Nothing to say

I have often wondered how it would turn out if I sat down to write here with absolutely nothing on my mind.

OK: Here goes.

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We were on Long Island. There’s an old joke about a guy having an affair, and the husband comes home, so her lover dashes off naked and hides in the closet. The husband is suspicious, and while his wife says she was just napping while getting dressed, he finally goes to the closet and opens the door and there sits her naked lover, and the husband says “What are you doing here?” and he says “Everybody has to be somewhere.”

So, we were on Long Island. I have to divide that beautiful place into halves, the upper northeast, and the lower southwest. Each have their own charm.

We were there 1) To spend time with my cousin and her husband who live in Wilmington, Delaware. They are delightful, shy and talented people. He’s an electrical engineer and a musician, and she has had a full rich life, graduating from Gonzaga and then whatever college is in Eugene or Corvallis or somewhere out on the Oregon coast, having wonderful parents, my Dad’s sister Helen and the man she married, Ed.

I never realized until later in life, long after Ed died, how close they were, how much he loved his daughter. My bad. She plays the organ, and that is how she and her husband hooked up. He’s a pianist and also plays trumpet. They played together for us, and we enjoyed them so much even as they were nervous. They were good together. What a time.

I made the trip happen, one to see my cousin, and also to fulfill my wife’s ambition to walk cemeteries on Long Island. Her ancestry goes way back. She had a list of cemeteries, and her cousin from upstate New York decided to join us, and the three of us grave-hunted. We left on a Sunday morning, took an Uber from Wilmington to Philadelphia, and flew to LaGuardia. From there we rented a car and drove to our first cemetery in Flushing, an old church. We walked the place, but the gravestones were old, 16-1700s, and consequently we could not read them. The area has been heavily taken over by Chinese people, so finding a place to park without my wife’s cousin would have been impossible, all the non-comprehensible babble going on. It was raining heavily. We found an underground lot, found nothing useful in the churchyard cemetery, and left for a bigger graveyard, the second of nineteen we would see.

By the way, the people there being Chinese merely charged my soul, as they are energetic, smart and lively. They will make very good Americans in time. The language barrier will go away, either us speaking like them, or them like us. Either works.

We walked the cemeteries, and found many of my wife’s relatives. They were, for the most part, part of the “seeding” that went on in the 1600s. People in Jamestown or on the Mayflower were not being religiously persecuted. That is made-up history, what most of our “professional” historians do to get by. The British royalty would raise families, and the first born male would join the military, never being in harm’s way (think Charles), and later assume the crown. The second-born male would often become an Anglican minister. There also came the women, sometimes poets and writers, but often, their third and fourth generations, sent off to America to take control of land given them by the King, to form the new colony. These were not poor people, they did not land by accident. They were sent to take hold of the new land, to prevent the French and Spanish from doing the same. It is no accident that Alanis Morrisette, lightly talented and heavily trained singer, was a descendent of a man on the Mayflower, Alan Morrisette.

It is no accident that all of our presidents are descendants of British kings. Even the one who they say was not, Martin van Buren. He’s was of Spanish lines, I am told, but still, royal.

That’s my wife’s family, and she can trace her ancestry to William the Conqueror, even as she is normal and lovely and unassuming.

For me, 1870 seems the year we lost track. As I like to say, we often call our family reunions “furloughs”.  True as I have read it from a hand-written letter, my Dad’s father was being raised in Austria (even as our name, Tokarski, is both Jewish and Polish), when he and his classmates one day rose up and overpowered their teacher, locked him in a closet, and left him there to be found later. Such rebelliousness was not tolerated (then or now) and he was a target for police and military draft, wars a constant. My great-grandmother was able to hide him on the back of a potato wagon, and he made it to the coast of France, where he was able to book passage (don’t ask details) to the New World, landing in Sheffield, Pennsylvania, where he worked the coal mines and met my grandmother. The Anaconda Company had opened a smelter in Great Falls, Montana (where the “Falls” had been dammed to make electricity), and Grandpa and Ma made their way out there, eventually owning a small dairy farm south of town.

That is Dad’s side. Mom was born near Greenbush, Wisconsin, the oldest of seven sisters,  and, as far as I can tell, sharecroppers. One night the house caught on fire, and while all family members escaped, they were penniless, and homeless. Mom tells the story of running to the nearest neighbor for help, only to return to ashes. My grandpa contacted his brother in Ekalaka, Montana, asking for work, and my Uncle said of course, come out and help on the farm. Grandpa did not tell him he was bringing his wife and seven daughters to a three-room house with an outdoor privy. Mom stood there as the train arrived in Baker, nearby. Grandma, raised in green Wisconsin, daughter of Irish immigrants, looked out over the Eastern Montana landscape and said “This is it?”

The rest is not interesting, as if was passed above is. Mom met Dad, we ended up in Billings, Montana, a hot prairie town with little of note to boast about. Frederick Billings was a railroad baron, and wanted to form a town at nearby Park City for watering up the steam engines. There was a kerfuffle of some kind, and Frederick moved the town to what is now Billings, otherwise unremarkable. Oh for fickle fate, Park City could now be Billings!!! Frederick’s son was named Parmly, and the Billings library is still named the Parmly Billings Memorial Library.

Nice thing about Billings is that fifty miles away were the Beartooth Mountains, and I was able to hike and climb and fish there, and when my wife and I met, that is where we spent our time. She had never backpacked before, I had never been in love before, you know, not really. Not like that.

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I was lucky. While on Long Island, I noticed an annoying pain in my lower right jaw, otherwise known as #21. We had a four hour flight back to Denver from LaGuardia, and I was able to read the entire time, no problem. On return, the 16th, the pain was persistent and I slowly realized I had a problem. That was a Thursday, and by Friday I was in misery. I decided to see a dentist, but not to spoil his weekend, waited until Monday.

Saturday was our grandson’s high school graduation, a lovely ceremony on a football field in nearby Conifer, Colorado. He’s a great young man, the product of two great parents, and we as grandparents watched him grow up from two young eyes that could barely see over the edge of our ping pong table to the fine young man he is. I was in agony, and could only walk behind the crowd seating just to keep moving. But I listened and liked everything I saw, including marching the kids across the stage in reverse alphabetical order and listening as a young girl sang while a young male guitarist accompanied, often ranging high on the fret bar. What a treat.

But the pain was getting worse. Finally on Monday I made my way to the dentist, who told me I was no longer eighteen, and that I had a dead tooth. I needed a root canal. He sent me to a specialist, who had an opening on Tuesday. As it happened, the tooth broke during the procedure, so now I would also need a new crown.

The specialist cleaned it up and (I hope) got rid of the infection, but new dental work lay ahead. I was taking amoxicillin, the pain was subsiding, but I needed to know what kind of financial pain lay ahead, so I asked my regular dentist was lay in store. He laid it out for me, sparing the details for you, except $2,087.00.

What a precise number! Something probably not unique to Colorado, if I were to go down the street to our other dentist, or down into Denver to the hundreds that work there, the price would be … $2,087.00.

Why ”’$87 at the end? Easy. They adjust their prices each year for inflation. Five years ago the price might have been $1,846.00 and all dentists would charge the same.

Why so? In 1996 when I ran for state legislature in Montana, I was invited to lunch by a man with a plan. He was an optometrist or something related to eyes, and he had a plan to” protect” the public from the threat of low-priced eye care. It was a bill creating a price system where all optometrists would agree to a pricing system, and none would deviate.

I did not get the world at that time, and said to him, my actual words, “What’s a little restraint of trade among friends?”

He still paid for the lunch, but I never heard from him again. I lost my race (as I well should have) and the bill passed. Here in Colorado, dental professionals have achieved the same protection for all of us, and I am so grateful that my new crown will cost $2,087.00 and not, say, $1,567.00 from some amateur down the street. We have to protect dentists, optometrists, doctors … all of them, don’t you see, from competition.

I remember the film High Anxiety, by Mel Brooks, where he plays a psychiatrist, and when asked in one form or another what rewards he gets from it, says, looking right at the camera with a Dr. Joyce Brothers banner on stage behind him, “A good living.”