Cusp and Crown
I had a black spot on my tooth. Not one of the two front, the bridesmaid. People who love me thought it was spinach and jumped to be the true friend who points out your flaws to spare you having your flaws noticed.
It became a thing I put off. We were wearing masks everywhere anyway. The grocery store was the only place people even saw me.
When we were kids, it was scandalously funny if Grandma popped her teeth out. My mom yelled “Mother!” the same way she yelled at us, shocked we were so ill-mannered. “At the table?!” Grandma loved being able to make us laugh and piss my mom off at the same time.
At the table, in a sandwich, on Christmas Eve, my tooth broke.
There’s great beauty and then there’s “has all her teeth.” I had been fine with the latter.
When the masks came off, I practiced a close-mouthed smile. I hoped my eyes might sell it.
I bent over my work; I would find a dentist tomorrow.
I had underway a memoir about houses, and my grandmother’s notebook from journalism school. I had music to catalog: a video series, licensing pitches. There were hungry beings and invasive trees to clear.
I had been digging, unsmiling, through old notebooks and pictures, looking for stuff I could sell to fund my retirement and trying to account for the state of things.
Misery loves a retrospective.
In the seventies, my mom preached daily that girls could be more than teachers and secretaries, but that I still had to wear skirts to school. She said Phyllis Schlafly was able to kill the ERA because her husband’s work supported their children.
My class was launched into the eighties, where it was so much faster and shinier than before. I’d been schooled for a regular life; I didn’t think all those beautiful rebels - Chrissy Hynde, Prince, Byrne, Bowie - were me. I didn’t like the shiny clothes or the brassy synthesizer sounds. I wanted to be Tom Petty, or an extra in Fleetwood Mac.
School was surprisingly unaffordable for me, and year-round landscaping would’ve meant shoveling snow in the dark. So software it was. No one had any experience or relevant education; all you had to do was seem smart.
By the nineties, I’d found my way to publishing; the CEO explained in a company-wide meeting (in a theater, with a fancy dinner after) that reducing what we paid to authors and “absorbing” the pension fund were how we would all make more money.
I had been too young to be a hippie. But I thought the big kids made good music, and that they’d done away with war.
So when the US became the WMD we were looking for in Iraq, I was miffed. That’s when I heard the back of the baby boom had been named Generation Jones. Stragglers born 1954-65, give or take, mostly to the previous “cusp generation”, the Depression babies. Partridge Family, not Woodstock.
I was a middle class middle kid from the midwest, not tall, tiny, spectacular or hideous. I straddled the line between Leo and Virgo, as if it weren’t vaporous enough to be a hazel-eyed, androgynous, lapsed Unitarian. My mom said I was just a “late bloomer”.
Belonging didn’t call me, anyway; I liked popping in, hanging by the door, the universal outlier. I came and went, collected stories.
I dropped the Namer of this Jonesing for a Generation a note, thanking him for his service. I was full of ideas for ways we could rebel against our literal Big Brother. Chicago was crawling with artists and activists just trying to stay busy when they weren’t looking for food.
We met for lunch. He was from LA, but had a thing in South Bend and a rental car. I took a train down from the city.
Scribbling in my notebook in an empty train car, I got to see a whole new part of the city on a perfect summer day. Eventually the conductor came by for my ticket. Since it was the last car on the train, he stood looking out the window for a while. He looked like I would look if I were a boy, only cuter, with blue eyes. Nice all the way through, because he wasn’t big enough to play football and had never seen the world.
I inquired about the possibility of some cab-like vehicle at the station. It’d take 20 years to get an Uber. He said he’d help me find a taxi; it was the end of his shift, and he lived nearby. He nodded at the page in my lap, asked me what I did. I went on a bit about music and art and publishing and how I was on my way to lunch with this guy who had a Great Idea. He told me that he and his wife were separated and he missed his kids.
One time my therapist expressed concern about my propensity to make new friends on trains or anywhere, and walking city blocks in the middle of the night half in the bag with a guitar on my back. I said I wouldn’t be able to conduct myself in the world at all if I didn’t think I could trust my own judgment. She said people like Ted Bundy would fool me. I said the odds of that are so small that if it happens, it’s my time.
Not Ted gave me a ride to the restaurant, was appropriately paternal about my meeting some strange guy, kissed me a little, and said it just made him miss his wife more.
The Namer was pretty, like Andy Gibb; the effect was temporary. We were both from Ohio. My enthusiasm and that “androgyny” bit in my note made him think I might be hitting on him; we cleared that up. He generously explained how PR, marketing, trend analysis and awareness building worked; he couldn’t imagine an idea with regards to Generation Jones that he hadn’t thought of, but yeah, definitely keep in touch.
There were plenty of other ideas to chase, and one never stops trying to get paid enough to eat.
Twenty years later I was looking for a dentist. Cusp and Crown was too far away, but it sent me to the dictionary.
“Cusp” wasn’t ambivalence or invisibility, but movement. Perched, said the Oxford: A point of transition between two different states, the end where two curves meet.
It was not a waiting room, and more than some kind of DMZ between girls and boys, sun signs, or social classes.
It was like being born on the train. You’re not from the last place or the next; you wouldn’t exist without the trip.
At the grocery store, no one cares what you buy or wear. You are what you do with your cart. It was no one’s fault when the couple up by the prosciutto was waiting for the slicer dude. There should’ve been enough room to go around, except some poor manager needed to put up one more free-floating display of hummus flavors to make their numbers. And that pressed the person who was just trying to get to the bagels right up against the cupcake case. So I couldn’t turn around and just bail with the olives my arm was six inches too short to reach.
The woman between me and the olives had surrendered. She had no plan to change, and she was my elder, by ten or fifteen years. I assumed I would defer, because that’s what’s right, and then I remembered my new tooth. The one I could pop out like Grandma just to make kids laugh. I was an elder now.
I caught her eye. I’m careful about manipulating people cuzza what the shrink said, but this time my joy was true; I had something I could do. I gave her the real grin; apparently it’s like riding a bike. “So…” I said as I started feeling it in my face - and then hers - “if you pull your cart back this much”, adding the hands, “I think I can just reach in there, grab those olives, and get us both out of here.” She complied, laughing. I got my olives. Our movement dissolved the cluster.
When dogs wag their tails, it makes oxytocin. More wag, more happy. I’d not forgotten the science, knew that my dive into my failures, and using eye signals over masks, would make me sad. I had been cocky about how easily I could bounce back.
I’d forgotten that the smile is also an essential part of getting things done. It’s power. The power to move from there to here.
Late bloomers still bloom.
