Hips Don’t Lie
My Smile is “My Ride or Die”
Or, How I Kept My Hips, My Cool, and My Skull
Reykjavík Dispatch, January 2022
We were out of matches, so I bought some. My former husband and I had separated a few days earlier.
I was at a cafe in Reykjavik, at 9:00 in the morning, and it was pitch black outside in January. Inside, where usually there were candles, all the tables were dark. I went to my bag, where I was starting to rebuild a home outside the family home, and I found the new box of matches. I chose to strike and illuminate the one at my table.
It’s late January. Christmas is gone. The Epiphany, gone. Summer is still far. We can easily lose our spark. When the barista came past me, she used my light to ignite the other candles, and thanked me, because she said they ran out of matches, lighter fluid, and lighters. I was happy. I offered some light with my tools.
The Parable of the Candle
If I walked around with a candle or a matchbox to remind me to live fully each day, I would be carrying what philosophers called a “Memento Mori” or what the Oxford Dictionary says is “an object kept as a reminder of the inevitability of death, such as a skull.”
The Stoics kept a Memento Mori (object) to invigorate life, to create priority and meaning. They treated each day as a gift, and reminded themselves to not waste any time in the day on the trivial. Less a fun game of pleasure, more a challenge to the living, up to each participant among the living to take their lives into interesting dimensions.
My Crown
I choose to leave the matches at home. I choose life, without carrying around an object of death. I had a tumor and cyst grow in my mouth, and then it returned after a few years. I needed support, and I knew I had the tools to ask for it, and ask again, to light the way for my smile.
To Get a Dental Crown Worthy of Royalty, I needed two dental specialists, their teams, and one highly skilled surgeon, a CT scan report, plus a pathology lab at the University of California, San Francisco, my birth city.
“DESIGNED IN CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA”
Steve Jobs, famous for his designs built in Cupertino, California, for Apple:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
-Designer Steve Jobs at Stanford University Commencement, June 12, 2005
THANK YOU:
My deep gratitude to my dentist and surgeon and the lab technician. Oli the dental artist survived the Khmer Rouge massacres of the 1970s and lived in a refugee camp for 12 years in Thailand. My dentist Nazila fled Iran. Her dentist created such joy for her as a young girl who was forced to wear a headscarf in the 1979 revolution, that as a young child, she decided to become a dentist, precisely to be able to be free and listen to music on her own terms, as her dentist allowed for her (music and dancing, also forbidden by the Ayatollah). My surgeon was born in the USA. We all come from somewhere and when we do our jobs well, we get a healthy mouth to smile and greet and eat in good health.
A dental surgeon in Iceland told me that he would replace my teeth with bone from my hips, or my skull. I chose to use my passport and get off the island to have Oli and Scott and Nazila do some magic instead. I like my brains, and my hips help me get through life with joy and fluidity. I first complained of pain in my jawbone in January 2021 to a different dentist in Iceland. He did not believe me, nor did he scan my mouth to see. I am grateful to the labs of California that fit me in on the same day, and beyond grateful to my friends and family who hosted me during my recovery.
Thankfully, in 2022, with a suggestion from my local physician after I asked for their recommendation, I found a clinic I trust in Iceland. Together, we can move mountains. Together, we can find light in the dark. But first, each of us must do our part, carry our matches, and have room in our heart for curiosity and trust. Here’s to all the candles!
