Yup, I know we’re still a month shy from the season of ghosts, goblins and weird looking food whose primary colors are orange and black.   

But that doesn’t matter, because I’m feeling compelled right now to tell the story of our very own, neighborhood 
haunted house.

It’s just a 30-second walk from my place, but thankfully, because it’s on the opposite side of the street, I can only see it when I’m strolling down the block.  Still, every time I find myself walking by, even during the day, I’ll admit it: I get creepy-crawly chills. 

Okay, I’m not sure that there are actual spooks roaming its halls.  

Here’s what I do know.   

The house is completely abandoned, and has been for more than four years.  A forsaken red jeep sits in the driveway, nearly covered with crackly old pine needles.  Close by are some tall, completely dead trees that brush against the structure.  One of those tree’s branches intertwined with several electrical wires right above it.  Yikes.  And, that’s alongside some of the gnarliest, driest tumbleweeds I’ve ever seen.  There’s also a giant 1970s-era satellite dish, long rusted, and anchored not-so-jauntily to the garage roof. 

Here’s more about its festive exterior.

The outside walls are made entirely of wooden shingles; it also appears that this siding is 100 percent dry rotted and probably abuzz with zillions of happy, I’ll-never-go-hungry-again termites.  Adding to the creepiness is a fairly large hole, which immediate neighbors say has given easy entry to rats—not the cute little cartoon mice who sewed Cinderella’s gown, but rats—along with mold and mushrooms, to move in and flourish. 

And the story behind the walls?

Well, its elderly owner lives several hundred miles away and is using this place, or so he says, to store items that he plans to display in a museum dedicated to vintage computers.  (Can you say hoarder? In fact, a peek into the garage through its swollen plywood door shows that space literally packed floor to ceiling.)   

But here’s the most troubling thing: with the epic drought we’re experiencing here, our neighborhood haunted house is also a tinderbox just waiting for one bored teenager with a match.      

There’s a bit of good news.

Never one to not try to right a wrong in my big girl clown shoes, I have found a sympathetic person in our local government to help put the house in order.

I promised this person that I wouldn’t give any specifics about his or her identity or plan, because this person may be overstepping his or her bounds.  But this person strongly believes that it is important to do so because, this person says, the home’s extremely combustible interior and exterior represents a clear and present threat to all of the other 
homes nearby. 

So far, I’ve convinced nine neighbors to send in complaint forms to our county health department, which this person instructed me to do.  I’ve also posted the form to a town Facebook group I’m in, so folks I don’t know, but who might want to help, can join my little crusade.  

I felt powerful for only about a week, though, since my call to action hasn’t done much. 

Both the county code enforcement folks and the public health folks say that since no one lives here, and also because there are no broken windows, there’s not a whole lot they can do right now.  (However, a small victory: one tree—but not the most potentially dangerous one that hugs the electrical wires—has been cut down.  Too, a good amount of brush has been cleared since I began my squawking.) 

So, yes, with this person continuing to advise me in any way he or she can, I’ll keep working to ensure that this house is made even safer than it is right now. 

But I’ve realized there’s another reason I really, really want it cleaned up. 

It goes back to when I was a very little girl. 

In those days, I walked to school, first my grammar school and later, the middle school.  

To get to each of those destinations, though, I had to pass the house where The Jungle Lady lived.

I never learned her real name, but the moniker my brother and I gave her was a perfect fit. 

Only about four doors down from where I spent my entire childhood, her tired wooden residence seemed to have been haphazardly plopped down amidst a jumbled front yard overgrown with under-pruned trees and vines.  Worse, meandering over the worn picket fence and almost onto the sidewalk were a dozen out-of-control oleander bushes.  Their nasty, pointy leaves started an almost immediate rash if I accidentally happened to brush against them, and I soon learned that if someone chewed on those leaves, or a flower or stem, the consequences could, literally, be deadly    (http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jul/26/local/me-59440). 


In my mind—and I still think I’m right on this one—those oleanders were planted on purpose by The Jungle Lady to keep neighborhood kids out of her way.  Indeed, when I did get the occasional glimpse of the slow moving, grey haired woman who lived there, and who always seemed to be glaring at me, I was petrified... as were a whole lot of other children. 

In fact, I’m getting a queasy feeling in my gut, right now, just picturing her and where she lived. 

So perhaps, getting the creepy-crawly house that’s down my street in proper order might be serving as a method to vanquish a few of those old memories.

It’s also a proactive way to honor one of my core beliefs, which is this:  I can’t change the world.  But I can always try to do my best to change a corner of a corner of a corner of the world. 

So maybe, just maybe, I’ll eventually do a bit more than make our neighborhood haunted house safe.

I might be able to save one or two little kids from feeling scared and powerless when they have to pass that corner to get to school.  I could prevent a few nightmares, too.

And that, I know, is A Very Good Thing.    

What spooky houses, and the people who lived in them, do you remember from your childhood?  Since I can’t be the only one, I look forward to your stories! 

So, it turns out there’s a coming-of-age ritual these days that nearly every teenager gets to do.

I’m not thinking here about dreading the first day of high school; suffering through a puppy love breakup, or finding out that your Best Friend Forever has been posting trash behind your back.

Yup, all of the above scenarios are certainly part and parcel of young adulthood.  But I’m betting that another adolescent passage happens a lot more.

I’m talking about wisdom teeth, or more specifically, their removal.

My 17-year-old daughter first started noticing that “something is growing in the back of my mouth” a few months ago.  While she said that the sensation didn’t feel exactly like a cavity, she did say, “It feels weird, but I don’t need to go to the dentist.” 

I immediately took her to our dentist.    

And because he has been juggling in the dental world for a while, he knew exactly what was wrong.   

Her wisdom teeth were coming in. 

Which meant, of course, that they needed to come out.

Our dentist isn’t an oral surgeon, but he was happy to write the required referral I needed to give to whatever specialist I could find.  

As it turned out, the stars were in my favor in this particular arena.   

That’s because a good friend whose son is a year older than my daughter had already done the research. Our kids have the same health insurance, and she had found the nearest provider.  Okay, he was 97 miles away, but no matter.  I’m here in The Golden State, so of course I drive.  Plus, I was fairly certain my child’s insurer would foot the entire bill if that’s where we went, so I knew that my time on the road would be well worth it.

That, and the fact that this particular dentist is all about wisdom teeth, to the point that his website URL pretty much says that. 

Our first appointment was the consultation.  After filling out the usual health history paperwork, my daughter and I were ushered into a small, sparse room.

There was a flat screen television mounted on one wall.  There were two chairs.  That was it—no gaily wrapped toothbrush or sample packet of floss anywhere in sight.   

The dentist—whom I’ll also call Dr. Wisdom Tooth--then entered, heading toward my child.  A grey-haired gentleman wearing pressed jeans, sneakers and a polo shirt, he introduced himself, then shook her hand, looked into her eyes and called her by name.  He did the same with me.  I was immediately impressed. 

He next took out the x-ray our family dentist had given us, and solemnly pointed to each blurry wisdom tooth. 

All four were impacted, he said, and the bottom two had some sort of cysts around them.  They were also growing in a way that, much sooner than later, were going to painfully collide with her neighboring molars.

He looked at my daughter, and quietly said, “Your mouth is a ticking time bomb.”

That got my attention. 

Dr. Wisdom Tooth then explained that she and I would now be shown a video on what the extraction procedure would entail.  After that, I’d have to initial, many times, a form that essentially said we had both watched the presentation and understood it. 

A compact tutorial, the DVD was over in less than ten minutes.  I scribbled my initials many times. We were given a prescription for pain pills and directions on what to expect the day of the procedure, then started our long drive home. 

After the insurance approval came through—amazingly, only a few weeks of waiting—we once again found ourselves in the office of Dr. Wisdom Tooth. 

Astonishingly, at least to me, the entire procedure took 37 minutes (not that I was counting).  

And while my daughter had hoped to give a hysterically funny post-surgery performance for YouTube audiences around the world, she basically was pretty out of it when a couple of the dental staff put her in my car, and then slept for an hour before asking for her favorite radio station.  (However, there are some pretty crazy post-surgery patients.  One with many millions of hits is here, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=idjo2fhLKDY.)

Oh, and given that I have a sturdy kid, she went to school the next day (although her cheeks did resemble those 
of a chipmunk’s).      

Given that the whole adventure involved driving many hundreds of miles, as well as dealing with a bloody mouth, heavy duty pain medication and, right, the actual wrenching out of teeth, it really was a positive experience.

Which got me to thinking about my own adventures (yes, plural) in Wisdom Tooth Land, which weren’t nearly as festive. 

The first was at 13 years old. 

I had braces and needed to have the bottom two wisdoms removed so the wireworks could finish their job.  My mother and I went to the recommended surgeon and, being a placid and dutiful child, strolled right over to a big dental chair.  A mask was put over my nose and mouth, and I was asked to start counting backwards.

My next memory was waking up on a narrow cot in a nearly pitch black room. 

I was sobbing.

There was a cup of very watery, very hot chocolate (huh?) in a Styrofoam cup beside me.  My crying was so loud that a member of the staff rushed in to reassure me, telling me I’d be going home soon.

I realized, much later, that what had terrified me so much was never being told what was going to happen.  

No one, not a staff member, not the dentist, not even my mother (who likely had no clue herself) had given me any preparation for the procedure.  And since I had never had any sort of extraction before, what did I know?  Heck, I assumed that the dentist would remove those troublesome choppers in a few yanks, and I’d be hopping out of the chair in five minutes.

In fact, the experience was so awful that it started a new routine for me, one that I still practice.  

Today, if a doctor or dentist or any other health care professional needs to do something I’m unfamiliar with, I always ask him or her to give me the lowdown before starting anything.  Sometimes, I’ll even make sure that a staffer talks me through every single step.  For me, knowledge is power.

The second visit to Wisdom Tooth Land was a decade later.

I was living in Brooklyn and had an amazing health insurance plan through Columbia University.  It was seven dollars per month!  Of course, this meant that only students would be taking care of all of my health care needs, but heck, it was seven dollars a month! 

At some point, a recommendation was made: the two upper wisdoms needed to come out.  I don’t remember a consultation, but I do remember that when I went in for the extractions, I was wearing a cute denim jumper and about 10 dental students crowded around the chair.  I was also informed that I wouldn’t be knocked out completely, but given 
laughing gas.

The gas made time slow down, with the minutes also feeling jumbled and somehow goofy.  And one other thing: I felt so ridiculously carefree that when a student showed me the bloody tooth he had just pulled, I thought: wow, how cool is that!  Too, I distinctly remember thinking that all of these students could gang rape me right now and none of it 
would matter.

Once the procedure was over and I was just beginning to feel like myself again, the lead dentist asked where I lived.  It was a long subway ride home and he knew it.

“Okay, hon,” he said, smiling.  “I’ll just give you a little more gas to help you.”

I floated back to Brooklyn.   

There were never any complications with the procedures, and I’m pretty sure I needed very little, if any, pain medication.  And of course, I survived.

But I’m so happy that my daughter had an entirely different journey with a dental office that completely has 
its act together.  

Unlike me, her trip to Wisdom Tooth Land has left no emotional scars.

And for that, I am an immensely grateful mom.

What are your wisdom tooth (or other dental) tales?  I look forward to hearing from you!