No Italian today. My teacher had to go to the dentist. She had gone in last week with a toothache, and had to go back today to get a root canal or something horrific like that.

Which is OK. It's a Monday, and there's always stuff to do. I vacuumed, and dusted and gave the bathroom a good scrub. Put in some laundry. Inspected my summer clothing. Ran errands. Went to the opticians and ordered new contacts. Made myself a gigantic salad for lunch, and non-fat salad dressing to put on it. Opened all the windows to let in the sunshine and fresh(er) air, and sat on the coach and read instead of studying Italian. In fact, I didn't even read in Italian: I read a novel in English and felt guilty not at all.

It's OK. My horoscope told me to do it.

Mostly, though, I spent my time thinking better her than me.

I am a dental wimp. I have a morbid fear of dentists, and I'm not afraid to admit it.

There is an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where Herb gets an ad account with Ferryman's Funeral Homes. Mr. Ferryman is an undertaker with a rather modern outlook and a head for business. He's realized that only so many people are going to die each year, and the only way he's really going to make some serious money is to open an chain of funeral homes. He also realizes that to do this, he needs to expand his market, widen his base of potential clients. So he takes out a series of radio ads with WKRP to push pre-need funeral services to a somewhat younger clientele.

So the staff at the radio station come up with a catchy jingle and ad extolling the virtues of Ferryman's Funeral Homes. It's tacky and in horrendous taste, of course, but Mama's on their backs and they need the money.

At one point, Mr. Ferryman himself comes to the station while everyone's at lunch. He is gaunt and cadaverous and creepy in the extreme. Quite possibly, he's just come from lunch himself-- with Lurch over at the Addams Family residence.

The staff gets back from lunch, Jennifer looks up from filing her nails at the reception desk and says "There's a dead man in your office waiting to talk to you."

My dentist looked just like Mr. Ferryman.

Exactly. A dead ringer. Spend fifteen years cringing in a dental chair, looking up at that visage, and you'd have psychological problems, too.

And that's before you get to the drills and wrenches and long shiny pointy things.

When I was seven, he pulled out my two front teeth. Baby teeth, teeth that were planning on falling out anyway. He broke one, and hadn't given me much, if any anesthetic. (Naturally, he didn't believe in anesthetic. It's always much more fun to cause as much pain as possible, don'tcha know.) When he broke this tooth, it exposed a nerve and it hurt like hell. I started screaming and crying, and that bastard told me to quit acting like a baby.

I was a baby.

Those were baby teeth. He pulled them to put in braces. On a seven year old. Some guy in England was found guilty of malpractice a couple of years ago for putting braces on a nine or ten year old, I don't remember which. If that's malpractice...?

My parents put his children through college.

I begged to go to another doctor. No dice. The whole family went to him, and my mother couldn't be bothered to switch. She never saw what all the fuss was about anyway. My mother is a seriously warped woman who actually likes going to the dentist. No cavities, either. I got my braces off when I was eighteen, and I never went back to him. Never.

Not that he cared. His kids had graduated by then.

There was one dentist, and only one, I actually liked. Stan. Stan pulled my wisdom teeth without warning (but with anesthetic), and I didn't even hold it against him. One of my wisdom teeth had broken through, but sideways and it rubbed a hole in my cheek. I, being a sensible woman, made an appointment for cleaning and asked him, as long as I was there, if he could file it down a bit so it wasn't so sharp. Of course, the other one had come in a few years before, but straight. It had a cavity a could put my tongue in, but Dr. Death had refused to fill it as he wanted to pull it. Stan pulled them both that very day. I was in shock afterwards, but once that wore off I still didn't hold it against him. He had to do it.

The two wisdom teeth on the bottom are still in my jaw. Stan had a friend, an oral surgeon. I've forgotten his name, but I'll call him Ollie. "You'll like him. He's a nice guy." Stan wanted me to go to Ollie so he could put me under, crack my jaw and the teeth therein, and extract the pieces one by one.

Fat chance.

If Stan really wanted me to go see Ollie, he should have lied, not told me the grand plan.

Not, of course, that I wouldn't have figured it out for myself.