old friends, old teeth, new teeth,and paint.

For about five years, about a dozen former childhood friends who remain friends in our second half, have assembled annually to catch up, commiserate, eat, and adore each other. There is no other way to explain it--nor is there any other common denominator except knowing each other from an early age. Some of us met before we were conceived (yes, they win), most met in grade school, with a few add-ons by high school and later, marriage. The bulk were in the music department, but not all. We knew each other when we were simply children. We live all over the place. A few no longer have parents in Redding, and it can be hard to get together.

This summer we could only gather about seven or eight, but it was still great. We did a lot of talking. Saturday night we talked about: Food, children, parents, dementia, song lyrics, wine, the weather, fat, shoes, hair, the official class reunion, marijuana, child abuse, love, teeth, work, the Chronicle, fruit, the Searchlight, feet, the Daisy, vomit, horses, fractures, siblings, bicycles, and then we talked about it the next day, too. It was great. My cup runneth over with love.

Update on my teeth: I have started the arduous process that will end, I hope, with a nice looking smile that will last until I no longer care, or need to chew, or both. The first step is bleaching my dingy lower teeth to match what will be creamy white top teeth (half implants and half bleached resident teeth). This is not a comfortable process but I suspect that extracting three teeth, drilling out the old root canals and installing some cow bone and the bolts to hold the new ones, and dealing with a partial denture for three months, bleaching will feel like a footrub and a glass of white wine. (Red wine cancels my progress, as does coffee, but come on now).

Update on paint: My laundry room looks like a hotel lobby. It matches the adjacent hall. In a fit of creative usefulness I mixed up a sauce of Orange Glo, Scotts Liquid Gold and Old English Scratch Cover and polished the oak cabinets in the laundry room and both bathrooms. For some reason the finish had never adhered well and/or was applied incorrectly, which is odd because the cabinetmaker did a beautiful job otherwise. Anyway my arms were so sore afterwards I could hardly eat my ice cream, so the maple kitchen cabinets will have to wait for another day off.

Today I had to attend a workshop on storytelling (one more thing to do at work--do they know me?) where I learned that good stories have a plot, and also a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Apparently I did not learn anything.