Of the four wisdom teeth God so graciously installed in me, I have one remaining. I sit here at the keyboard in a bit of pain as tooth #32 on the bottom right side, according to my dentist, is now gone.
Nothing left but a stitched-up crater in my gum and some pain. The pain meds are kind of working?
The pain could be worse? Who knows and I don’t want to know so thank you to whoever invented pain meds.
The other two came out at different times in different states and with different dentists. But my question is, now that I’ve lost three of the four, am I getting dumber? My wife might agree much too quickly with that. We just crossed over being married for 29 years this past Monday. Where did that time go? Kind of like that first wisdom tooth, I don’t have a clue.
That’s when movie quotes come to mind. Like Ferris Bueller’s famous line, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” I reckon that’s so. Some of the things I missed – some due to being young and stupid – make me wish I had a time machine.
Mike Sibley’s 64-point game against IA back in the 1970s. I’m sure I was there but had no idea how huge that was. I know I was at Delta State, thanks to my sister, back in the mid ‘70s to watch Lusia Harris and her National Championship teams but I don’t remember any of it. There were all those B.B. King birthday celebrations that I didn’t take part in.
But the words of Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption of “better get busy living or get busy dying” have spurred me to remember I did drive from Oxford to Cleveland and back in one night to watch Renaissance perform. There wasn’t a better show around. I did drive back and forth from Oxford to Indianola to rehearse and perform in Music Man in the summer of 1984 and don’t regret a moment of being on the road to share the stage with Mike Anderson and the rest of the Sunflower County talent. I’ve driven from Oxford to Austin, Texas, to watch women’s basketball and put many miles on my Chevette back in the day to visit family and friends.
My tooth, or where my tooth was, still hurts so I’ll try to figure out more ways to get busy living tomorrow. Oh, and I did ask Michael Martin Murphy for his black Stetson cowboy hat once. I reckon that counts as living. By the way, he said no. For some reason, Tim McGraw’s in my head now… “I went skydiving…”
