Let me take you back in time, back before The Husband and I had health insurance.
The Husband was in terrible pain and needed an expensive root canal surgery, but our options were limited. We could drive to Mexico and look for a dentist in Tijuana. We could go to a dentist friend-of-a-friend in Santa Barbara, who was willing to do the work at a discounted rate. Or I could try my luck with an x-acto knife, a pair of pliers and a YouTube instructional video.
He chose the Santa Barbara route.
We were new Californians then, and it was our first visit to Santa Barbara. What little we knew about the place was culled from a new TV show called “Psych” and a soap opera from the ’80s.
The dentist was nice, and I was impressed that he opened his office on his day off to do this favor. His practice had one of those forcefully cheerful names, like Dr. Happy Smile Goodtime Dentist O’ Fun!, so I expected to have a great time. Maybe even get a free pink toothbrush.
My husband settled into the dentist’s chair, and I settled into the waiting room with a stack of books and whatever electronic gadget provided entertainment in 2006. A Tamagotchi, maybe? I don’t remember.
The dentist popped his head out of his office.
“Hey, this is going to take a while,” he said. “Maybe five, six hours. Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee or browse around? I’d hate for you to be stuck here that long.”
He gave me directions to State Street, just a couple blocks away, which is lined with boutique stores, galleries and cafes. Then he said he’d call in a few hours with an update. I put my things in my car, then headed to State Street.
Back then, The Husband was The Fiancé, and we were still in the planning stages of our wedding. So when I passed by a bookstore with a large window display of glossy wedding magazines, it was like having my clothes snagged on a thorny bush. I got stuck, and I couldn’t seem to walk away.
Before I knew it, I was in a coffee shop binging on newly purchased bridal magazines, making crazy lists and planning all kinds of shit with tulle. The lunch crowd came and went, but I remained, reading in-depth articles about how to give good face in my wedding photos and 40 reasons to love an illusion-neckline dress.
I had just reached the end of a quiz (Was I an elegant bride? Or a glamorous bride? Dear God, tell me!), when I glanced at my watch.
Five hours had passed. I still hadn’t received a phone call from the dentist.
Maybe I should call him, I thought. So I rummaged in my purse for my phone. No phone. I looked all over the coffee shop, back the bookstore, inside every store I visited. No phone. And then, in a jolt of panic, I ran as fast I could to the dentist.
The Husband was sitting on the concrete stairs outside the dentist’s office, cradling his jaw with his hand. He was in tears.
All he said was, “I called you.” And then he nearly fainted.
Here’s what happened: After I left the dentist’s office, the dentist realized my husband’s tooth was too far gone to salvage with a root canal. So he pulled it. The Husband was done and out of the chair within a half hour. The dentist, working on his day off, packed up and left. And my poor boo had been sitting outside for more than five hours, holding his achy jaw, with an unfilled prescription for painkillers in his pocket.
I helped him to the car, where my phone was sitting with the rest of my things. I had 27 missed phone calls, all from my husband. The voicemails covered the entire spectrum from “Hey, I got done early. Come pick me up” to “What the hell? Are you ignoring me? The engagement is off!” to “Are you OK? I’m so worried about you.”
The guilt! Oh, the deep, miserable guilt. This one incident is why I scooped the cat litter for YEARS without complaint.
Now, seven years later, it was time to revisit this beautiful city and make the past right. And so for our anniversary, I planned a trip to Santa Barbara.
Through Airbnb I booked a one-bedroom apartment in a leafy neighborhood near State Street. It sounded perfect — a dog-friendly place that boasted a full kitchen, wifi, off-street parking, all kinds of great stuff.
Almost immediately, things went a little awry. The owner of the apartment texted me to say there had been a death in her family, so she didn’t have a chance to clean the place. Also she left her car was in the carport, so we would have to park on the street. I completely understand how the sudden death of a relative can turn everything upside-down, and I truly felt sympathy for this woman, so I cut her a lot of slack. However, I didn’t like that she asked us to lie to her neighbors about who we were and what we were doing there, since she was illegally subletting her apartment.
Later, parked on the street instead of inside the carport, we found a neon-green parking ticket tucked under our windshield wiper.
The next day, in an effort to try something new, The Husband and I took a painting class together and created two lovely pieces of art. We didn’t yet know that just two days later, my husband would drop my painting and shred the canvas.
Then our dog became ill. This involved hours of walking in circles around the pretty, leafy neighborhood, wiping runny poo off the sidewalk.
On one such walk, my husband and I stumbled onto the office of Dr. Happy Smile Goodtime Dentist O’ Fun. The Husband held my hand and gazed at the concrete steps. “Remember when the dentist pulled my tooth and you abandoned me for more than five hours while I was in pain?”
“YES.”
And then our dog defecated on the steps.
Honestly, I wouldn’t say it was a bad vacation. I’ve known people who had bad vacations, and this wasn’t even close. But I will say that this lovely seaside town has a tiny raincloud above it, and it’s addressed only to me. All the things that would pass by uneventfully elsewhere seem to get bumpy for me in Santa Barbara.
I once asked Andrew McCarthy — yes, THAT Andrew McCarthy, the teenage heartthrob-turned-travel writer — how he writes about a location in which something bad happens to him or a place where he doesn’t feel a personal connection.
He said, “I’ve realized that when I don’t feel a connection to a place, it says more about me than it does about the place. It’s rarely ever about the place at all. It’s about what you brought there.”
It means I brought a lot of baggage to Santa Barbara.
Or perhaps, like my husband’s tooth, I’m rotting from the inside out, and Santa Barbara is simply exposing the decay. Who knows?
Either way, it’s a nice enough place that I don’t mind trying to love it again and again.
There’s always next anniversary.