Saturday Dilemma

Photo Copyright: Maggie May

First of all I would like to apologise to those people who couldn't leave a comment on my last post because of a Blogger glitch. I only knew about it because they asked my brother to pass on a message about their difficulty.

I hope Blogger is working again now.

You might be wondering about the little owl photo on this post.

It was brought round by my friend and neighbour this afternoon.

At first I thought that it was a little bag or purse with a key ring on it. However, when I opened it up there was a strong nylon bag inside. That is ideal for unexpected shopping journeys. You know how easy it is to pop in for a small item and then go on to buy six. Then you notice you haven't sufficient room in your bag.

I am always doing that. Now I can clip this little owl onto my bag and never have to come home with a plastic bag again.

So I am well pleased. I do seem to have some lovely friends, don't I?

I hear some funny things while waiting in the hospital for my treatment to start.

Today I found myself sitting in a corridor with another lady while they prepared the two rooms for our radiotherapy.

The lady started telling me she'd just started having the treatment after a long session of chemo. I remarked that she was extremely lucky to have kept her hair.

She replied that it was a wig.

I was truly amazed because I can usually tell when some one is wearing a wig and this one even seemed to be mottled with grey. Very natural looking.

Anyway, she went on to inform me that while she had been having chemotherapy, another lady had asked her if it was her own hair or a wig and when she answered that it was a wig, the older lady asked if she could borrow it for the weekend while she went to a wedding because it looked so natural.

What a cheek. It would be as bad as someone asking to borrow a set of teeth or a false limb. Just a bit too personal.

We both had a chuckle about that.

It was my oldest granddaughter's 9th Birthday this week. I can hardly believe that she only came to this country five years ago after living in Japan from birth. She has done extremely well with all her English subjects.

However, she is feeling a bit sorry for herself at the moment as she is being taken by her mother to another city every Saturday to a Japanese school for the whole day.

It is the only way that both children can even attempt to keep up with their appropriate school year with reading and writing in Japanese.

The positive thing will be that both children will be fluent in both languages when they become adults and most likely will end up with good jobs because of this.

The downside is that they are doing a six day school week when everyone else is only doing five and they will miss parties with their friends and outings with their dad.

I can remember when I was only twelve and my teeth were overcrowded and my dentist wanted to make more room for them by extracting four good teeth. My mother left me with the choice and I obviously chose not to have the surgery.

I later told my mother that I wished she had made me have it done as my teeth grew crooked.

This seems to be a similar case with the girls and their Saturday school.

They might be glad of the extra tuition on a Saturday if they end up with good jobs as bilingual English/Japanese speakers.

What do others think about this?

Is it good or bad to cram children's schooling with an extra day?

The Grandchildren and Teeth

Photo Copyright Maggie May

It appears that the grandchildren have come to stay early. They arrived on Friday evening with bags full of their belongings. However their daddy will be here until Monday morning and then they will be alone with Harry and me.

Amber the oldest granddaughter has no teeth in the front of her mouth at all because being seven, that is what happens to the baby teeth. They all seemed to go one after the other and the tooth fairy was very busy for a few weeks. She will look very different when the new ones come through. I always think that baby look disappears when that happens, as they look more grown up.

I was worried about my teeth at the beginning of the week because I hadn't been able to have cleaning or dental inspections while having chemo and for some reason or other, I was convinced that chemo had wrecked them.

My appointment was for Friday afternoon but early in the morning I had a telephone call to say my dentist had to cancel as he wasn't in that day. I wasn't very happy about that.I felt that I'd waited long enough, though it wasn't the dentist's fault.

Anyway, I went along to the hygienist appointment and had them all cleaned professionally.

Although she isn't a dentist, she did assure me that my mouth wasn't full of cavities (as I'd imagined) and she said my mouth, teeth and gums were in good condition. So all the mouth wash I used was obviously a good deterrent against decay during chemo.

I have another appointment in two weeks to see the dentist anyway.

In my last post I mentioned the poem below that was going around in the seventies and eighties and we all thought it was very funny. I hope you have time to read it.

OH, I WISH I'D LOOKED AFTER MY TEETH
by
Pam Ayres

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth,

And spotted the perils beneath,

All the toffees I chewed,

And the sweet sticky food,

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

I wish I'd been that much more willin'

When I had more tooth there than fillin'

To pass up gobstoppers,

From respect to me choppers

And to buy something else with me shillin'.

When I think of the lollies I licked,

And the liquorice allsorts I picked,

Sherbet dabs, big and little,

All that hard peanut brittle,

My conscience gets horribly pricked.

My Mother, she told me no end,

"If you got a tooth, you got a friend"

I was young then, and careless,

My toothbrush was hairless,

I never had much time to spend.

Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right,

I flashed it about late at night,

But up-and-down brushin'

And pokin' and fussin'

Didn't seem worth the time... I could bite!

If I'd known I was paving the way,

To cavities, caps and decay,

The murder of fiIlin's

Injections and drillin's

I'd have thrown all me sherbet away.

So I lay in the old dentist's chair,

And I gaze up his nose in despair,

And his drill it do whine,

In these molars of mine,

"Two amalgum," he'll say, "for in there."

How I laughed at my Mother's false teeth,

As they foamed in the waters beneath,

But now comes the reckonin'

It's me they are beckonin'

Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth.

Freedom At A Price

Once again it is time to write Portrait of Words, which is a monthly challenge to write a fictional story about a given theme. You could go to Jeff B's Blog and look at the photos. I do not use the photos in my stories.

The March story had to be about a trendy boy in his twenties, feature a coach with a Japanese background, a piano, a dentist and a rusty bag of screws. Brilliant!

Only in his early twenties, Tom Berry knew that he was really lucky to have found a sponsor to send him to Tokyo for two weeks. This seemed to be beyond his wildest dreams. He was excelling in his piano playing and he was a good singer too. He had played in several English cities and had proved to be popular. This was to be his first tour overseas. A different culture. A different race, on the other side of the World.

Tom flew from Heathrow to Narita and was met by Miho Tanaka, who was the representative of the firm who had sponsored him.

She gave a short bow, produced a business card and ushered Tom towards a luxury coach that was to take him the two and a half hour journey into Tokyo.

Miho was a typically slim, petite Japanese woman in her thirties. After the first courteous greeting and then the small talk, they relaxed into the plush seats and into an easy silence.

Tom had been travelling for a long time as his plane journey had been twelve hours long, but he had spent hours travelling to Heathrow before he even started the flight. It had been mid day when he boarded the plane in England and now it was first light in Japan. The excitement had kept him awake on the plane, so now he was feeling jet lagged.

In between dozing, Tom stole glances at Miho when he thought she wasn't looking, but he knew she had been looking at him and had pretended to be shy and diverted her eyes when she realized he had noticed.

Not long into his tour, Tom developed a gnawing toothache that threatened the whole trip. He had appeared on stage in Tokyo for three nights when it first started to bother him. Miho had soon found a dentist for him and he was surprised at the difference between Japanese and English dentistry. This dentist took out the old filling and made an impression of the hole that was to be filled. The filling would be tailor made and fitted at the end of several visits. He left his first visit with a temporary filling and his pain had gone. On his last appointment at the dentist, Tom was very impressed with his new white filling that was cemented in to the cavity. He was really grateful to Miho for finding him such a good dentist.

Most of the audience at the theatre where he was playing, seemed to be made up of what looked like schoolgirls in white socks and short skirts and they tried to mob him afterwards. He was proving to be quite popular.

Tom was seeing Miho regularly and she seemed very eager to meet him in sushi bars and to accompany him for a drink after his gigs.

Although she was a good deal older than he was, Tom found Miho really attractive, especially after all those school girl fans. They had slept together several times but Tom realized that this relationship wasn't going anywhere and he had tried to cool it.

Miho wouldn't take no for an answer. She turned up everywhere that Tom went, whether it was at the theatre or in a bar - whether alone or with people from his sponsor group, Miho was always there. She shadowed him wherever he went, so he began to ignore her.

Her eyes were dark and steely. He had no idea what was going on behind them. They could be soulful one minute and look cold and distant the next. All Tom knew was that he had to get away from her. He felt he was being stalked. He needed his freedom. He was young.

She had told him she was going to come to England to be with him. She was going where he was going and for the first time in his life Tom felt suffocated and disturbed.

The night before he was due to go home, Tom spent the evening in an English bar that he'd frequented over the last few days and lots of British people as well as other foreigners spent time there. All foreigners were known as Gaijin to the Japanese. The exact meaning of the word is outside people.

Laughing and drinking with some people who had befriended him, Tom looked up.......... to find himself looking straight into those deep pools that happened to be Miho's eyes.

He walked over to her.

"You know its my last night,"He stated. "Tomorrow I fly back to England."

Miho showed him her ticket. She was flying too. She was looking for a sponsor so that she could stay there a long time.

He took her arm and they walked out into the night. Tom kissed her in a stairway and Miho leant against a door, while Tom pressed his body against hers. The door started to open and they stopped and looked at the steps that went down into a kind of cellar.

"Let's go and find a place to be alone," Tom suggested as they made their way down the steps and Miho eagerly went down into the cellar, following him.

There was not much light down there and there was nobody about. A window at street level let in enough light for Tom to see the surroundings and it seemed to be a place where carpentry items were stored. He noticed saws and hammers and nails.

He drew Miho towards him and she surrendered to his kisses.

With a swift movement of his right arm, he picked up a bag of rusty screws and clutching the bag firmly in his hand, he smashed it into the back of Miho's head.

She gave a gasp and her legs crumpled slightly. Her eyes reflected horror and disbelief when she realized what was happening and she started to struggle. By then Tom had snatched a hammer which he smashed into her head with all his strength.

She crumpled down onto the floor like a rag doll.

Tom slowly walked out of this place into the Tokyo night. He felt free again.