Two years and eleven months ago I tested gravity with my face (it worked by the way). One minute I was closing my front door to get a ride across town the next I was being loaded into an ambulance, my face skinned and swelling, and four of the teeth in the perfect bite I’d had for 30 years pushed so horribly out of place I resembled nothing so much as a victim of a serious beating.
After the many hours with both the MDs and the dentist I was left with a hole in my memory (apparently I interacted with my loved ones while we sat on the steps and waited for the ambulance; I honestly don’t remember), lips so swollen I could only eat through a straw for the first two days, and braces for the first time in my life. Once the external, physical damage was healed I then moved on to more than a year of orthodontia to correct the damage of gravity meeting cement. The orthodontia was followed immediately by root canals, four of them, and more time eating nothing but soft food. If you’ve never had a root canal, well, basically, by the time you need one, it’s a blessing to be free of the pain your teeth have put you in. The downside is that your teeth then have no nerve endings in them; you can’t sense hot or cold with your teeth, and, with many teeth in a row being desensitized, you’re constantly aware of the pressure of your remaining natural teeth on the ones that now contain steel posts instead of a live nerve core.
The end result of all this dental work is that I had to ease back into eating hard foods. Sandwiches with a knife and fork for four or five months, pizza not in slices but cut up, and nothing but semi-soft fruit. If I never see another grape or a bowl of canned peaches again it will be too soon.
Today though, today was different. Two years and eleven months later I ate an apple. It was a gala, probably imported from South America. Its skin was smooth, a lush red. The flesh underneath was firm and juicy, at the peak of ripeness.
What does this have to do with anything you ask?
It seems to me that Americans have spent our time post-September 11th being afraid. Our government, in fact, encourages us to be afraid through its constant terror alerts, news updates, and cautionary tales. Press coverage of the war in Iraq is designed to make us thank god we don’t live in conditions like that and be thankful when the State comes to take away our rights because, after all, they’re only doing it for our protection.
I guess what I’m trying to say in a very ham-handed, too giddy at overcoming my own fear to be coherent sort of way is that if we forget to enjoy the small things, the apples, the daffodils, the trees budding in preparation for summer, if we ignore all those things then all of the marching, flag waving, and believing in the “important” things is for naught because one day it will be our last day and we won’t know how we got there.