suppose a little catch-up is in order. [Speaking of which, isn’t it amusing that there appears to be ketchup splattered all over the cover of Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver? With Ronald Reagan saying the word “ketchup.”]
[Makes me giggle every time.]
Charles, some of us recall, was a math major at Eckerd® College8 and met Danielle in an astronomy class. There was some initial attraction on the parties of both the first and second parts, but the clincher came on the first observation night when they climbed to the roof of the building named for Jack Eckerd’s child (we didn’t employ Blaise to do the research, so we don’t know the actual moniker.) Just as they assembled and the kinky professor (Van Allen, don’t ask, please don’t ask) was about to speak, a fireball blasted across the sky. An amazing thing, no? And the pair were so fired up they embraced and kissed! A very memorable first kiss!
Kind of surprised that at least some of you don’t. Remember, I mean.
A few years later they went to Florida’s east coast, to the same campground visited by our flamingo-crossed couple in “MosquitoCoast Cost.” There they took a moonlight stroll and witnessed the egg laying of a loggerhead turtle! Oh, wow!
Then they went back to their tent, and unbeknownst to the pair in the pleasurable heat of the moment, made a baby.
Oceanside procreation. How romantic! Sorta kinda just like the girl turtle, only with loggerheads, y’know, they can lay eggs fertilized by up to seven fathers. [What goes on in the Gulf Stream stays in the Gulf Stream.]
They graduated and married. Nellie became a corporate headhunter and Chuck got a job at a bank. When we left them they were doing pretty well, though Nellie, as in most such itemizations, had to cover the bulk of the child care, doing her head-hunting by phone, from home. [Like every one of my good characters she is quite stoic in the face of necessity.]
Now, however, the worm has turned!
Grace, as the little bundle of joy was named, is now just past two years old. The well-labeled “terrible twos,” and Chuck is working from home due to the Trumpidemic.
No more excuses, Charlie. He’s discovering the pleasures of parenting a toddler up close and personal. He is, in point of fact—and you know how fond I am of facts—FILLING IN9 for Nellie as much as half the time.
She’s able to get out to the store without the youngster, and even met a friend in the park for take-out coffee a few times, socially distanced, natch. No need to take the plague home to hubby and the kid. Her world has expanded a little, even in the midst of the societal lockdown, as Charlie’s has contracted. At least in some respects.
Respect is a very apt word here, which is why I used it. He has developed greater admiration for Nellie. He knew what she was doing for the past year, of course, but he didn’t really know. Working from home with a squalling rug-rat in the next room is not the stickiest wicket in the world. But it’s right up there.
So Charles and Danielle have entered the next phase of their conjoint parenting. For Grace’s sake we must, IMHO, wish them well.
[To spare myself having to catch you up again in some future assemblage, I’ll just go ahead and tell you what’s in store.]
All three will survive the plague. Whew!
Nellie will be so effective in her job that she’ll be promoted to a managerial position. [Good on her!]
Chuck will move up the corporate ladder for a few years, right up to the time that his bank is bought out and he is dumped. Hey, like I keep saying, we’re dealing with late-stage capitalism here. It is often “not pretty.”
Next, oh, how I hate to report this … maybe I shouldn’t?
Sigh. Okay. Can’t leave you hanging.
Kirchner & Co.® will be hired to find a replacement for our Chuck. Yes, that Kirchner & Co.® The one for which Nellie toils. Marital tension much?
Chuck is not one to cast blame for things far beyond his wife’s control, but things will still be kind of dicey. Here he will be unemployed and licking corporate wounds while she is actively working to hire his successor. Finding someone to FILL his former position. This “filling” is about as distasteful as the liquified cherry in a bonbon, only bitter rather than sweet.
However, I think we can here decide to resolve the contretemps.10
We’ll have Nellie find an opportunity to hunt Chuck’s head! She will be able to place him in a much better position at higher pay! Yes, they’ll have to move from Florida to the Western North Carolina mountains and make all kinds of life-changing decisions, but c’est la vie!
C’est la vie!
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Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].
1 [275] Oui, Fr.
2 [276] Susan is about 17 years past her expiration date, so she isn’t present to be embarrassed by the story about to be told.
3 [277] Recall I mentioned the 1965 VW Squareback on page 19.
4 [278] If this were a YouTube® video for guys she would be in a bikini, but this is not that. It is a true story from long before YouTube® was a thing.
5 [279] See? I never mislead my readers. (Or, at least, not much.)
6 [280] Were you able to finish the story? C’mon, what do you think might have happened? A woman alone in the woods? Naked? With her pinky inserted into the drain aperture of a 1965 VW Type III?
7 [281] Page 147 in Waist Not, Want Knot (BUB, 2020)
8 [282] High school grades were not all that stupendous.
9 [283] Theme music, please.
10 [284] The French always have the best words to describe marital problèmes.
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