Earlier this week I went to the dentist after a nearly five-year hiatus. Blame the pandemic! Up to a certain point, anyway.
You may remember me mentioning that I needed to call the dentist sometime around, oh, I don’t know, February 2023. Well, spoiler alert: I did not do it for another year.
I’m not sure I learned a lesson from it, either, because not only did I not have any cavities, I also did not get put back on the Shame On You 4x per year tooth-scraping plan, like I did when I “forgot” to go to the dentist for more than a decade.
I am not even really opposed to the dentist in general, mostly because I’ve had one cavity and zero crowns or root canals. The dentist told me I should be more careful because “after 50 is when things start to fall apart.” OKAY. COOL 2 KNOW.
My mom frog-marched me to the dentist every six months for my entire young life until I got my own dental insurance, with many extra visits to an orthodontist and before that, to my beloved childhood dentist Dr. Waddell, who had to pull many of my apparently very stubborn baby teeth that refused to fall out. Yesterday I texted my mom to thank her for torturing me in this fashion for so long and she ignored me. (She is on spring break with her lady friends.)
Last weekend, my husband and I finally dragged two curb-find chairs to my dad’s upholstery shop so we could yank the old fabric off and clean them up. I performed this task many summers of my young life, something my dad has now apparently forgotten (“Oh, I forgot you used to come to work with me every single day of probably four summers” is an interesting thing to hear from your parent, btw).
It was a pleasure to pick up the same tools I used 40 (CAN IT BE) years ago and pull staples and tacks out of wood. Removing old upholstery is sanctioned destruction and can be very satisfying.
Other things I used to do at my dad’s shop: make upholstery buttons (with something like this only more medieval-looking because it is old as the hills), calculate the retail price of fabric per yard and write the prices in upholstery sample books, play with scrap wood on the lathe, sweep up tacks and staples, and probably other things I am forgetting. I would also paw through the old tobacco tin of coins my dad has found in other people’s couches and chairs and occasionally watch my dad snap an errant fly with a rubber band, which I still consider pretty cool (and have never managed myself).
“The shop” as I knew it for most of my life is different now. Two years ago, my dad’s landlord sold the building where he’d worked for 50-some years, and instead of retiring or moving a few things into his basement like a normal 81-year-old person, he simply moved across the street to a bigger space. I actually love that he did this, and he will gladly tell you that one of the reasons he is still around is that he still works, albeit much less than he used to. He told me this weekend that he no longer loads and unloads armchairs from his van. For my dad, this is front-page news.
Anyway, it is nice that the shop still exists. It is nice he is still there. At some point in time I will be the only person who remembers what it was like, and that has been weighing on me a little bit. But in the meantime, I am enjoying it.