B-, a blog reader,  wrote me this morning to say: “you’re not starting this year out very well, Jon. Front teeth are missed when they are gone. Reflects on how we feel about ourselves. Get well and baby yourself.”

I know that tone.

I like the idea of getting well and babying myself, although it’s more fun when Maria does it.

And the year did begin with a car accident and a tooth extraction. Neither was much fun.

But I balk at the idea that my year had started poorly.

Or that a gap in my tooth line will make me feel poorly about myself. I actually think it adds some character to an ordinary head. I’ll have forgotten about it by Monday.

The issue might seem small, but it isn’t really if you think about what’s wracking our country.  There is always a bigger point to be made.

I hope my legacy – I’m getting to that age – will be in part that I always fought to define myself in a world that increasingly defines people and tries to tell them who they are and what to do.

People are always telling me who I am, liberal or conservative, left or right, helpless and impulsive. It’s my task to know what I am and what I need to do; my mission is to define who I am and let other people know and to fight for my identity in a world of labels and instant messaging and crumbling boundaries.

I guess that’s my legacy.

“Reverence for one’s legacy,” wrote Robin Givhan in the Washington Post this week,” was supposed to be the safety valve, the narcissistic self-defense mechanism that also has the effect of offering salvation to others. The guardrails are gone.”

I sometimes forget that people define happiness differently than I do.

I have this unfortunate and sometimes misguided habit of bristling when people tell me things that I know or ought to know as if I’m too dumb to figure it out for myself.

I know that isn’t what most people are saying, but I also know it’s often what I’m feeling. My sense of self has very little to do with a tooth.

For me, accidents and tooth trouble are simply a part of life – everyone single person reading this will experience one or the other. Neither speaks to the meaning of life, just the nature of life.

Responding openly and directly – and sharing the experience – is one way I can cope with the trouble. The other is taking care of myself.

Trouble does not mean that I am having a bad life or year. I don’t join in the very American notion that we should expect to go through life without pain, disappointment, or loss because most of us never speak of these things.

The more I accept and respect life, the less difficult it is for me.

I’ve learned and grown much more from trouble than the absence of it. How bland life would be without it.

I don’t take trouble personally. I don’t disrespect it with self-pity.

I must have done a poor job somewhere along the line if I left the impression that I’m having a bad time or that my year is off to a bad start. Older people are very likely to have some health troubles. For various reasons, the “healthy” can deal with it.

I have good doctors, I choose them carefully and listen to them diligently.

It’s odd to read a message commiserating with me for having a bad year. It’s not true.

I had more than a million new visitors to bedlamfarm.com last year and nearly four million page views. My long and challenging mission to refocus my writing online has been a success. I am pleased about it and proud of it.

Hard work does pay off. Life is what you make of it.

At 73, we seek rebirth, over and over again. That is the Hero Journey. I hope I never stop. No tooth will get in my way.

The Army Of Good and I have kept our vow to make sure no member of the Bishop Maginn High School community has gone hungry this year or last and helped the Mansion residents and aides fend off the covid-19 virus and isolation with disinfectant foggers, masks, clothes, food and a ton of arts and craft support.

I am even prouder of that.

Kathy wrote on my Facebook that I should think of the children and get a fake tooth: “So, not for your personal life, but for your professional life, and so not to scare the school children, get an implant.’

These children have known trouble I can hardly imagine. They’ve suffered genocide, persecution, bombs, shootings, starvation and cold, the loss of their family and friends, poverty and dislocation, bigotry, and bullying.

A missing tooth is not something that would bother them very much. Unlike many Americans, trouble is not a shock to them or something to be hidden.

For me, the core issue is learning how to care for myself, something I have historically failed to do.

This year, that is changing.

I took care of myself in my Bedam Farm Old Man safety campaign – thanks to a new bathtub mat, a new electric snow blower, good ice-grip shoes, and a wooden rail by the back steps. Since then, and for the first time in 15 years of living up here, I have not fallen or even slipped on the ice.

I’m exercising every day now and loving it. I’m taking care of my heart. My blood sugar is right on the dot, every morning. I check.

My car is in the shop; it will be home in a few weeks; the insurance company is paying for the $10,000 in damage, and the pain in my mouth is temporal and easing.

I want to say that losing a tooth or siding off an icy road does not define me, my life, or happiness. I have everything I need, and more than I ever dreamed of having.

I live with a wonderful human, two fascinating donkeys, and three loving dogs. Don’t forget the sheep, Jon.

I’ve lost a bunch of teeth in my lengthening life, and I can’t recall missing a single one. Online, it’s easy to forget that our experiences are personal and individual; what happens to one doesn’t necessarily happen to everyone else.

The advice a doctor gave you doesn’t automatically apply to me or my big mouth. We are each responsible for ourselves. I am not responsible for you.

There is nothing that I want that I do not have.

Perhaps I needed to make that clear, lest people start feeling sorry for me, which would be unfair to the truly needy and vulnerable.

I accept those bad things that happen to good people, it’s life, and I will bear my share of it, hopefully without complaint or self-pity.

I guess the thing is, I have to make my own advice in order to own it.

___

P.S. I’m getting tons of messages about the need to replace an extracted tooth with an implant or insert, or the other teeth will shift, rot, or runoff. Teeth move, they say.

My dentist, who I respect and trust, says this is not necessary in my case. So Maria doesn’t care about the missing tooth and the dentist doesn’t either, and I surely don’t.

That’s settled. The gap remains. I’m quite fine with it. People who care will just have to bear it.

I am grateful for people’s concerns and good wishes, honestly, but I need to repeat that I take my medical advice from professionals I know and can talk to and who have examined me.

I don’t take my medical advice online, not even from good people who care about me.

My big lesson for being on social media is this: sharing a problem isn’t giving it away. That is a boundary.

I take good care of myself, it is my primary responsibility as a functioning human being, and I take it very seriously. Sadly, most advice from the either is not reliable and not meant for me.

This is a central talking point for people who use social media in modern-day America. It’s so easy to lose ourselves here, and we see how easy it is to lose our minds and reality here. And telling other people what to do is free, a pandemic of its own.

So it’s good for me to talk about it and write about it. We are all in this world together, and perhaps the best advice we can give one another here is to define ourselves and protect our own sense of who we are.