Open Wide and Say Ah
I just spent the morning with my friendly dentist. You want to darken your day, this is one way to blot the sun from a morning. Potential gum disease, stress fractured teeth, a ‘hard bite’, old fillings, potential crown work — it’s like having a TV that only plays Fox News’ Sean Hannity, all the negative opinion that’s fit to speak. My mouth has two months to live. I’m regretting I made the appointment, better just to live my final years in blissful ignorance, gumming my soup dinners happy to never floss again.
My buddy Roger tried that avoidance route, mostly because he couldn’t afford dentists. Half his mouth is devoid of teeth now. They rotted to the point the pain got too much for him, then he had them jerked, something the poor tend to do rather than pay for a crown or implants. Teeth are way down on the list when poverty dictates priorities. And even if he’d had health insurance — which he didn’t — dental health isn’t covered, don’t ask me why.
I got a lot of neighbors here on the cavity-prone South End who look like hillbillies without their molars and incisors. One year I was working building a winery for Professor Bob up north when my co-grunt put down his framing hammer and got down on hands and knees searching the plywood floor we were laying.
“Lose a contact?” I asked, getting down with him to search.
“Naw,” Randy replied, “my &^%$#!!tooth.”
It had rotted, literally, right out of his head. The kid was 22 years old. A minute later he found it by a box of 16 penny nails, a brown little molar, horrible there on the gleaming blonde plywood deck. Next day I asked if he’d gotten in to see the dentist. He shook his head no, opened wide to show me the gap in that rotten mouth of his was filled, then he grinned. “Nothing a little SuperGlue can’t fix.”
No brains, no headache, as my neighbor used to intone, philosophically challenged. I decided right then to buy an electric toothbrush and a year’s supply of floss. Saves me a fortune on SuperGlue.
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