Life Is Good

Two things combined this week to make me realize I’ve got a pretty good life: I went to the dentist and our refrigerator light burned out.

Short history of my dental woes… One side of my family had brutally bad teeth and those were the ones I inherited. Thanks, Dad! About 15 years back, I had most of them yanked because they were gruesome and I had already had enough toothaches to last me a lifetime. I had implant surgery and got a new set of choppers.

My teeth, before

My teeth, after

Since you may be eating breakfast, I won’t go into the details of that surgery. It was amazingly grody. Suffice to say my newer teeth are made of plastic.

Now, you’d think - since I have plastic teeth - I would no longer need to go to the dentist. That’s what I thought, but no. It turns out I still need to visit the dentist every six months to have a thorough cleaning and allow him to tell me my current set won’t last forever and I should invest another nine or twelve thousand dollars for a better-looking new set. I always tell him I don’t have that kind of money to spare, the old teeth work just fine thanks, and I don’t care what they look like because they’re never going to look as bad as my originals did. Then he schedules me for my next six-month scolding.

Meanwhile – watch this transition; it’s so smooth you’ll hardly notice I’m changing topics – our refrigerator light burned out last week.

[Here I wanted to put a photo of our refrigerator without a light.

However, you wouldn't be able to see it, so I haven't bothered.] 

This was the first time such a calamity had befallen me. I didn’t even know where to look for the burned-out bulb. It turned out to be hidden away in a nook on the front of the refrigerator’s ceiling, so I had to reach my hand in at an awkward backwards-facing angle to unscrew it.

Once I had the bulb out, I looked at it with a frown and then shook it next to my ear because that’s what you do. If you don’t hear the “I’m a broken light bulb” sound, you screw it back in because you figure it was just having a little joke with you and now it might work again. It doesn’t, of course, so you unscrew it again, give it another frown, shake it one more time to be sure, shrug when you still don’t hear anything, then throw it away. After that, you realize you don’t have one of those bulbs handy because you’ve never had one burn out before, so you have no light in your fridge until you buy one. This presents no great problem in the daytime, but it surprises you when you open the door at night because you’ve had thousands of midnight snacks in your life and you’ve never had to feel around for the salami and cheese before.

So, I’ve given you five minutes of what are now called, by some, “first-world problems”. What can I say? I have teeth; I have food; I have a refrigerator (with a light); and I live in the first-world, so that’s what I tend to write about. If it helps any, I’m always thankful about it.

You, of course, own some sort of computer or other device on which you can read this, so life in the first-world is probably decent for you also. I have no idea what kind of shape your teeth are in, but I hope you at least smiled once or twice just now.

Soon, with more better stuff.