TOP Readers in Penn Yan

Scott Kirkpatrick showed up driving this very strange-looking rental car.

I've had several very nice visits from TOP readers this Summer. Yesterday, longtime email correspondent Scott Kirkpatrick flew a rented Piper Arrow all the way from Boston to have lunch with me...

...And I stood him up!

Wait, don't judge. It was unavoidable, unfortunately. I woke up with a toothache yesterday, and not till I tried to eat did I realize it was serious. Sitting in the dentist's chair when I should have been sitting having lunch with Scott, I heard some words you don't want to hear from your dentist—"we can't fix that, and there's nothing we can do for the pain." Turns out I've cracked the root of a molar, of all things. And the offender is a tooth that has already absorbed thousands of dollars of my meagre resources. This might impact the blog a bit in months to come—apparently I need a couple of rounds of oral surgery. And it's going to be frightfully expensive. Frowny face. (Number Three is the tooth that keeps on taking.)

But Scott and I got to drive to Canandaigua together—it's a long drive through fine rural countryside—and he visited TOP HQ for a brief hour to chat further, see the red chair, and check cloud altitudes for the flight back to Boston. Less immediately, Scott comes from even farther away—he's a Professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He put up a few pictures taken during his visit here.

Recent breakfast visitors have included Kevin Willoughby and Rob Spring. (If you stay a night or three at La Belle Vie in Penn Yan with my friends Laurel and Llewellyn, they'll give you a discount if you mention TOP and they'll invite me for a breakfast, and those are always a treat, both for the food and for the company. Please make reservations directly though their website.) That's Rob, who came with his wife Helen, in the inset picture.

Kevin says he has been a "Mike reader" for a very long time, but inexplicably I did not snap his visage! My apologies to Kevin and his S.O. Julie McCoy for that lapse. For many decades I have cherished the aspiration to be more thorough and organized one day, and that plan for the bright if hazy future should incorporate an ambition to be more thoroughgoing about reporting and recording visitors.

Which reminds me, I forgot to have Scott sign the Guest Book when he was here at the house! Rats. Tooth pain must be affecting my brain. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

It's really nice to have faces, voices and personalities to attach to familiar names. Thanks to Kevin and Julie, Rob and Helen, and Scott for coming by.

Mike

[Ed. Note: A few readers have reported that the link to Scott's pictures doesn't work for them. However the link is properly configured and works for me, so I don't know what's amiss. Here's the URL if you want to try it that way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/133969392@N05/sets/72157687409573585/ ]

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ron Himebaugh: "Cracked root—the very worst pain I ever suffered, so my sympathies. Tooth pulled, implant, crown, around $5k or so as I recall, plus the endodontist, to find out it was cracked in the first place. Part of aging, my dentist said. I often marvel at our forbears who endured these sorts of miseries without benefit of drugs and technology. Stay strong...."

Kevin Willoughby: "Our 'breakfast with Mike' was one of several highlights of our Finger Lakes vacation. Given that Llewellyn is a fine photographer and I'm at a point in my life where I'm trying to decide on my next camera, I expected a lot of photo talk. Except for a little gossip about photographers, we talked about everything but. Mike gave us a bit of local history. Since both Mike and Julie are editors, we talked a lot about good books. Llewellyn and I chatted a bit about audio topics. A genuinely wonderful breakfast. Laurel's breakfasts are world class, delicious and beautiful. A first course: Cantaloupe with blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, ginger curd, and lavender scones. I'm an aviation buff, so after breakfast, Julie and I visited the Glenn Curtiss museum. We were met with a flock of motorcycles in the parking lot. I had forgotten that Curtiss invented the motorcycle. Synchronicity: while we were at the museum, Mike published a post about Harley-Davidsons! Our thanks to Mike, Laurel, and Llewellyn for making our vacation so much fun!"

Comments

[Christopher Crawford]

Nothing they can do for the pain? Sure there is. Pull the tooth. Pain will be gone instantly. I had the same problem a few yrs ago with one of my teeth. Dentist said I could spend a fortune on saving the tooth or $200 and have it extracted and he advised that was the better solution.

[Ed Hawco]

You must have a heck of a long driveway...

[cj gordon]

Could you not just have the tooth pulled? If the toothache is from an infection try a piece of garlic up against it. Worked for me and I bet my teeth are in worse shape than yours. I even pulled one of mine a few weeks ago. Instant relief.

[John Krumm]

Yes, frownie face. My wife just had a cracked molar extracted last week. And, like you, we now wait the advice of a surgeon. I really wish, in middle age, we could just go to something like a Mayo clinic of dental care, live on campus, get everything done, and then it's just cleanings for another decade or so. None of this running from local specialist to specialist over the months.

[Ken Tanaka]

Ouch. I have felt you pain...several times, in fact. Some years back I had a tooth that also had undergone extensive preservative rennovation only to eventually develop what was determined to be a hairline fracture in the root. It had to be surmised as it could not be seen on xrays probably because it was at right-angles to the beam. Every couple of years it would become painfully infected and require medication until finally one year it was excruciating and threatened to invade my sinuses. Out it had to come. The final pain of seeing thousands of dollars yanked out of my face was even more excruciating.

I wish you luck with your unruly molar. It always seemed like summer is a particularly crummy season for dental pain...if any season could be worsee than another.

[Chris]

Sorry to hear about the dental pain, Mike; it can REALLY get the attention, can't it! BTW I tried to follow that link to Scott's pictures, and got a 404 on flickr...

[Richard Nugent]

The tooth issue strikes home with we old folks. I am reminded of a line in the 80s(?) movie "Peggy Sue Got Married" when the Kathleen Turner character gets transported from her adult world back to her childhood. She asks her father for some words of wisdom on what he would do differently in his life, expecting some pithy odservation. He thinks a bit and responds, "I'd take better care of my teeth". Wise words indeed!

Good luck with the oral surgery.....

[Lynn]

My sympathy Mike, tooth pain is the worst! I've had a number of split molars, which my dentist put down to grinding in my sleep due to stress. He also concluded my teeth had a tendency to develop vertical fissures. Capping at the first sign of a fissure can save the tooth.

A splint might help prevent further problems developing, saving you from losing more teeth and money. Talk with your dentist. Relaxation and meditation may also be useful.

When you consider each tooth can cost the equivalent of a dream lens or holiday, any preventive measures are a good investment.

[John Camp]

I probably put $10,000 into a single tooth over more than 40 years -- A neglected cavity (that I didn't even know about ) broke through to the root in 1968, and after a root canal, I continued to have problems, stubbornly trying to save it. Four years ago, I had it pulled and had a peg implanted. The bone grew around the peg, and about a year after the peg was implanted, I got a new tooth. Works fine, no pain, no problems. But, as you say, it wasn't cheap.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Mike, use this short link for the Flickr album:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/133969392@N05/oQ530k
it fits into the column width of the blog, while the expanded form (what you see in the URL line of a browser) does not. Maybe that is why some are getting 404 errors, from a truncated link.

[scott kirkpatrick]

On teeth -- I stopped paying attention to regular dental care when I went off to grad school. Let things go for a few years, and the result was a river of fillings in my molars. Ever since, something breaks away about every two years, and I have to keep my fingers crossed while we see just how deep the damage goes... But that was not the sort of experience that I stopped in to share. We had a great discussion on subjects like the Amish and Mennonites all around, and the sometimes delicate tradeoffs that keep TOP full of interesting opinions contributed in a collaborative spirit.

Plus, the Finger Lakes look just amazing from three to five thousand feet elevation.