By Carla Kelly 

I hit intellectual rock bottom last week. The crisis is past, but I’m thinking about Halloween now, and it’s easy to tie the two together.
I was considering a column on scary costumes, and my first thought was to dress as a dentist. Dentist phobia is where I registered “dumb” on the brain-o-meter last week, but I’ve changed my tune.
For more than a year, I had been feeling an ache in my jaw. I decided it was probably stress from my job. Yes, a year. I’m the biggest coward in four or five Midwestern states, and will do almost anything to avoid the dentist’s chair.
After I quit that job in June, my jaw stopped hurting so much. About a month ago, it started aching again, getting worse and worse until even I, Mrs. Chicken Liver, couldn’t take it. I figured the whole side of my face was one big abscess. In my panic, I decided my treatment would provide enough dental work to allow even a modest dentist a trip around the world for his entire family and his 15 best friends.
It took me a day to work up the courage to call a local dentist and beg an emergency visit. I thought I even knew which tooth was the culprit. I had the whole scenario down, almost to the point of having my will prepared. (No point there: I got nothin’ anyone wants, unless its books.)
I must give my dentist high points for not looking at the X-ray and in my mouth and throwing himself on the floor, laughing at my stupidity.
Nothing much was wrong, except me and my tense jaw. Was I under stress again? How could that be? I was working at home, doing the kind of writing I like best. Well, duh on me. I’ve just finished writing a novel in eight weeks, and if that’s not stress, I’m not sure what qualifies. The fact that I enjoyed every minute of it doesn’t take away the intensity of the project. I mean, I had peoples’ lives in my hands on the Royal Navy’s blockade of the Spanish coast.
The hygienist gave me a detailed list of ways to prevent, or at least ease, tense jaw. She and the dentist were so nice. There’s probably a soundproof room where they go to laugh a lot when idiots like me leave the office.
I’ll cross dentists off my list of scary costumes, but Halloween is still on my mind. A month ago I was standing in a grocery store line in Wyoming and thinking about odd combinations of things people buy. I remember buying bread, mayonnaise and Drano once. Yikes, what a sandwich.
One thought led to another. I decided it wouldn’t be prudent to buy apples and razor blades at the same time at Halloween. The moral of this – I should only get in short grocery lines that leave no time for creative thinking.
I do have a favorite costume: one I wore in the fifth grade, when I lived in St. Simons Island, Ga. I’d been devouring Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes and knew I had to trick or treat as the great detective.
I gave myself points for ingenuity in my Holmes costume. If you wear two baseball caps, one fore and one aft, it looks like the deerstalker hat (especially after dark) that Holmes used to wear when the game was afoot. I put a short skirt that buttoned down the front over my coat, to resemble a caped Victorian overcoat.
My dad was a pipe smoker back then, and he had one of those pipes with the curved stems. With that clenched in my teeth – probably the origin of my tense jaw – I toured the neighborhood dressed as Sherlock Holmes. What a great costume. People used to read then, so I didn’t have to explain who Sherlock Holmes was.
This summer in London, Karen wanted to visit 221B Baker Street, the “home” of Sherlock, so we queued up and did the tour. There’s a big statue of Holmes in front of the museum, so we had our picture taken with the Great One.
But that was summer. Now it’s time to start writing another novel. I think I’ll stock up on Advil and Jell-O, because sure enough, when things get tense around Chapter 18, so will my jaw.