The Saga of Tooth #15 or, A Pity Party for One

Thursday's root canal (the need for which was discovered when the dentist took X-rays for a temporary crown preparatory to a permanent crown) morphed into Friday night's cracked and fallen-off temporary crown -- guess I got a little too aggressive with that braised rotisserie chicken and kale.  Several after-hours phone calls and texts with the admittedly extremely responsive and compassionate endodontist and on-call dentist, including a couple of texted glamour shots of the interior of my mouth (including a fleck of tomato skin on the roof thereof -- appetizing!) led to the conclusion that everything is pretty much stable  -- if you define "stable" as the ground-down, jagged, sharp, exposed remnants of what was once my tooth -- and can be dealt with Monday, when a new temporary crown (still preparatory to a permanent crown) can be fitted and popped over the whole sorry mess. I saved the broken pieces of crown snugly wrapped up in a piece of aluminum foil kind of the way children keep their baby teeth -- I'm not entirely sure why. And oh yes, be careful with food, the dentist said sympathetically, I know it's not fun, but eat mostly soft foods. 

On Saturday morning I told my husband that I was basically doing okay and that he should go forward with his plans to visit his sister and younger brother overnight. . .I'm sure he was relieved, and anyway, this was going to be a pity party for one, and two would be a crowd. I uploaded a new novella on my Nook (Richard Russo's Nate in Venice), ran a few errands, went to the Y (where I started reading Nate), had a phone conference with a recent graduate regarding the merits of a job offer, and decided to go to the 5:30 PM mass so that I could loll in bed on Sunday morning as a sort of pity-party aftermath. My lunch was the Silver Palate's broccoli puree, made by Dan the day of the root canal (and a soothing favorite of my father after his cancer diagnosis) followed by some hummus. Later, as I sat in church mentally composing a short Harris-Teeter shopping list, I remembered that HT is across the street from Vin Rouge, a pretty authentic French bistro considering we are in Durham, North Carolina, and their delightful country pâté is nothing if not soft.

For some reason you have to go to the bar at Vin Rouge to order takeout pâté, so I sat morosely on a stool surrounded by happy people drinking and noshing on their steak frites (the dentist, again, on my weekend diet, albeit sympathetically: "think of french fries as too crunchy").  It was busy and the wait was long and I kept thinking about the bottle of chilled white wine in the fridge. When I got home, ravenous, I transferred the whole thick slice of chicken-y, pork-y pâté to a favorite plate, along with the Dijon mustard and cornichons that came with it, uncorked the bottle of cirò bianco -- from Calabria, like my paternal grandparents -- poured myself a generous pour, and polished off the whole decadently delicious portion of pâté, nibbling judiciously on the cornichons with the right side of my mouth, hopefully safely removed from the tooth in question -- #15 in the dental lexicon -- the far-back upper molar on the left side of my mouth.

Once the pâté was history, I took the ripe avocado sitting on the counter, mashed it, minced some red onion, and mixed it in with the avocado along with some lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Voilà, guacamole for one, the perfect second course at my pity party. I wolfed that down too, whereupon it was time to sip just a little more cirò, see what Nate is up to, remember that we are going to see our son and daughter-in-law in less than two weeks and that our daughter and son-in-law live just around the corner from us and that we are taking them to Vin Rouge to celebrate his birthday this coming Friday night. I might even share some pâté.  Maybe my pity party is not so pitiful after all.