Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll sees EVERYDAY MIRACLES IN THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. She writes:

Before we begin today, let me just say that EVERY SINGLE TEAM I developed the slightest rooting interest in during the playoffs – LOST! Hoping to monetize this skill, I am offering to root FOR the opponents of your pet team for a price. Say, $100? A girl has to use what meager skills she has. I am kind of a Reverse Nostradamus. More like a Nostra-dammit. So wire me your Benjamins before the next game.

Okay, friends. Let’s just stipulate that with creepy cretinous corruptocrat Joe Biden as placeholder for the third term of Barack Hussein Obama America is nearly on the ropes. But let us not court despair by losing sight of the “forest” for the “trees.” America is still the greatest country in the history of the world. And the everyday miracles still count.

And anyway, despair paralyzes and demoralizes and helps not at all. Despair is a pit of quicksand into which we dare not sink. Let me list just a tiny handful of recent everyday miracles in one little puny life. Gratitude behooves us.

Last Wednesday evening, on the 77th birthday of famous novelist Max Cossack, my gift was to treat two of our best friends – and him – to a nice dinner out at one of the few decent “sit-down” restaurants in the Dusty Little Village. Everyone was in a festive mood, especially after our favorite server’s special Lemon Drop Cherry Bomb Concoction made entirely of several kinds of liquor. (It’s definitely a girly-girl drink – or grrrlly-grrrll – and the studly manly men who are our life companions stuck to beer and whiskey.)

The next happy event was the arrival of the basket of warm, crusty French bread and accompanying tub of butter balls. Ah, bliss! For several seconds. Then, on the second little slice, barely visible under the quilt of butter, I bit into something strangely hard! Which, of course, turned out to be my own tooth. Being quite loopy already, I took that news in stride, put the tooth part into the pocket of my shirt, and partied on. There was no pain, just the relentless desire to stick my tongue into the yawning gap where the tooth used to be.

With something like that, you cannot reconfirm too many times…There’s a hole. Yup, there it is again. Could I be wrong? Nope. Still there. And so forth.

After a fine meal, we went back to our house and watched Spy with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Statham doing an incredible parody of himself. VERY funny movie. With lots of f-bombs if you are averse to such. We went to bed.

Next morning, I called my awesome dentist – a fetching young woman who learned dentistry in the Navy, mother of three, unafraid to work on Arizonans who are strapped up – and they found an emergency 12:30 opening to take a look at my tooth. Which, by this time, had been moved from my linty pocket to a tasteful wee plastic bag.

Dr. K said it was a dislodged crown, not another broken tooth, thank God. It had evidently been popped free by the crusty bread. They cleaned up the crown, glued the heck out of my tooth, and popped the crown back into place. My insurance didn’t cover it, but it was only $140. Hardly any more than a Pot Roast in Bidenomics World. And all handled perfectly a mere 18 hours after the incident. You don’t think THAT’S a miracle?

My poor Mama got an infected tooth when she was 10 or 12. Grandpa took it out with a pliers, but there was no such thing as an implant. And the family couldn’t afford RENT, so they surely could not have afforded dentistry, even if it had been available. She just had that space in a fairly prominent place for the rest of her life. And it made her reluctant to smile too broadly.

When we were wintering in Palm Springs about 15 years ago, a dear friend from Canada was hobbling about in extreme pain for all of January. He desperately needed a hip replacement, but his National Health Service had put him in a two-year queue. Once he was notified that his name was up, he had ONE WEEK to get his patootie back to Canada for the operation. If he did not report for surgery in one week, he went to the back of the queue again!

Strangely enough, the first year we moved to Arizona, another friend, a marvelous professional gardener who had gardened her way into several disabilities, also decided that she could no longer tolerate the pain in her hip. She had an exam and x-rays the next day and surgery the day after that. Within a week, she was walking again, almost pain-free. Only in America. (Or probably, Israel.) And needless to say, before the Wuhan Flu.

Teeth and joints are important, of course, but there are even smaller miracles that we barely notice. I happened to mention to the Paranoid Texan Next Door that I had been using blank computer address labels to label the contents of the dozens of plastic foodsavers in my freezer and fridge. And that I was unhappy with them because the labels stuck on in such a way that they left an unsightly residue of paper and glue after removal. Even after soaking and scrubbing.

He went on Amazon (which is his hobby) and within minutes found a special roll of labels JUST for food savers where the sticker comes off perfectly after the food is gone! Now, admittedly, that isn’t a miracle up there with next-day surgery and modern dentistry, but it meant a lot to me. And in this terrible, no-good, very bad capitalist nation, some marketer noticed there was a “need” for those labels, manufactured them and distributed them through Amazon. Who even knows how many people profited along the way?

Likewise with the clever Velcro pads that keep my scatter rugs from slipping out from under me and causing me to break something much worse than a tooth falling on the rock-hard Mexican tile. Likewise with the clever rubber gripper without which I would never be able to open a jar of pickles. Little miracles, all.

The collectivists – who, you will notice, never seem to live in the commie hellholes they admire so much in the abstract – claim that capitalism is wasteful and produces too many similar products. I think it was Bernie Sanders who claimed nobody needed more than two choices in deodorants. I doubt many of his adherents use deodorant, but, I happen to be allergic to several different kinds, so I am glad for the plethora of choices.

Without heavy-handed regulation and the government putting its giant paw on the scale, most “unnecessary” products will wither away if they are unbought – unlike the “State” which the commie geniuses said would wither away under “true” communism, but which never does without a mighty push.

In the lovely little movie Moscow on the Hudson, featuring the late, great Robin Williams in one of his best roles, his character escapes from a Russian circus visiting New York. In one of the best scenes he goes into an American supermarket and asks a cashier: “Where, please, is coffee?” He, of course, expects a small shelf with one selection available if it isn’t bought out. Instead, he sees an endless aisle filled with nothing but coffee choices. And he faints dead away.

We don’t see these miracles because we are so spoiled that we take them for granted. Much of advertising nowadays, I notice on the rare occasions I watch commercial television, has as a theme that we DESERVE things. A cancer patient DESERVES to try a new drug whose side effects include, no kidding, different cancers, TB, and death! A pair of obese ladies discussing their incontinence DESERVE to have a good-quality pad for “leaks.” Ai-yi-yi. A Cadillac driver DESERVES to have that car because he is always first to work and last to leave.

There is a distinction without a difference between “entitlement” and believing you “deserve” something for no particular reason. And that thinking leads nowhere good. Personally, I don’t think I deserve a single thing that I either haven’t paid for myself or that somebody fought and died to give to me.

Oh, by the way, commenter family, I mentioned to the PT that I couldn’t walk last Monday. We have been walking partners for 14 years and we both try for 10,000 steps a day. I told him that we were having company Tuesday and I still had no column written to send off Wednesday morning. He said, “Why do you bother to have a topic? Your commenters just talk about whatever they feel like anyway. Why not just say, Today’s column is called: Hey, It’s Friday again, so feel free to share whatever’s on your mind?” I told him there may be some truth in what he said, but I like it that way. He just shook his head and walked away. At least he got a few steps on his clicker.