Road Trip

The road trip is this near-mythical American concept, born of equal parts Manifest Destiny, Henry Ford and evocations in popular culture. To me, those two words conjure Kerouac’s On the Road, which I haven’t read. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which I have, and Paul Simon’s song America—the latter having been revitalized in my memory by the recent discovery of an improbable version by the British prog-rock band Yes that I found on an added-tracks CD of 1971’s Fragile.

In Simon’s bittersweet Vietnam-era travelogue there’s the line “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.” Well, so, too, does my own April 13-19 journey through the American South. While it was happening I took daily notes, with the intention of ending my self-imposed blog hiatus with an amazing, revelatory addition to the Great American Road Trip canon. In my mind, this idiosyncratic yet deeply insightful piece not only would elicit gasps of admiration from my tiny but loyal readership, but somehow would find its way to a wider audience, leading to a book deal or at least to an invitation to blog for pay on some hotshot website.

But when I came off the road, it seemed as if there were many demands on my time more compelling than sitting down at the PC in a protracted struggle to shape my experiences into something literarily memorable. There not only was that pesky paying job that again was taking up so much of my time, but there were newspapers and magazines to read, e-mails to write, texts to send and TV shows to watch. Indeed, even though the editing project that had been the putative cause of the hiatus was done, not even an automotive odyssey trip through seven states and across 2,400 miles in six days had changed the fact that blogging is work, and that my work ethic isn’t the best. Would I like to be known far and wide as a brilliant writer? You bet! Am I—have I ever been—willing to put in the time and effort to hone those skills and truly develop whatever talent I might have? Not so much.

Still, there are certain things I want to relate to you about what truly was a memorable trip—one that came about because Lynn’s and my friend Julie Smith wanted to show her English second cousin Danny Pickwell a bit of America on his first journey stateside.

Now, if I were to have written the rich and multifaceted travel opus I’d originally conceived, there’d have been a lot in there—in a much longer post than this one—about the many charms of the tireless Julie, who got stuck with the vast majority of the driving because I can’t (physically or legally) drive a stick shift, and because Danny didn’t feel entirely comfortable driving on the “wrong” side of the road. I would have tried to convey, too, why and how much I enjoyed the company of the affable Englishman, who runs a bed and breakfast back home and surely is the perfect host.

But, for the purposes of this lazy-assed abbreviation of my road trip story, suffice it to say that I can scarcely imagine two people with whom I’d rather have shared close quarters for multiple days while constantly snacking, singing badly to various musical genres, and popping in and out of truck stop megastores so jam-packed with junk foods, automotive supplies and electronic gadget as to make one simultaneously awed and appalled to live in a nation whose carbon footprint is so grievously outsized.

So, let me first related the itinerary, then bullet-point the highlights.

We set off from Julie’s house in Sterling, Virginia, and reached Nashville, Tennessee, that first day. We subsequently traveled through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi city of Hattiesburg (where Julie’s English mum incongruously lives), and New Orleans, then headed back via the Gulf Coast all the way to Pensacola, Florida, through Alabama to Athens, Georgia (home of Julie’s adult son Tanner), and back to Sterling.

Highlights:

Graceland. In the 19th century, cotton was king in the South, but by the latter half of the 20th century the King was Elvis Presley. So, we hardly could take an English tourist through the region without paying tribute to the King at his home in Memphis.

I’d never been to Graceland, but I thought I knew what to expect: Kitsch overload. Ostentation, tacky furnishings, an onslaught of gift shops bursting with tacky souvenirs. An ambiance that was in keeping with the man himself: a huge talent who wasted and prematurely lost his life in an excess of food, booze and pills.

What I saw and discovered, much to my surprise, delight and sorrow, was a moving memorial to a devoted family man and generous philanthropist whose descent into dissolution was tragic, but which didn’t negate all that was admirable in his musical and personal legacy.

I was surprised by the modesty and lack of grandiosity of everything from the house and grounds to the portrait of the man painted by the audio tour and the photo-rich memorabilia. Yes, I know that Graceland, as a money-making enterprise, is dedicated to burnishing Elvis’s image, but I learned a lot that added dimension to the flat and rather clownish image I’d had of a sultry superstar gone fat and stoned. Particularly moving were the joyful reminiscences of her dad by Lisa Marie, who’s always come off in public as a rather cold and unsympathetic figure.

There is what only can be described as a riot of gift shops, however. And my Graceland umbrella, purchased in response to that day’s downpour, lasted fully one day before it fell apart. And no, Elvis’s decorating style wasn’t the classiest, as evinced by the carpeted walls of the stairwell leading to the King’s faux-safari room.

Clarksburg, Mississippi. You know that Cream song “Crossroads”? It’s not a Cream song. It was written by Delta bluesman Robert Johnson in 1936. The crossroads to which he was referring are in Clarksburg. We stayed there overnight, at a great ramshackle cluster of lodgings called the Shack Up Inn. Julie found it for us on the Internet. The owners have moved and refurbished a collection of old sharecropper shacks. Mine was named Pinetop in honor of bluesman Pinetop Perkins.

While in Clarksburg, we heard live Delta blues at Red’s, a bona fide juke joint that is dumpy, tiny, smoky and wonderful. There, I happily burst my eardrums and washed down my two coleslaw sandwiches (there was nothing else vegetarian on the menu) with an 18-ounce Budweiser.

Clarksburg also is the home of the Delta Blues Museum, which we toured, and the Ground Zero blues bar, which is partly owned by Mississippi native son Morgan Freeman. We lunched at Ground Zero, where I feasted on a soul food vegetable plate that included one of the best pieces of cornbread I’ve ever eaten.

Also in Clarksburg, I added Mississippi to the list of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour. It was chilly and windy that particular morning, and I got no sense that passing motorists had any inkling of the history being made on their roadside. But I was psyched, and afterward I allowed myself a few mini-doughnuts from the Shack Up’s version of a continental breakfast spread, which was limited to a few pastries and coffee.

New Orleans. This wasn’t the stuff of Mardi Gras. It was a cold day; the parade of naked women Julie had assured us we’d see failed to materialize, to Danny’s and my bitter disappointment; and our streetcar ride was intermittent and confusing due to construction on the trolley line. But we got a great walking tour of the French Quarter that included a raised cemetery and the House of the Rising Sun, I snapped pictures of Danny stuffing his face with crawfish, and at Julie’s urging we went that night to a dueling-piano bar that was so cheesy that, with the aid of a few ridiculously alcoholic hurricanes, it was fantastic. Four female pianists alternated taking pop-song requests from the audience and reducing each to its two-minute essence. A sloppy cross-section of America enthusiastically if not tunefully harmonized.

Photographs. This was my first road big road trip with an iPhone, so I took a lot of pictures. This was a highlight for me because of the ability my phone afforded me to indiscriminately shoot, and the gratification of being able to instantly view every single poorly composed, badly lit and blurry image.

Actually, some shots turned out pretty well. Among my favorites were interior shots at Graceland and exterior shots of the rustic and rusty Shack Up Inn grounds; a fish skeleton on the beach in Long Beach, Mississippi; a line of urinals in rainbow colors behind  a casino in Biloxi where construction was being conducted; the juxtaposition within a Gulf Coast strip mall of The Wireless Center and End Time Ministries (enjoy broadband access while awaiting Armageddon!); close-ups of a pelican and a heron at a downtown Tallahassee park; and shots of Danny modeling cowboy hats at a huge discount store in North Carolina on our journey’s final day.

So, that was my road trip. It wasn’t bawdy like Kerouac’s, or topical like Steinbeck’s, or lyrical like Simon’s. It was personally memorable, though. And Danny has promised us Road Trip II: The English Leg when we can get over there. Maybe that will be the road trip that I’ll immortalize in brilliant prose. A Maryland Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or some such.

But I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work. Probably not.               

House of Kill Repute

We interrupt our Blog Hiatus to issue this important update to a June 2, 2012, Lassitude Come Home post titled “Grim-Reality TV.” In that account of my fascination with the all-murders-all-the-time cable television channel Investigation Discovery, I noted that I pass many known homicide sites during my runs through the outwardly safe neighborhoods of Bethesda and Washington, DC.

So, my update is this: As I wrote nearly two years ago, it’s been known for decades that Brad Bishop left the building on March 1, 1976. But this week, thanks to the FBI and the Washington Post. I finally learned the building’s exactly location. And this morning, I saw the building.

Or, rather, I saw it with fresh eyes. Not as just another ‘70s-style split-level set back from the road on leafy Lilly Stone Drive in Bethesda’s Carderock Springs subdivision, but as the house where a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service on that late-winter day 37 years ago left his Foggy Bottom office early, withdrew money from his bank, purchased a ball-peen hammer at a hardware store, drove home, and bludgeoned to death his wife, three young sons and widowed mother.

I’d become aware of the case several years ago, when the Post ran a story about the home’s grim history from the quirky angle of its subsequent longtime owner’s utterly unconflicted delight at having gotten such a great deal on the cleaned-up mass-murder scene. That piece—which maddeningly placed the homeowner’s right to privacy above my yen for a house number on the named street— led me to the Internet, where I found other articles and the inevitable Wikipedia page for William Bradford Bishop, which told the complete story (but again, sans house number!) of the multilingual government employee’s partially successful attempt to burn the bodies in a remote section of northeast North Carolina and entirely successful escape from custody—his blood-stained station wagon having been found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on March 18, 1976, and Brad Bishop himself having been found and brought to justice never.

The thinking back then, and now, was that a smart guy who spoke five languages fluently might easily be living under an assumed name and an acquired tongue somewhere in Europe. Indeed, there were a few alleged Bishop sightings in Sweden, Switzerland and Italy in the early years by people who knew the fugitive and were pretty damn sure it was he who they’d fleetingly seen. But even pleas for pre-smartphone crowdsourcing help on such real-crime TV shows as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries yielded no significant leads.

For years, I’d run down Lilly Stone Drive and wondered Which House It Was, my Google searches having gotten me exactly as far at identifying the Death House as international law enforcement had gotten at tracking down the Bethesda Bludgeoner. I’d hoped forlornly for a momentarily icy wind, or a ghostly cry, or a couple of dog-walkers just happening to point at a house and remark within my earshot, “Who’d ever think five people would be pounded senseless with a household tool there!” Somehow, none of those things ever happened. The neighborhood pines whispered, but never any words I could understand.

Then, though, a few afternoons ago the Post’s daily headlines e-mail popped up on my office PC, coaxing me to drop what I was doing and to add a “hit” to the website’s numbers. This particular attempt succeeded, as one of the headlines proclaimed that, in an effort to revive interest and prompt new leads in this coldest of cold cases, Brad Bishop, now 77 years old (if alive), had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

While this news of course was of great interest to me—beyond my grim fascination with the case, I of course would like to see the cocky narcissist (as I see him) pay for his crimes—the article itself told me nothing that I, voracious reader of all things Bishop, didn’t already know. Well, it did remind me that he is an “alleged” mass murderer—all devils leaving blood-soak trails in their wake being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But I’d long known all the other things. Like how Brad Bishop’s sons had been ages 14, 10 and 5, his wife was 37 and his widowed mother was 68. And how, in addition to speaking French, Spanish, Italian and Serbo-Croatian, Bishop was an “avid outdoorsman” who’d  presumably be at home in the Black Forest or the Pyrenees, not to mention the Smoky Mountains in which he might have lingered if not for all the unfortunate notoriety.

But then I saw it: a link from the FBI article to a much-earlier Post story. The piece, dated February 22, 1977, was headlined, “Brad Bishop Home Sold Year After Family of Five Slain There.” In the article, Carolyn Gneiser—wife of the homeowner whose quotes I would read decades later—noted, “We renegotiated the price a little bit” after learning from a neighbor the grisly details their realtor had been loath to share. (No kidding!) The sentence that riveted my attention, however, was this: “When the Robert H. Gneiser family moves into the contemporary split-level house at 8103 Lilly Stone Drive next month, their neighbors are hoping the event will remove the specter that has haunted the Carderock Springs development in West Bethesda for the last year.”

Finally, an address!

So, after my Saturday run in Washington this morning, I drove to Lilly Stone Drive, found the house, parked my car, and walked up the driveway to get close enough to take a few pictures. Yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel like a ghoulish intruder and an insufficiently respectful trespasser. I abashedly waited to take a photo of the front mailbox until the street had cleared of traffic. As I neared the house itself, I mulled my possible responses to the shouts of a furious and possibly gun-toting Bob Gneiser. I was braced for him to run out the front door screaming, “The damn FBI, putting this back in the news! Get the hell off my property!”

Only, one of the first things I saw, after noting the utter blandness of the dated home (you’re not missing anything from my technological inability to post a photo here), was the diplomatic license plates on the lone car in the upper part of the driveway. That, and the fact that today’s newspaper hadn’t been brought inside, suggested to me that Bob Gneiser, too, has left the building, and that the foreign renters who succeeded him might not even be home.

Emboldened by the likelihood that I wouldn’t be chased off the premises at gunpoint, I proceeded to walk right up to the house and took a few pictures. I even took one at the back of the house. No one said “boo.” (Although under the circumstances, that exact comment would’ve sent me running even more surely than would have Bob Gneiser’s imagined gun.) I completed my reconnaissance work, got back in the car and drove home, which took all of five minutes.

I of course had to immediately share my best shot of the house with a few friends who know well my preoccupation with lethal crimes, even though I consider myself a pacifist and the National Rifle Association to be a terrorist organization. In my texts, I repeated the same joke I’d used in the 2012 blog post, about how I’d resisted the temptation to ring the doorbell and ask the man or lady of the house to pose for me with a catsup-soaked hammer.

But why, really, is my knowing Exactly Where It Happened so important to me? Why do I so relish the fact that, on future runs on Lilly Stone Drive, I’ll know the history of that one particular house?

I speculated back in 2012 that violence somehow is part of our DNA as Americans, whether it manifests in sociopathic ways or just weirdly prurient ones. Anyway, it’s probably a harmless interest on my part. I hope so. I think so.

But I also know—and I’m not proud of this—that I’d have gotten a real kick out of that red-hammer shot, had Sven the Diplomat materialized and been up for the gag.

Hiatus

While it might seem to you that I’ve simply once again failed to post anything new for a month, I’m actually on a hiatus that I’m just now getting around to announcing. I’ve taken on a book-editing project for a friend that is commanding all the time that I might otherwise be spending writing blog posts. Or rather, that I might otherwise be spending thinking about writing blog posts, without actually doing so very often. As is my wont.

I want to make this clear so that no one thinks I’m dead or, more likely, that I’m being even lazier than usual. In fact, given the fact that I’ve been working on this editing gig (for real money, too), I’ve actually been less lazy that usual.

 

Anyway, before I disappear from this space for what easily could be another month or more, I’d like to survey a few things that have been going on.

One of those things is winter, a season that I genuinely like and will deeply miss when global warming renders it climatically meaningless, but that this year doesn’t know when to stop. (I see no contradiction there, by the way: As we say in the meteorology business, climate change Fucks Things Up.)

I’m off from work today, and this morning I spent at least 10 minutes layering myself in three pairs of thermals before driving into the District for a run. While necessary and effective, such laborious dressing is supremely annoying. I love the way Nat King Cole sang the word “eskEEmos” in his classic version of “The Christmas Song,” but I do not personally enjoy dressing up like an Eskimo. If I did, I would move to Nunavut. All that padding makes me feel like the Michelin Man when I’m running. Also, when I have to pee it takes a seeming eternity just to find and extract the source of the urge.

There’s been much to-do this winter, all across the country, about the polar vortex. Which allegedly is a longtime weather term that hadn’t ever really applied to conditions in the United States until this winter, but which I suspect was simply made up by the PR team that came up with the film The Matrix because it sounded fiendishly awesome. In the DC area, what the polar vortex has meant is that since December we’ve experienced far more teens and single-digit temperatures, wind chills of zero and below, and snowfalls of varying depths than we usually do. It’ll get seasonably warm or better for a few days, and people will walk around in shorts and T-shirts in the 45- or 50-degree weather just because they nominally can, although it’s premature and frankly kind of stupid. However briefly, hope prevails over reason. But then the mercury plummets once again, as a new wave of Canadian air proclaims, “Not so fast, hosers!”

Today is the last day of February. Spring is imminent and consistently warmer temperatures are inevitable. Baseball spring training games already have begun in Florida and Arizona. Soon enough, the dog will be panting and Lynn and I will be complaining about how hot it is, given this region’s tendency to go from spring moderation to summer heat in the span of a week or two. But at this point I have to say enough already. I don’t look good in knit hats. Also, in the car,  my CDs skip unless I give them an intense massage. I look forward to the days soon when I consistently can go hatless, when my car CD player doesn’t skip through a four-minute song in 30 seconds, and when I can urinate without first needing to dig around in my pants as if they were an excavation site.

So, what else is going on? The Oscars.

The Academy Awards are coming up Sunday night. Parenthetically, March 2 also will be my dad’s 86th birthday, but I’m guessing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not award him a public service statuette for a lifetime of infrequent movie-going, not to mention his utter distaste for the sex, violence and vulgarity that are Hollywood’s wheelhouse.

I’ve seen most of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, quite a few of the nominated acting performances, and, this year, even all the nominated short documentaries. This afternoon, I plan to take in the nominated short features, as well, which are playing on one bill at a DC theater. The only awards about which I have really strong preferences are Best Picture and Best Actor. I’d love to see 12 Years a Slave win because it’s the best rebuttal I’ve ever seen to those who romanticize the Old South, fly the Stars and Bars, and argue that those who fought for the Confederacy should be honored for defending Dixie's way of life from Yankee aggression. It’s a brilliantly conceived and acted film, and it's incredibly hard to watch. As it should be. My Best Actor nod, meanwhile, goes to Matthew McConaughey, for both his outstanding work in Dallas Buyers Club and for making a bona fide thespian of himself after years of dicking around in unchallenging pretty-boy roles.

I have to give a shout out to West End Cinemas in DC. It’s an aesthically dumpy complex of three theaters, with tiny screens and uncomfortable chairs. But West End’s  taste in film selection is outstanding, and I’ve spent many happy afternoon hours there over the past year. Most recently, that’s where I caught the Oscar-nominated short documentaries, which run the gamut from the reconciliation of a gay man and the ex-skinhead who nearly beat him to death, to a profile of a dying inmate in hospice care at a maximum-security prison. Another of the short documentaries showcases the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor, an improbably optimistic one-time concert pianist who still was feeling joy at the keyboard at age 109. She was in the news this week upon her death at 110.

Polar vortex, the Oscars … February also has been about the Winter Olympics, continuing horrors in Syria, and upheaval and instability in Ukraine (which now  joins seemingly two-thirds of the world in those categories).

All I can think to say about the recently concluded Olympics are these things: 1) Sochi was an asinine place to hold the games both climatically and in terms of lending Vladimir Putin unearned legitimacy. 2) I found it difficult to get excited about competitions in which undetectable nanoseconds separated winners from losers. 3) I really liked, however, a line I heard somewhere, with reference to the biathlon, that for the next four years now, anyone seen skiing and shooting a rifle at the same time again simply will be known as a crazy person.

I must confess that I also enjoyed the dredging up of the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan knee-bashing incident upon that Olympic circus’s 20th anniversary. Tonya Harding is such a tragic figure—her own worst enemy, whose sad upbringing seemingly preordained her current state of denial. She says she’s happy now as a wife, mother and landscaper. That seems unlikely, given that her double chins shake with ill-contained fury at the ways she insists she’s been wronged by the press. But for her sake, I kind of hope so. Nancy Kerrigan achieved Olympic glory and seems to bear her former rival no ill will, to her great credit. But you wonder whether Tonya Harding ever will subdue her demons.

Ukraine? The economy’s in freefall, and disunity between its nationalist east and Russia-loving west threaten to rip the nation asunder. Syria is a humanitarian apocalypse, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, unspeakable violence continues unabated under the world’s radar in countries from Congo to Sudan to North Korea to Mexico. In South America, Rio de Janeiro is preparing for an Olympics for which it seems economically ill-suited by bulldozing its slums and leaving homeless its poorest citizens.

Wow, I am all over the place, literally and figuratively, in this post! All I meant to do was announce a blogging hiatus. It seems that I should add thanks that my biggest personal complaint is a transitory cold snap.

When I next post, the weather is sure to be warmer, but the world’s problems are just as certain to unchanged. It’s enough to make you want to huddle under a comforter, whatever the outdoor temperature.

Dental Dilemma

Everyone over the age of 40 likely has uttered the sentence “I’m too old for this” many times. At 55, I feel that I’m far too old for any number of things. The problem, however, is that most of those things aren’t going away anytime soon.

Take working for a living. Please! as the late comic Henny Youngman used to say, except that he was saying it about his wife. (Quick aside: As young reporter, I once covered an event that featured Youngman as guest entertainer. Somewhere in our attic there’s a black-and-white photo of the two of us, taken by my newspaper’s photographer. Henny is poised to play his trademark violin, and I seem to remember he’d just made a joke at my expense that had cracked up the furniture-industry executives he’d been paid to amuse.)

Anyway, take working for a living. I’ve been doing it for 33 years now, and I have to say, enough’s enough. That’s a huge chunk of my waking hours spent doing things other than pretty much nothing, which is the way I’d vastly prefer to be spending that time. And holding down a job necessitates many other things for which I feel too old, such as donning business-casual clothes at a pre-dawn hour five days a week, enduring tailgaters on two-lane MacArthur Boulevard because they’re late for work at Sibley Hospital, dealing with coworkers who are even more socially awkward than I am, being forced to adapt to technological changes in the workplace, et cetera and so on.

But there’s one thing for which I’ve long felt too old that I easily could do something about, except that I am a coward. That something is coming clean with my dental team on flossing. Specifically, on the fact that I’ve never flossed my teeth and I have no intention ever of doing so.

When I was a kid, flossing wasn’t even a thing. I went to this awesome dentist in Summit, New Jersey, named Dr Hill who’d been my dad’s dentist forever—since long before he married my mom. Dr Hill was a highly successful and incredibly dapper African American man at a time—this was the 1960s—when kids like me who grew up on suburban cul-de-sacs didn’t see many black men, period, let alone urbane black men who played the horses and sometimes sported a checkered vest and jaunty cap.

Dr Hill never mentioned flossing. He asked me about school and kickball and my life in general, and he displayed that classic dentist’s ability to understand my responses even when my mouth was open and filled with logs of cotton. (Were those part of the cleaning or the drilling process? I can’t remember anymore. In those days when water was unfluoridated and Rice Krinkles were my go-to breakfast cereal, I always had multiple cavities.) I loved Dr Hill.

Our family dentist in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we moved when I was 14, may have mentioned flossing to me, but that was the 1970s, and I had one hand, and the nascent disability empowerment movement hadn’t yet turned its attention to the inalienable right of every American, regardless of hand number, to floss his or her teeth. I don’t know if a device yet existed at that time to facilitate one-handed flossing, but if it did, my dentist didn’t know about it. As I recall, his aged hygienist laboriously flossed my teeth, then looked pityingly at me, as if to say, “Plaque may overtake your mouth and your gums may succumb to disease most foul in the months before you next see me, but there’s not a thing anyone can do about that, you sad, crippled son of a bitch.”

I think it was when I was living in neighboring High Point in the 1980s, working for the newspaper there, that my dentist and/or hygienist began telling me of the existence of a contraption I could hold in my one hand that would allow me to floss my own teeth. I of course had no intention of doing so, because a) it struck me as tedious thing to spend one’s time doing and b) I saw absolutely no evidence that my mouth was going to hell. I mean, the water was fluoridated by then, I was eating better and brushing nightly (whether my teeth needed it or not), and my cavities now were few and far between. Sure, my gums bled during those in-office flossings, but so what? They bled at no other times. Because I never flossed!

My next longtime dentist was Dr Schatz, a wonderful man who already was approximately 112 years old when I became his patient after moving to DC more than 20 years ago. He’d been Lynn’s dentist, and possibly Woodrow Wilson’s as well. His cramped office smelled like 1940, he kept his World War II uniform hung on a doorknob near the desk where Mrs Schatz served as scheduler when she wasn’t serving as hygienist, and he bragged that the Smithsonian had expressed interest in someday buying his dental equipment. Needless to say, the Schatzes didn’t nag me at all about flossing. Oh, they thought it was a good idea, but they knew that Woodrow Wilson hadn’t died of dental disease and that failure to floss wasn’t the end of the world. (Nor, for that matter, had it been the reason the League of Nations hadn’t worked out.)

But then there was this, too. As sweet and kind as the Schatzes were, their views of people with physical challenges weren’t exactly enlightened. I’m not making this up: Mrs Schatz once told Lynn how sad she was for her that I’d never be able to hold her in a two-handed embrace. I believe the Schatzes admired Lynn all the more for her stoicism in the face of such stunted marital intimacy. At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that I’m pretty sure they assumed I was incapable of flossing my own teeth.

Time ultimately waits for no dentist, however, and several years ago Dr Schatz finally retired. (I don’t know if the Smithsonian’s Division of Dental Antiquities ever got a hold of his equipment.) Making the transition to modern dentistry after all those years in the Eisenhower era was a shock to the system in more ways than one. This new office had computer monitors and kept electronic dental records. My new dentist ministered to my teeth from a sitting position—Dr Schatz hadn’t even had a chair. The office atmosphere was antiseptically professional, with no QVC-purchased dancing Santa Clauses on display, no mounds of moldering paperwork piled on the front desk, no ancient volume of Who’s Who in Dentistry sitting in the lobby bookmarked to the practice owner’s page.

I missed those personal touches, and the pure camp of biannual time travel, but I quickly saw the wisdom of entrusting my teeth to a team whose mental and physical faculties weren’t fading, whose professional knowledge was up to date, and whose database made unnecessary my bringing in a filled-out insurance form every time. The thing that bothered me from the get-go, however, was the staff’s insistence on—and assumption of—flossing.

This new hygienist always commented on my bleeding gums and gently urged me to do a better job of flossing, being of a modern mindset that assumed not only that was capable of it, but that I surely must be doing it (if inadequately), because who doesn’t floss in an age when its benefits are so well known?

For the first couple of years, I simply nodded at the sagacity of the hygienist’s advice, content to tacitly lie each time. Eventually, however, this recurrent bit of theater started feeling stale to me. It dawned on me that, hey, “I’m in my 50s and, yes, I'm too old for this!” Why was I engaging in this constant charade? Why was I blandly accepting the container of floss that always accompanied the new toothbrush and mini-tube of toothpaste in my parting “goody bag”?

Why could I not look that earnest hygienist squarely in the eye and simply say, “No disrespect, but I do not floss, and I frankly never will. I know you’re just doing your job and looking out for my optimal dental health, but I feel I’ve aged out of this conversation. I should very much like never to have it again.”

Or, since that would be a lot to verbiage to remember, why couldn’t I at least say, “I hope you won’t take offense, but I don’t floss and don’t plan to. My gums have lasted this long. I’ll take my chances.”

Since making this mental declaration of independence, however, I’ve never been able to make it a verbal, audible one. My most recent checkup and teeth-cleaning was a few weeks ago. I’d been pretty sure this was going to be the time I’d finally make my Flossing Speech. In fact, I’d envisioned a blog post in which I proudly told the story about how I’d kicked flossing tyranny in the ass. (And although I shouldn’t say so, my current hygienist has a substantial one.)

But damn if I just couldn’t do it! Again, as if we’d never had the conversation, she commented on my bleeding gums and urged me to be more diligent about flossing. I so wanted to tell her there can be no diligence where there is no effort or interest in the first place. But those words would not escape my lips. Once again, as I’d done so many times before, I meekly confirmed the wisdom of her advice with a solemn nod that suggested I’d get right on it. I hated myself a little as I climbed into my car.

When I got to the office that morning (it had been an 8 am appointment), I decided I’d seek counsel on the Internet. Surely I’m not the only flossing holdout, I reasoned. I’d do a few minutes of searching and find out how others go about expressing their defiance to their dentist’s offices. (And also, whether there are any consequences. I mean, is it a firing offense? Do some dentists tell noncompliant patients to take their grubby mouths elsewhere? Would I need to shop for a new provider?)

To my great surprise, however, no search combination I entered yielded a single fellow flossing foe. Not “refuse to floss.” Not “won’t floss.” Not “proudly united against flossing.” Nothing! When I Googled the search term “no flossing,” all I found was WebMD’s well-meaning but thoroughly unhelpful guide, “Flossing Teeth: No More Excuses!” Among other things, it hails “floss-holders”—the very device that has been suggested for the one-handed among us.

Where, I wanted to know, was the document titled, “Flossing Teeth: No Excuse for Extending This Ridiculous Charade. Here’s How to Stop the Madness”?

So, I don’t know if refusal to floss is the very last societal protest that lacks an advocacy group, or if I’m the last non-flossing dental patient in these United States, or what. All I know is that I feel entirely too old to continue playing this game, yet I'm too damn much of a wuss to put an end to it.