Observing California Lilac...While In Slavery to My Teeth

ceanothus bloom

It's my own fault. I've had a vague ache in my tooth for many months, not continually, but on and off. "Sooner or later, you're gonna need a root canal," said the dentist, and I opted for later. I kept imagining it would go away of its own accord, and I conjured up so many more pleasurable things I could do with the money if it did go away. (Have you priced a root canal lately? It's not an insubstantial sum.) So I chose to ignore it, or postpone dealing with it. And suddenly...oh.

Remember Dostoevsky's riff on toothaches? It was in Notes From The Underground, a book I read in high school, when anything that suggested alienation, melancholy, and existentialist ramblings seemed like my cup of tea. It comes back to me now, while episodic waves of pain wash over me: "Even in toothache there is enjoyment..."

I'm trying hard to perceive what enjoyment there might be other than extreme relief and gratitude in its intermittent cessation.

Enjoyment in a toothache? Here's an excerpt from our friend Fyodor:

I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain...you are in complete slavery to your teeth...

I find absolutely no comfort in this. I'm not so much moaning as whimpering and whining anyway, the primary effect of which is to elicit an odd combination of sympathy and annoyance from my significant other, who vividly recalls warning me long ago to get to a dentist promptly and deal with the damned tooth.  Avoidance, he says, is never a good strategy.

For now, I'll take another Advil, or one of my vintage ten-year-old Vicodin tablets. I just need to get through one more day. Root canal tomorrow. Yay.

Meanwhile, since I cannot possibly have a post on a blog called "Still Amazed" that is nothing more than a toothache whine (although I did rather recently dedicate one entirely to poison oak misery) I want to point out that I have never noticed such an extravagant explosion of ceanothus bloom as I am seeing in the backcountry lately.

Ceanothus is wild lilac...ranging in color from white to purplish-blue, and the picture above is simply what I can see of it while standing on the deck at the back of my house, which I must say doesn't do it justice.

A few days ago I rode (and pushed) my bike along a dirt road lined on both sides with small trees of these white lacy blossoms, and the air was utterly fragrant with them. Looking up toward the mountains near Gaviota pass, the whiteness resembles frost,  and the slopes appear softened and silvery, no longer etched against the sky but fading featherly into it. It's a gentle spin on winter... whispers and sighs, our version of snow.