GARDINERVILLE

Bleeding Madras

One day, when I was in Jr High, Jimmy Ruff wore an oversized bleeding Madres shirt with khaki pants to school. The colors were eye popping. Bleeding meant they would fade but I loved the contrast between the rainbow colors of the shirt, his blonde hair and off white pants. So from that day forward I wore plaid shirts.

In college I wore plaid, Khaki Dockers and brown shoes. When I started teaching I did the same. Other male teachers often wore plaid as well. They too must have discovered how good it looked. One time a teacher friend of mine named Doug Russell was retiring. So to honor him the whole school had “Plaid Day.” Everyone wore plaid in his honor.

When I heard I was going to be a PE coach Deborah said, “Honey, you need to get some sporty clothing so you look the part. Lose the plaid.”

“I’ll be fine I replied, thinking that what I have always done will do. Now that I’m a coach and playing with the kids, I’ve changed my mind. So today I went to the Goodwill looking for “Sporty Clothing.” 6 bucks a shot. No way.

From there I headed to Penny’s where they were having a Door Busters sale. They were getting rid of their summer stock. I found bright sporty collared shirts for $3.78 each and splurged on two others at $9. 50 each. With a coupon for 15 percent off I got all 5 shirts for 29 bucks. Look out kids, here comes Coach G.

September 2010

“I’m wearing my tooth!” I said gleefully, as we walked toward Sprouts Grocery Store.

“Always wear your tooth when you are out with me,” replied Deborah.

“Ok, it’s a rule then: I’ll always wear my tooth when we are out in public together.”

In August, two days before the end of Summer School I was eating and noticed something hard in my mouth. My heart sank when I found it was my tooth and my eyes widened when I realized I had a gaping hole in my teeth.

The next day at Summer School I explained to my class that I had had probably been hit in the mouth with a basketball years before and my tooth had decayed from the inside out and after babying it for 15 years, last night it fell out. I assured them I was not in pain and I was having it fixed. They seemed to buy that. Nothing more was said. The next day was the rocket-shoot with tons of parents and I kept my mouth shut most of the time so the parents wouldn’t notice.

During the next two weeks I got a fake tooth in what might be characterized an “Invisalign” type set up.

Then one quiet morning I went in to Dr. Amalang’s office and a specialist gave me some red serum to “relax me.” While awake he extracted the root of the tooth and replaced it with a titanium post. The center of the post is open so later it can accept a post with my new tooth attached. They call this an implant. It seemed like the specialist took about 45 minutes of digging around in my mouth to get the root out. Apparently it was fused to the bone and he didn’t want to remove the bone with the tooth. I was happy to have him take all the time he wanted to because I wanted this done right. It was hard work from my point of view and he was sweating when he was done. The next week Chad and I headed for Tennessee.

On the trip Chad didn’t care weather I wore my tooth or not, so when we were together I didn’t. After we got to Tennessee and looked around a bit, talked to family members and saw people in stores and on the street Chad observed, “Without your tooth, I think you fit right in here, Dad.”

The specialists has the biggest smile, worked the hardest and made $2,000.