Let’s not talk about yesterday. Today was blandly dull by comparison. Tomorrow I am having dentistry inflicted upon me: the first steps in getting a crown and an onlay. This will be my first onlay. Apparently “onlay” is a fancy dental word that means “like a crown, but doesn’t go down as far, but still costs the same amount.”

Depending how you count, this will either be my fourth or my seventh crown. It will be the fourth tooth to get a crown. Both the crowns from 2003 (my oldest two) have been replaced; one of them has been replaced twice. The oldest crown I have is one of the gold ones that I got when I was living in Knoxville.

Tomorrow’s work will be replacing some large fillings that are just shy of their 30th birthday. They have outlived the dentist that installed them.

I remember when I got those fillings originally: During the summer after ninth grade, I had to go to the dentist four Tuesday mornings in a row to get a lot of fillings. In dental lingo, I got fillings in 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 29, 30, and 31. So any of the large “silver” (mercury) fillings in my mouth date from July 1988. I didn’t really do much that summer except read books and get dental work done. I had to read A Death in the Family as the summer reading book for my 10th grade English class. I was reading a lot of Martin Gardner books from the bookmobile that summer. It was super-awesome that the bookmobile was able to get books that I requested from the main library because it was sort of inconvenient for me to ride my bike all the way to the main library. (You need to keep all this in perspective; Schenectady is not a large city; I can’t imagine that any of the distances that come up in this story are longer than 3 miles.) Right around the time that I was getting all that dental work done, I would talk incessantly about The Ambidextrous Universe and parity violations to anyone who would listen to me.

Since I didn’t have a lot of experience with dentistry up to that point, one of those Tuesdays I had agreed to have lunch with my friend Brian. Originally we were going to go to the Friendly’s on Union Street, but then once we got there, we changed our plans to go to the McDonalds across the street. I managed to eat my lunch despite the fact that the novacaine hadn’t yet worn off. We got losing gamepieces for the Monopoly game. I tried to tell him about physics and time travel. He told me about spending time with his relatives in Bradenton, FL and playing tennis with famous people.

This memory sticks in my head because it was fairly uncommon for me to actually go and do social things with my friends—and even more so with friends that I was not particularly close with. I do remember spending a bunch of time in various people’s basements when I was in high school, but that was almost always in the context of a group of people who were together to do something like play computer games or work on paste-up for the school newspaper or to accomplish some particular task.

This story does turn out to be another episode of all my friends are dead. This story doesn’t really haunt me, as Brian only died only a few years ago of some sort of previously-undiagnosed heart condition. I mean, it’s sad, but we had pretty much fallen out of touch. And it’s not at all like the situation with Michelle where she wrote to me about overdosing on prescription medication about a year before she killed herself, and I didn’t tell anyone.

Brian and I were never close friends. And since I am bad at reading social signals more than once I did wonder if we were really friends at all or if he was just making fun of me the whole time. We hardly ever socialized outside of school. He was far more popular than I was, and he went to the sorts of parties that I would never be invited to. He would show up to school hungover and would bum Advil off me. On weekend mornings when our lawn would be covered with empty beer cans, my parents would insist that it was my “friends” that had done it (I blamed their students), but my mother would still happily pick up the cans and return them for the bottle deposit. My guess was that if it were anyone that I knew from school, that it probably was Brian and his friends. Once, in 11th grade, I came home from school to find Brian sitting on my front porch, and we sat and talked for a while.

Here’s a picture of Brian from some time in high school. Sorry about the phone-photo-of-a-photo, but I don’t even know if my scanner works any more. There is no date on the back of the photo, but it says, “Ode to a Party (by Sparky C—).” I’m not sure where the party was (probably somewhere in Rosendale Estates?), but I certainly was not invited. I was not even aware of it until Brian gave me this picture.

ode to a party

Brian graduated a year early from high school to avoid having to switch school districts when he moved from his mother’s house to his father’s house, and he spent the 1990-1991 school year living in Bonn, Germany. He was delighted that school in Germany didn’t care at all if you went to class. Despite the fact that he had already graduated from our high school, he contributed “special correspondent” pieces to our school newspaper about German reunification. At one point during the year he was in Bonn, he sent me a gift of a few pencils, which I might still have, and a fountain pen, which my college housemate Lisa borrowed and never gave back. I think about Brian each time I go to one of the cute stationery shops in Bonn.

Because of that one lunch at McDonalds, I’ve always had a mental connection between Brian, The Ambidextrous Universe, and my summer of dental work. And after tomorrow, only three of my fillings from the summer of 1988 will remain.