He says he’d like to keep his teeth. It’s no surprise. They’ll be a curiosity to photograph and display to friends on Facebook. Then they’ll probably end up on a shelf, little remarked upon, collecting dust.
Right now, minus two wisdom teeth, my son is propped up by a couple of pillows on the couch. He holds a pink plastic dish to his face and drools a gooey pink mix of saliva and blood into it.
“How do you feel?” I say.
He gives me a nod, his chipmunk cheeks distended by gauze pads putting pressure on the vacancies.
“In a few hours,” I tell him, “you can have a pain med.” Then an hour later, the nurse said, a couple of Tylenol. Or was it Motrin? I can’t remember. “Don’t spit,” I remind him.
On the way to the oral surgeon that morning, we discussed different kinds of patients, those who disappear into a dark room and want to be left alone (his sister and I), and those who prefer to suffer demonstratively on the couch and want to be taken care of (he and his mother). He gave me a list of foods and beverages to add to the list of foods and beverages suggested by the nurse. I leave him now, pillowed, his face blackening and bluing, to go get soft provisions, liquids, and narcotics.
I’m just pulling into the pharmacy parking lot when I hear an announcement on the radio: Encyclopaedia Britannica is calling it quits.
A set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica weighs 129 pounds and costs $1,395. In its heyday, Britannica sold 120,000 sets a year. The shortest entry was logged in 1771: “Woman: The female of man.”
We had a set when I was a kid, in a custom-built bookcase, on a shelf above the World Book Encyclopedia. World Book, the spatial arrangement seemed to suggest, was kids’ stuff. It was the gateway reference book. You had to work your way up to the Britannica.
They might as well have been on the roof. I wasn’t going to use them. For one thing, they were so heavy, and the volumes had sharp corners that stabbed your belly and legs. For another, the print was small, the pages were thin, and the language was dense and impenetrable and British. Once or twice I consulted them. I decided I was going to read up on philosophy, but I let that go. Too many pages, too many unpronounceable Greek names, not enough pictures. I read up on the Amazon after I saw Tarzan and the Amazons on Saturday morning television and became interested in piranha fish. (What was Tarzan doing on the Amazon? I wondered. And how can there be more than one Amazon? Questions I did not answer by not reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica.) In the interest of self-improvement, I consulted the pages on human reproduction, which Encyclopaedia Britannica made about as thrilling as philosophy. Not as many pages (good), unpronounceable Latin names, not enough pictures (bad).
For a parent, it must have been comforting to own the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was like having a piano in the house. There was at least the theoretical possibility of your children improving themselves. An old, out-of-date set of encyclopedias, like a crappy, old piano, could have that effect. Why don’t you give a few piano lessons with Mrs. Bell a try? Why don’t you read up on electronics?
Out-of-date was no problem, except when the supplements came. Those slender oddball additions Britannica felt obligated to mail out when new knowledge was discovered—who wanted those? They were ugly. They lacked heft. Here we had all the knowledge we would ever need, all red and leather-bound, all gold lettered and alphabetical, and then Britannica sent us those updates.
Encyclopedias prepared you for the real work you would do when you got to school. They were like a life preserver, keeping you afloat before you got to the lifeboat, which I guess was the school library.
Right. When I went to the library, I headed straight for the encyclopedias. Our World Book at home had white covers; the ones at school had red. But they smelled the same, and unlike the Britannica, whose print was cramped with accuracy and erudition, you could copy from World Book without eyestrain.
I don’t remember a teacher ever asking me—or anyone, for that matter—did you really write this? Water pollution, here you go. Gettysburg, got that subject covered. Edgar Allen Poe, yeah, I’ve been reading up on him a lot lately. If I had gone to the library and traced some Monet water lilies for art class and turned them in to Mr. Perry, he would have vivisected me on the spot (he also taught biology). “Do your own work,” he would have said. But you could turn in pages and pages of plagiarized writing, and none of those teachers seemed to care.
Looking back, I wish just once I’d copied from the Britannica. Maybe that would have rung their bell, violating a code of honor originally written in blood that had dried and become the color of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s cover. “Wait a minute,” they might have said. “This reeks of Britannica.”
When I get home from the pharmacy, my son is leaned over sideways, drooling more of that gooey pink mix of saliva and blood into the pink dish.
I hold up the white pharmacist sack, rattling pills inside. “How do you feel?”
He shakes his head. Not good. “Did you get me that coconut water?” he asks.
I did.
Frankly, I don’t get this coconut water thing. It’s a new elixir I know nothing about. (Though I imagine Tarzan must have given Boy coconut water when he had his wisdom teeth out.) I pour a glass of it, roll an opiate from the pill bottle into my hand, and then stop. First food, the nurse said. Then pain medication. I give him a choice of pudding, pudding, or pudding. He decides on the pudding.
It could be teachers were simply in awe of kids who would sit in the library, or at the kitchen table at home, copying long passages from the encyclopedia on whales or the Battle of the Bulge. It was, after all, work. Hard work. Almost as hard as reading and thinking. And maybe they believed there was actual benefit in wholesale theft of the original language. In classical times, students practiced the art of declamation, memorizing and reciting classical speeches. In so doing, they learned about the techniques and skills of famous orators. So when Mrs. Mann or Mrs. Ault or Mrs. Kaufmann looked at writing that was a stylistic reach for me or Randy Glazier or Raymond Robishaw, maybe they thought, There they go, declaiming again.
Today no such work is required. Hold down the left mouse button, drag the mouse over the words you want. Copy. Paste. No fear of hand cramp. No threat of carpal tunnel syndrome. Look, ma, I’m writing. It’s just that easy.
The pain med, it turns out, doesn’t do much. My son sinks lower on the couch. Every so often he drools a gooey pink mix of saliva and blood into the pink dish. He loses his sense of humor. He stops talking. I remember that he should take Tylenol—or was it Motrin?—an hour after the narcotic. While he suffers, I do what any parent today would do. I Google the name of the pain med, linked first to Tylenol, then Motrin.
This is progress. It would never have occurred to my mother to consult World Book on a question like this. And I’m pretty sure she felt the same way I did about Britannica. But then, in the pre-information age, she would have listened to the nurse and remembered which medication turbocharged the opiate.
On one site I learn that if I give him Tylenol, he will overdose. On another I learn that if I give him Motrin, he might die.
“It hurts,” he says.
“Want some more pudding?”
“Mmmf.” He turns up the TV and says, barely audible, “Good part.” He’s watching Nicholas Cage watching an iguana.
The phone rings. It’s the oral surgeon’s office. How’s the patient doing?
Motrin does the job. He sinks still deeper into the couch, expectorates a few gouts of blood into the pink dish, and sips coconut water.
Why wisdom teeth? I wonder, lining up puddings in the fridge.
It’s really two questions. Why do we get teeth we don’t want or need? And what’s wisdom got to do with it? I doubt I would pull down an encyclopedia to answer these questions. But while the patient sleeps, I open my laptop and educate myself.