Tooth 47.

 At 50, I've lost my first permanent tooth. Molar 47. No one knows for sure, but it might have been cracked all along. 

It started bothering me last December. I'd not seen a dentist in a while, so I dismissed it as 'probably a cavity' and kept putting off seeing a dentist. It was a mild bother when I bit and chewed hard stuff - nuts, maybe a steak. It got progressively worse, and one night after the last Iran War started, I ground my teeth so hard that I knew something was off when I woke up the next morning - that was when we were waking up in the middle of the night and running to the shelter downstairs with the children, terrified with the noise and terrified for the children.

That's when the toothache started in earnest. It'd come and go, so I thought I'd just wait until it resolved on its own. It wouldn't, so I finally saw the dentist. To no one's surprise, nothing was seen either clinically or in the x rays. I was offered a Botox shot, saying it was probably my cheek muscle rather than my tooth, and, needless to say, I didn't take it. Eventually, the dentist at the new clinic in Jaljuliya spotted the tooth infection, conferred with the powers that be, and low and behold, I was in for a root canal treatment, which I had in early April.

That seemed to do the job. The tooth continued bothering me every now and again when I bit and chewed a bit harder, but I dismissed it as the tooth healing, and finally in August I got another full-blown tooth infection in exactly the same spot - only I was abroad for another week. Saw an online doctor, who prescribed me a course of antibiotics, which, as it turns out, I could have got without the prescription - funny country we were in. Saw another dentist when we came back who diagnosed an overfill and decreed that the root canal treatment needed redoing. Saw the same specialist again, the one who'd done the first treatment, who dismissed the overfill was 'artefact', yet proceeded to redo the treatment - sort of. He told me to come back after two weeks to finish it, only to walk out on me right when I arrived for my appointment FOUR minutes late when the day finally came. We actually crossed paths in front of the clinic, only I didn't think it was him as he was supposed to see me just then, but it did strike me how much he looked like him.

Setting up a new appointment turned out to be a living nightmare, as internal bureaucracy dictated that I needed to finish the treatment where I'd started it - which I didn't want to because now I was upset with the sloppiness of said specialist - and, needless to say, that was only explained to me in English much, much later, by the seventh or eighth time I was trying to set up an appointment, after my local clinic - the same ones who failed to spot the infection in the first place all those months ago - turned me down TWICE even if my face was swollen and my gum was oozing pus from the infection for anyone to see. Eventually, I was able to secure an appointment in Netanya tomorrow after another dentist saw me, cleaned the wound in my gum, and prescribed me another round of antibiotics. Exasperated, I threw the towel and set up an appointment with a private specialist two days earlier - if anything, to get the proverbial second opinion. The diagnostic session was free and the specialist is Brazilian, so at least there wouldn't be the language barrier for a change.

So, I go there yesterday. We start chatting and it turns out we're neighbours in Kfar Saba as well as fellow countrypeople. It takes her seconds to manipulate the tooth and come up with a diagnostic: it was cracked beyond repair. Might have been the bruxism, might have been the other dentist's sloppiness. Teeth that undergo root canal treatment, she explains to me, are more fragile and prone to fracturing - especially molars, which take the brunt of biting, chewing, and griding. The x ray confirms the infection and bone loss around the tooth, while she actually shows me with a mirror where the crack is: smack in the middle of the tooth. Without the temporary filling, I can actually see half the tooth moving and the crack widening as she manipulates it.

She offers me to have it removed that very afternoon. I wonder out loud about my little daughter's birthday party, scheduled for that very afternoon. The owner of the clinic, who's also Brazilian, walks in and mentions that he happens to have an opening because two other patients have cancelled. I confirm the price of the extraction, and we decide to do it there and then. I call my wife to tell her the news, and she is not amused. Not so much about the price (it wasn't as expensive as we feared), but the fact that I'd be AWOL at my daughter's birthday party, and it'd be up to her to handle everything - bringing the food, watching the children, talking to the other mothers, etc. I argue that I need the remaining days off to recuperate before I go back to work and that untreated, the situation could worsen again very quickly - i.e. the infection could worsen, and it could become an emergency. So, we agree on the extraction there and then, and I start getting all the anaesthetics shots - I didn't count, but it could have easily been five or six. They didn't hurt, of course, but it was hard not to remember my extreme phobia of dentists and huge needles in my mouth as a child. Also, it turns out that the dentist knew of my wife from WhatsApp groups of Brazilians in Kfar Saba. Our children are roughly the same age, and truth be told there are so few Brazilians in Kfar Saba (not to mention in Israel in general) that over time it's impossible not to hear of or come across them, even if you don't particularly want to be in an exclusively Brazilian community. And to add insult to injury, many times we actually know these people - or know of them - from the Jewish community back in Brazil: someone who knows someone who's someone else's cousin or sibling. In my dentist's case, she knew of my wife's cousin because her husband went to school with him.

Eventually, I made it to my little daughter's birthday party. She had an absolute blast, and I was even able to help my wife some, although when the anaesthetics wore off, I was in for an afternoon of absolute discomfort - I'm better now. It's the next day.

So much for turning 50.

The life of an English teacher.

 The student begins his essay with the words "Shakespeares sonnet's are notoriously difficult to interpret". I am forced to disregard his statement - I disagree that Shakespeare's sonnets are notoriously difficult to interpret - because I need to focus on the fact that he specifically didn't employ the apostrophe in the possessive, yet he made it a point to employ an apostrophe in the middle of the plural. Sadly, in a group of over 30 teenagers who are native speakers of English, I find this is an unexpectedly common problem. "Anglo teens notoriously can't spell".

That said, some of them had some very interesting views on Shakespeare's sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?), this one kid included. Many of them zeroed in on how Shakespeare is referring to art as the aesthetic vehicle for posterity, and a few of them even pointed out the sonnet's championing of ageism - only young people can truly be beautiful - and physical beauty over any other standard. And this before we discussed sonnet 130 (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun) and its frontal attack on these very standards, which were already dated in the 17th century.

So much for a Wednesday morning.

Cheap shot at flash "fiction".

 A., age 15, went to the demonstration against the drafting of haredim in Jerusalem because he didn't want to get killed in the war. He went up to the twentieth floor of a construction site for a laugh - all the other kids were doing it too. He lost his balance and fell out of the open window. He plunged straight to his death - never stood a chance against gravity. I guess his god does work in mysterious ways.

Moonlight sonata.

 My wife's oldest cousin passed away last week. We weren't very close, but I don't think he was sick with anything. He had a heart attack playing tennis on a Saturday afternoon. He was 51.

When I was younger, I often wondered if people knew that the day they died was going to be their last day alive. As in you wake up in the morning and you get a feeling that was the last time you did that.

I don't think my wife's cousin woke up last Saturday and knew that was that. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that we don't know, really. We wake up as if it were any other day, because it might as well be. Whether in my wife's cousin's case, or when you have an accident, you don't really know your number is up. Maybe if you're sick in hospital or something, or if you're really old. Otherwise, I don't think you know. (Unless, of course, you commit suicide.)

One of the things that have made me come to this conclusion is watching videos of attacks on the street. Just this morning I saw one. This guy walks up behind a police officer. In a split second, he's tried to stab the police officer, and his partner has turned around to come to his rescue, and next thing you know, they have shot the guy dead. There you have it. I don't think the guy knew one minute before two minutes later he would no longer be alive.

I've read about the spike in brain activity a couple of minutes after your heart stops beating in cases of heart failure. I wonder what my wife's cousin saw in his mind's eye. He must have felt the pain - I've read heart attacks are very painful. But after he lost consciousness, did he slip straight into a dreamlike state? Or is it more like when you fall asleep and you're not really conscious or aware of anything at all - not until later when you start dreaming?

I hope I die when I'm very old. I want to see my children grow, and I want to see my grandchildren. My great grandchildren if I can.

Weather diaries.

I miss writing. I miss producing, even though I have been working so incredibly hard. I've got a new computer, so I should be able to write more and produce more. Not that there was something fundamentally wrong with the old computer. It was just old. It had stopped updating. It's still going, but it's quite slow. It's a nightmare every time it needs to be restarted. It takes forever. It got to a point where I had to uninstall Skype, because it took so long to start. It stopped responding. At least this one is brand new. A world of possibilities before me. I hope lots of interesting things come out of our newly established relationship. I certainly do miss writing.

Song for someone.

Today marks the 38th anniversary of the day I came out of my mother's womb. It was the early hours of a Sunday, 19 September 1976, and my parents were at a restaurant, where they had been dancing all night. When my mother's water broke, she was rushed to hospital by her cousin, because my father was in a state, and he didn't go see her - or me - until Sunday afternoon.

I had existed - first as a handful of cells, then as a foetus, then as a baby - since mid December 1975, which is about 40 weeks before I naturally came out of my mother's womb. During this time, my mother read The Continent, by Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo, and, like many people who have also read it, fell in love with the manly and rugged-looking Captain Rodrigo Severo Cambará, a sort of Gaúcho Heathcliff. I was named after him.

The Policy Of Truth.

In 1983, construction workers found a decomposing human head whilst digging in a peat bog in Cheshire. Identified as a middle-aged female, the police soon linked the head to Malika Reyn-Bardt, missing since 1960. Her husband, Peter Reyn-Bardt, in prison on different charges, when faced with the discovery, confessed to murdering her and burying her in the bogs. He was duly convicted and sentenced based on his confession, though shortly after his trial the head was radiocarbon dated to actually be 2,000 years old, and not that of his missing wife.