Hillbillies, Fallingwater & Missingteeth

Last weekend, we ate at Hillbilly’s Pub and Grub—Donegal, Pennsylvania’s only non-pizza sit-down restaurant. Not that I’ve got anything against pizza, but c’mon, Hillbilly’s Pub and Grub? Ya gotta try it. Susan got fish and chips. She said it was fine. I got a burger and onion rings. Holy cow, what a burger! The onion rings weren’t bad either. “Wow, this is better than Appalachian Brewing Company,” the gold standard for burgers in Gettysburg. In the hotel room before dinner, I said “I’m going to show them my missing tooth and see if I can get the hillbilly discount.” I was trying to get a rise out of Susan.

While at the restaurant, that comment floated back to me. I mused over it being the sort of thing an old(ish) guy like me might repeat several times. To the hostess, to the waiter, to the guy whizzing next to me in the john… Happily, no insistent ODC poked at me. I kept my mouth shut instead.

I told Susan, “It’s starting to look like I won’t get that tooth fixed until next year.”

“I’m sorry this is taking so long. I’d be pretty bummed to be missing a tooth for a year.”

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This week, the prompt at my writer’s group was “and we laughed and laughed…” Hmmm, I thought, fiction then. I’m not a laugh-out-loud sort of guy. In fact, smiles are rare as well. The surgeon I saw about my broken off tooth last week noted this. “Give me a smile. No, a really big smile. Can we see your missing tooth?” I gave my on-command smile, a toothy straight line reminiscent of a grade-schooler saying cheese. My teeth are visible, but no joy lurks there. “No, I can barely see the gap. It really comes down to vanity if you want a temporary bridge. After I extract your tooth, and set an implant in your bone, it won’t be ready for a crown until October.”

Christ, October? I might as well wait until January when my dental insurance resets. The implant will gobble up my whole insurance limit this year. I’ll be thankful when he pulls out that tooth. The remaining edge, protruding just beyond the gum, is sharp. I jab at it with my tongue until it bleeds.

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Donegal, Pennsylvania is the highway off-ramp for two popular tourist attractions. Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece architectural achievement sits thirty minutes to the south, and the Flight 93 National Memorial—the spot where United Airlines 9/11/2001 Flight 93 crashed into a farm field—sits forty-five minutes to the east. Without those destinations, I’m not sure Donegal would even exist.

We didn’t visit the Flight 93 Memorial, although I’d like to this summer. In a past post, I repeated, or possibly invented, a conspiracy theory about Flight 93. After driving by last weekend, and later talking to a friend about the powerful voice recordings of the passengers’ final words played on loop there, I decided I should probably visit the site and learn the facts before I spread any more sketchy rumors. In that same blog post, I also predicted that Biden would win the 2020 election and that the stolen election narrative would start America’s second civil war. I still can’t tell if I was right.

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Fallingwater is gorgeous. It’s styled to blend into the existing landscape of stratified rock cliffs. The stone for the house was mined on site, and there is little difference between the walls of the house (interior and exterior) and the walls of the cliffs that surround the area. Besides stone, the other primary feature of Fallingwater is glass. Wright put windows everywhere. His goal was to give the residents the feeling of being surrounded by nature even when indoors.

If you ever find yourself in southwestern Pennsylvania, consider a stop at Fallingwater. The tour lasts sixty minutes and costs around thirty dollars. Easily worth fifty cents a minute. But buy your ticket in advance, despite streaming hundreds of people through the house per day, the Sunday we visited was a complete sellout.