Travels with TL: Montrose Redux

Perhaps you will recall that right before we moved, we were waiting for “the metal guy” to come get all our large scrap metal, but he didn’t come when he said he would, so at 5:30 prior to a 6 p.m. walk-through by our buyers, Lynn and I were flinging metal into the backs of our cars and bringing it along to the new house.

We were going to try giving him another call, to see if he would pick up or if we could deliver it to him out in Parlin when the unthinkable happened: he and his wife of three months were killed in a three-car accident on the highway east of Gunnison. Last I heard, blame had yet to be assigned, but it was definitely not the Mosses, who were in the car that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit head on.

Which is the sad explanation for why Lynn and I were riding along toward Montrose yesterday accompanied by the clank and clink of a car full of metal, much of it sections of woodstove pipe.

The purpose of our trip was Lynn’s return to her oral surgeon, although it turned out her last visit there had been a full six years ago. Lynn has a medically-induced dry mouth, and without saliva, it turns out, your teeth turn crumbly and fall out of your mouth chip by chip. She currently has two broken molars, one on either side, so chewing has not been fun.

I went along because she keeps getting told that it’s better to keep her own teeth than get a full set of implants, but chip after chip, implant after implant, crown after crown, this starts to feel very expensive and not terribly productive. So I went as a second set of ears and to make sure Lynn discussed all her options.

(Like most of us, I suppose, this is what Lynn does when she goes to a doctor: she complains up until the medico comes into the room and asks how she’s doing, and her answer is, “Fine.” So I go along to say, No, not fine.)

We both really like her oral surgeon, Dr. Boisen. I like that she hears what Lynn is saying and carefully factors that in, and she also pays close attention to the medical issues surrounding Lynn’s teeth. So she heard pretty clearly that the piecemeal approach is wearying, but she also explained that Lynn’s medical factors make her not the best candidate for a full set of false teeth. She said we (including her and Lynn’s dentist) should all start thinking in terms of blocks of implants, possibly small bridges.

It’s still expensive — it’s astounding, really, how such small things as teeth can be so ruinuously costly — but perhaps it won’t feel like she’s just turned into a cash cow for the dental industry.

So after setting up plans for Lynn to have the two broken teeth extracted and the area around an existing implant checked later this month, we left the expensive environs of the dental profession and headed for the scrappier environs of the metal biz. This time around at Recla, we seemed to be the only ones selling — everyone else was there to buy. I have no idea what any of them were buying, or for what, but Recla is the most happenin’ place you’ve never been to in Montrose.

And we came away $1.10 richer thanks to our stovepipe. Which led, of course, to Target.

I like to think of our trip as free, but Lynn thinks it cost over $6,000. That’s because when we purchased our new kitchen appliances, Maytag offered a mail-in rebate, which we got back in the form of a gift card $400. I figure, we were going to buy the appliances anyway, so this is free money. Lynn’s apparently still a little bitter about the price tag.

At any rate, we managed to spend an hour of our time and a little less than half our gift card (saving our $1.10 for a rainy day) at Target, where Lynn was also texted by our friends the Gauss: “We just passed your car in the Target parking lot.” It may be true that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but in Montrose you run into everyone you know from back home.

We went into Target looking for two things: Lynn wanted a bedskirt, and I wanted cushions for the dining table chairs, but we came up empty on both wishes. We did find, at Camelot Gardens once we finally pried ourselves out of Target, a bigger pot for one of our megaflora — and a fountain we liked that was only $400. We bought the pot but passed on the fountain.

That was about all the shopping we could manage, and we wanted to get back in time to go to dinner with Tia, so we hit the road for what was an extremely pleasant trip back. It was one of those halcyon September days I was talking about just yesterday, where the temperature in Montrose was supposed to be 80 but it felt more like a pleasant 70.

Of course, by now the car was smelling a bit fast-foodish, since Kara has raved endlessly about Burger King’s new plant-based Impossible Whopper, so we brought back sandwiches for everyone at work to try. They smell like regular Whoppers. The staff member who waited on us said the staff either loves or hates them — no in-between.

All in all, it was one of our better trips to Montrose (except for the promise of dental expenses and teeth-pulling), and a lovely way to spend a fall day.