Francis Ponge's Fruit Crate

I dropped off my failed implant at the orthodontist’s. It was basically a crown attached to a screw. You could screw it into a wall and have a molar emerging from a wall. You could frame it with incisors. Or lips. I wanted to donate the failed implant to a lab that studies them and ostensibly searches for clues as to how they might’ve failed. The orthodontist’s office was closed for lunch so R and I parked and sat in the car and waited. It was a raining a little. Our windows fogged up. When the orthodontist’s office reopened I dropped the implant off with the receptionist and asked to use the bathroom. Sure thing, she said. I grabbed the bathroom key, which is attached to a toothbrush. On the way home we stopped at Safeway to get my medication. Antidepressants. Four of them. My doctor won’t give me a full prescription until I see him for my routine physical. I’ve been reluctant to go because the clinic is within the hospital complex and I worry about Covid. You pass by an emergency room to get to the other clinics, which are accessed by a bank of elevators in the adjacent lobby. It doesn’t feel safe, although clinicians stationed in the lobby are taking everyone’s temperature and asking pertinent questions about their health before they allow them access to the clinics. I phoned earlier in the week to request at least an extension to my current prescription. The receptionist said she would pass the information on. But the pharmacy did not have my medication. The doctor hadn’t called. R called the doctor’s office again and asked the receptionist to relay the message that I needed the medication. Somebody dropped the ball. I still don’t know if it’s there. We came home and had dinner and watched two episodes of Cobra Kai. The I went to the bedroom to read. I heard the banshee scream of a power saw. One of the members of our building is still sawing wood. He’s been sawing wood for three months now. He has a power saw set up on the porch a few feet away from our bedroom window. We don’t know what he’s sawing the wood for. We can’t imagine anything within the space of even a three-bedroom apartment that would require that much wood. Thank God for ear plugs. Could it be he’s building an arc on top of the building? The Greenland ice sheet is melting. It won’t be long before all the world’s seas begin to rise. If I see our neighbor collecting animals – bears, elk, rhinoceroses, elephants, fruit flies, peacock spiders, coatimundi, storks, axolotl, mole rats, pangolin, Tasmanian Devil, cassowaries, alligators, kinkajous, vampire bats – we might lean more confidently toward the ark scenario. The animals will need a shelter. I think he’s gone through several forests. Also in the news today, more than 7 million cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the U.S. The U.S. is now the hardest-hit country in the world for both cases and deaths. But is “hardest-hit” the right modifier? It’s bad here because so many chose to ignore it. People have lost faith in their institutions. And I think about the fragility of Francis Ponge’s fruit crate: best not to weigh too heavily on its fate.