Last night I was brushing my teeth and letting thoughts race through my mind as I did so, paying attention to them for only a few seconds at a time. Give those molars a good seeing-to, I thought, and so I took them from every angle I could. I remembered seeing the brush made of Badger-hair that a guest had left in our toothbrush cup. How black and dirty it looked. I wondered if it made any difference at all to the nylon brushes. I gazed out the window and watched the silhouettes of the trees in our garden swing and sway in the wind. In the distance, through the open window, I could hear a baby crying at one of the neighbour’s houses. I remembered my Dad used to tell me that Gandhi would brush his teeth for fifteen minutes a day. What a strange thing to tell a young, impressionable boy. Telling a child something like that could have had devastating consequences. There was the possibility that I would take it to heart and end up brushing my teeth for thirty minutes or forty-five minutes a day just to outdo the guy who preached ahimsa. I imagined being known to everyone as the kid with the toothbrush in his shirt pocket at all times. Maybe I could go one better than that and preach peace with the aid of a toothbrush. Now, there’s an idea.
Dad’s intention, I think, had been to encourage me to brush my teeth through instilling his heroes’ ways into me. He didn’t brush his teeth for fifteen minutes a day, I’m sure of it, and through my teenage years I gradually brushed mine less and less. Brushing your teeth for any length of time can’t hurt. The longer the better, I should think, but I wish my Dad had been able to see into the future and tell me something more fitting. Something that would have made me pay attention and something I would have adhered to for the rest of my life.
I saw a programme on TV about Mothers and their children. I watched a Mother put her little girl on a roundabout and push it once or twice to get it spinning. “Hold on tight,” she said as the camera watched the girl from the opposite side of the roundabout. The girl smiled the first spin round but her expression changed to one of nausea and sickness within seconds. When the roundabout eventually came to a stop she stepped off and stood in the same spot, wobbling slightly. Her head moved slowly but almost uncontrollably on her shoulders and when she next looked into the camera she looked dizzy. A thought came to me as I watched.
Drugs are dizziness. Dizziness sums up drugs, I thought. If only my Dad had thought of that analogy years ago. That may have put me off. Every time I’ve ever stepped off a roundabout I’ve felt dizzy and I don’t like it. Yet I continue to get on the roundabout in the first place when I know exactly what will happen. Forever going back to the things we know we don’t get on with – will we ever learn?
