Week 28
More advent comic and a city that just got fluoridated.
Advent comic continues. I’m making one or two panels a day and posting to my notes if you want to read that way as they come out. Or just read here where I pull together the week’s panels. If you missed the first several days you can find them here. It’s all plotted out to take us to the big day: Christmas, or also known as my sister’s godmother’s son’s birthday.
Stay tuned Wally Watchers!
This Week I Learned…
That Bunbury — the second biggest city in WA, the third biggest city in WA* — has only been getting fluoride added to the water since last year. My aunty grew up in Bunbury and was telling us this at my grandmother’s funeral on Monday as we waited for the priest to arrive at the cemetery. She said that growing up there and then moving to the city, it was noticeable how much worse people’s teeth were in Bunbury.
It does feel like something that maybe could have been addressed earlier. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole about fluoride. Of course there is a website called Fluoride Free Australia, and I didn’t really expect them to make any good points, but there was one in the very last line of an article titled “Ten reasons to STOP fluoridation in Bunbury”:
“With recent, growing published evidence of both dental ineffectiveness and potential for harm to health, it seems essential to the health of the nation that this experiment must end. Instead, we need universal dental care for all Australians, like Medicare.”
Fluoride has been controversial since the 1960s, when people claimed water fluoridation caused everything from acne, backaches and boils to left-handedness, stammering, animal sterility, varicose veins and more.
One man testified at a royal commission that the entire program was a plot to brainwash the young and erode Christian values. And while I couldn’t find any evidence that there are more lefties in the world today, that one did seem to come true.
(Also BONUS TWIL: I just learned kangaroos are left-handed.)
Greek funerals are solemn, very ritualised affairs. A very good friend of mine also flew to Perth on the weekend for a funeral. He happened to be burying his aunt on the same day and at the same cemetery. The two services couldn’t have been more different. They played The Gambler and my friend read out his last text exchange with his aunt, in which she talked about going through the Red Rooster drive-thru on the way back from the hospital and ordering a whole chicken for herself. At the Greek church there was ceremonial chanting, and though my father wrote a eulogy, it was read out by the priest and there were no jokey stories about chicken.
My sister said she hated it whenever the chanting slipped into English, and I knew exactly what she meant. Part of what I used to love about church was not understanding the words, letting them wash over me, meaning without meaning. When the language is opaque, it becomes a texture, a mood-setter, and it lays out an invitation to turn inwards.
On the morning of the funeral, I woke at 3.30am, a bit of body-clock jet-lagging, and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up, moved to a hammock that was in the room and finished a book I was reading. It was Paul Auster’s Baumgartner, the last book he ever wrote. When I got to the end, I had to take a break for a few seconds of sobbing, when the main character talks about a perfect moment shared with his now-dead wife:
“…as he spread their blanket on the sandy soil and he looked over at Anna’s beautiful, shining face, he was flooded with a feeling of happiness so powerful that tears began to gather in his eyes and he said to himself: Remember this moment, little man, remember it for the rest of your life, for nothing more important will ever happen to you than what is happening to you right now.”
And I cried because I’ve had this moment, and I hold it still. And I think I also cried for my grandmother, who told me almost every time I saw her after her husband died to make the most of each moment because it goes so fast. Life goes like that.
I know she would have approved of the funeral. It was sincere and humble in its reverence for God and in its lack of customisation. Nothing fancy. I remembered her wailing — a guttural, never-ceasing cry of abject pain and misery — at my grandfather’s graveside. And I was sad there was no one there to do that for her, and that I had done mine in private, noiseless and in a hammock. The coffin up close looked like a prop. I fixated on the wood veneer and plastic handles made to look like shining silver which made me think about all that plastic going underground.
That plastic leaching down into the groundwater over millennia, maybe to flow deep underground to meet the river, to enter the vast and interconnected water systems, to be filtered and treated and finally have fluoride added to create lots of nice, healthy teeth in Bunbury.
*I only just learned it was overtaken by Mandurah!