wobbly teeth * celebrity dreams

Tonight we were riding home from the grocery store when suddenly a LONG profound silence from Jaelyn pooled in the back seat. I turned around and turned on the overhead light.

Have I told you before that my daughter who has the biggest, most beautiful brown eyes in the universe also has an uncanny ability to spill buckets of tears from those eyes at will?

I’m not talking about crying. I’m talking about a unique ability to sit silently, wide eyed and cry tears so violently that her face is soaking within a minute?

The moisture is building in her eyes.

ME: What is it Jaelyn?

Niagra Falls.

JAELYN: I almost broke my tooth.

ME: You what?

Have I told you before that my daughter has the most astonishing oral fixation yet documented (in my somewhat limited experience with such things) in a four-year-old? That she not only chews her fingernails and hangnails and dolls feet and hands and teddy bear paws, but also the sleeves of all of her shirts. And what’s more – tonight, she decided to chew – to pull violently – to … I don’t know what she was doing…snapping her elastic black pants with her teeth?

And sure enough, one of her front lower teeth is loose.

It was such an interesting moment, because the flood of her tears came to feel like Eden lost...they were genuinely pentitent, but neither she nor I could do nothing to reverse the angels at the gates with the flaming swords.

Everythingteeth.com (or something like that) assured us that four year olds are the right age to lose their teeth (even if mother nature gets a bit of help).

I cuddled her on the couch as she sobbed after I explained that the tooth would probably fall out, and though she would have a hole in her smile, a new tooth would eventually grow. Its amazing and horrible to feel the weight of a four year old dealing with the profound understanding that a choice she has made is undoable.

Is it true that in general, as a child, you get used to the idea that the world is not so much fixed as it is routine? That all that happens may well be purged and cleansed by the next time around? New Years doesn’t matter because years aren’t picking up speed and there's no great loss if you miss an opportunity this time, because it doesn't affect all the future opportunities you'll ever have....?

Freudian psychologists say that if you dream that your teeth are falling out – you’re fearing your own mortality. I don’t dream my teeth falling out, but I have been dreaming ALL THE TIME of being on trips – to far away places – amalgams of places I’ve lived and places I’d like to go. In every case, I run into old friends, and together we spend time with more recent friends. And I know that something is about to happen in these dreams.

Oddly enough (this is very strange for me), I’ve had celebrity dreams twice in the last week. Last night I was hanging with a bunch of friends (Burt, Brenda, Brendon, Natalie & Lynn) in a library that overlooked the Santa Monica Beach. And what’ya know….guess who was there? Jennifer Anniston! She engaged me in some banter about the note I had sent Brad. She’s been so funny about pretending that I’m really the snooty one to get to know – and people accuse HER of it! Imagine!

Two nights before that an old family friend that Lynn and I share – who just happened to be a dignitary in Iran before the Shah fell, asked Lynn and I to take Sheryl Crow to lunch at the local casino. He wanted to get our opinion of her before he asked her to sing at a fundraising lunch he was having. She was also very funny, really joking around and everything with us.

I’m not the guy who’s a star-f*$#er. I really have very few parasocial relationships with media figures, and I’m only interested in the phenomenon of celebrity in a very distant objective way.

So what do these dreams mean?

Will Jaelyn’s tooth fall out?

Stay tuned in 2004

for answers to these questions…

…and more.

peace~