Long in Tooth
I am flat on my back, squinting up at a dazzling light as my dentist peers into my gaping mouth. A no-nonsense woman from Iran, she methodically tugs at one upper tooth after another and repeatedly whispers “mobility” to her assistant, who is recording the results on a clipboard. I’m not surprised that she found a loose tooth: My tongue has been fiddling with it for several weeks. But all of them?
Once I’m upright again, she regards me with an odd expression that I can’t help reading as pity. She clears her throat and her words come a little too slowly and loudly, as if she expects me not to grasp them.
“Mr. Hammond, you are getting dentures.”
Even as I drove home in a daze, I acknowledged that there was a certain rightness to the news – perhaps even an inevitability. After all, my father had dentures: a full set of uppers that he kept in a glass of water at night. He got them in his mid-forties, but because I was nine or ten at the time, I came to see dentures as the defining mark of an old person. Thus began what I saw as the Universal Story of Teeth: Children grew them, then lost them, then grew “permanent” ones that weren’t really permanent because grownups lost them again, one by one, until none were left. The principal difference between me and my father – and by extension, between the Young and the Old – was clear: I brushed my teeth at bedtime and he put his in a glass of water.
If my father had reached the final chapter in the Story of Teeth, I stood at its beginning – or close to it. The first pain experienced by all humans is the agony of teething, but I recalled none of that as I stared at Dad’s teeth in that glass. I did remember being rewarded for lost baby teeth with shiny new quarters left by the “Tooth Fairy.” Like every other neighborhood kid, I routinely rode my bike to Dyer’s Market to spend my Tooth Fairy money on Tootsie Rolls, Baby Ruths, and Jawbreakers – an irony that didn’t fully hit me until that foggy drive home from the dentist’s office over half a century later. As I pulled into our driveway, I took some consolation from the thought that at least I got twenty more years out of my natural teeth than my father did.
Dad got his dentures in the late Fifties. The term I remember everyone using – he used it, too — was far less euphemistic: “false teeth.” My mother framed his fate as a warning: Take care of your teeth or you’ll end up like your father. Chastened by his misfortune, my older brother, my older sister, and I brushed regularly and usually correctly: up and down rather than side to side. Although we didn’t use dental floss like Mom did, we dutifully rode our bikes to Dr. Misamore’s office for regular checkups that were, if memory serves, semi-annual. An affable man who tried hard to put kids at ease, Dr. Misamore dispensed a lollipop – yet more irony – to anyone who managed not to put up too much of a fuss in his chair. My brother and I sat in that chair like stones because we were too frightened to make a fuss, but our sister’s fear took the form of nervous chatter. “Hey, Dr. Misamore,” she exclaimed during one visit, “Guess where we’re going for Texas!” Without missing a beat he replied “Christmas?”
As a child I received two or three fillings. Most of my checkups, however, were routine affairs even though my teeth were beginning to crowd together and one canine was twisting sideways. It was a sign of the times that Dr. Misamore was unconcerned with these issues. In small-town Ohio in the late Fifties, snaggly smiles, uneven teeth, and visible gaps were not considered problems to fix – just traits to live with. Except for the few kids who had severe overbites, braces were unheard of.
What was a concern, however, was tooth decay, as TV commercials constantly reminded us. An affable announcer protected from a hurled coconut by a sheet of plexiglass informed us that Colgate provided an “invisible shield” against tooth decay. Colgate also claimed that its special ingredient “Gardal” would make our mouths “three ways clean”: in breath, taste, and teeth. Ipana pitched itself more directly to kids by featuring the animated Bucky Beaver, who urged us in song to “Brusha, brusha, brusha” because Ipana is “dandy for your teeth.” We were also told that if we used Pepsodent, we’d “wonder where the yellow went.” Crest, which contained “Fluoristan,” invoked the Fifties obsession with science by citing an American Dental Association endorsement that I heard often enough to memorize: “Crest has been shown to be an effective decay-preventive dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care.” These were reassuring words: With Dr. Misamore providing the “regular professional care,” I did my part by brushing “conscientiously.” Morning and bedtime brushings surely compensated for the Dr. Peppers and Butterfingers that were also part of my daily routine. And, of course, there was the ever-present warning that issued from Dad’s false teeth, which he sometimes took out and chased after us with as a joke. For another joke, he let them drop onto his lower teeth while his mouth was open – a trick that made him look like a vampire. But isn’t all humor rooted in pain? One time his uppers slipped down by accident while his barbershop quartet was singing “The Old Rugged Cross” at a funeral.
* * *
It is my next appointment, and my dentist is explaining the process that lies ahead. First, another dentist will pull my upper back teeth, leaving the incisors, canines, and premolars so that I can still eat. Once those extractions heal, my dentist will make a mold and send it off so that the denture can be made. When it arrives, I’ll pick it up at her office and take it to the other dentist, who will extract my remaining teeth and put it in place. Then I’ll go back to both dentists for a final look.
As I struggle to take all of this in, unasked questions arise. Will I be able to endure the pain? Will I still taste food? Will my face lose its shape when my denture is out? Will I look – and feel — suddenly and irretrievably old? Two other questions are more practical – and I manage to ask them. This is July: Will all the work be done before I start teaching again in late August? And how do I coordinate the jockeying back-and-forth between this dentist and the other dentist?
In short, I am afraid. I feel myself entering a dark narrative of total helplessness. When my dentist tells me I’ll need to schedule the procedures around the possibility that the other dentist might be taking a vacation, I rip the paper bib from around my neck in frustration. She responds by berating me for what seems like a half hour but actually lasts around five minutes. Why are you so angry? My other patients don’t get angry! My other patients coordinate their own appointments! My other patients are cooperative people! As the scolding continues, her Farsi accent becomes more and more pronounced.
Although I apologize and we make up, sort of, I leave without telling her why I am so angry. I can’t tell her, because I don’t really know.
My father came by his dentures honestly: His parents had false teeth, too. Grandma Hammond’s were so uncomfortable that she wore them only to eat, which gave her face a scary, shrunken-head look. My sister had cavities and my brother had misaligned teeth until the Army fixed them. Clearly, our family inhabited the wrong side of the good-teeth/bad-teeth divide. But even though I came by my dentures honestly, too, I did not go gentle into that toothless night. Everything about getting false teeth was freighted, and not – or at least not only — because of vanity. Upper implants that I had gotten in my late fifties had slipped down just far enough to create a toothy look that made me self-conscious when I smiled. In addition, two of my molars were chipped and a third was gone, which allowed my incisors to start gapping. I knew that dentures would be an aesthetic improvement, but the lure of a nicer smile could not dispel the darker significance of the Universal Story of Teeth. Never mind that my father lived four and a half decades after getting false teeth: As any psychologist will tell you, fear is not always rational. Neither is shame, which probably played an even bigger role. Hadn’t Bucky Beaver schooled me in the quintessentially American link between good teeth and a successful life? A “winning smile,” along with the synonymous “All-American” smile, says it all: Having one marks its possessor as the flat opposite of a loser.
There is a grim rightness to this, too. Access to dental care has always been a poignantly tangible marker of socioeconomic status in America. When it comes to class, we’re like horses: By our teeth ye shall know us — or at least, our origins. My father understood this all too well. Having begun his working life as a pipeliner on a tank farm, he took correspondence courses and became an accountant at the company for which he had once laid pipe. Although the tank farm welcomed all kinds of teeth, the accounting office proved less congenial to a losing smile — so when Dad made the shift from blue collar to white, he decided to get his teeth fixed. Once he learned that they were too far gone to fix, he had them pulled and got his denture.
Like my father, I wound up in a profession that my teeth did not predict – a mismatch that becomes obvious whenever I open my mouth to speak at a faculty meeting. Academia is no more welcoming to a losing smile than an accounting office is, and although I’ve managed to survive there, I’ve always had the worst teeth in the English department. Nor is this likely to change: The arrival of younger professors, all of whom grew up in a world of braces and retainers and whiteners and regular flossing, has only solidified my grip on that distinction.
For an academic, the cultural valence of bad teeth is not helpful. Someone is to blame for them, which makes them emblems of irresponsibility — and professors aren’t supposed to be irresponsible. Bad teeth are also emblems of ignorance — and professors aren’t supposed to be ignorant, either. The gap-toothed or buck-toothed grin is the stereotypical mark of a rube — a view that I absorbed thoroughly as a child who laughed at the puppet Mortimer Snerd, a country bumpkin whose toothy cluelessness provided a foil to Charlie McCarthy, a quick-witted sophisticate in a top hat. When Red Skelton played the hapless hobo Clem Kadiddlehopper, he simulated buck teeth by pulling in his lower lip. Zero, Beetle Bailey’s resident hick, sported an enormous pair of protruding incisors. Then there was the buck-toothed Dr. Julius Kelp, the socially stunted nerd played by Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. The ultimate bad-teeth fool from my childhood, however, was Alfred E. Neuman, whose gap-tooth grin graced every cover of Mad Magazine – a look that was updated in Jim Carrey’s toothy Lloyd Christmas of the Dumb and Dumber movies. Mike Myers played the fool as the equally toothy Austin Powers, whose rodent-like dentition was a comic nod to the British reputation for having bad teeth. Still, that reputation probably wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the American fetishizing of perfect teeth. On the other hand, British aristocrats were always painted with closed mouths; only the commoners, whose faces appear in “genre” paintings, were given such animated expressions as toothy grins. This convention of elite portraiture makes you wonder: what were all those Dukes and Duchesses hiding?
The prestige of the All-American smile is clearest, perhaps, in its absence: Of current celebrities only Michael Strahan has succeeded in making a gap in the teeth – the technical term is diastema – appealing. While a former football star, it seems, can receive dental absolution, no politician could pull that off. When was the last time you saw a political candidate – at least, an American one — with anything less than perfect teeth? The winning smile flashed by liberals and conservatives alike in elections ranging from the town council to the presidency is even more critical to political success than Kennedyesque hair. A male candidate can win without the hair, but not without the teeth. Our broadly grinning political class stands in sharp contrast to our first president, whose lack of a winning smile is routinely attributed to bad teeth. Contrary to popular belief, George Washington’s dentures were not wooden, but were fashioned from bone, ivory, and human teeth that were, by most accounts, harvested from slaves – a fact that lends an especially grim significance to the All-American smile. In a way, though, the very existence of Washington’s dentures – several sets, in fact – aligns him with our dental aspirations: His palpable discomfort on the dollar bill shows what he went through in his futile efforts to get that smile. Another popular myth holds that Paul Revere made Washington’s false teeth. Though that’s not true, Revere was up to the job. He ran an advertisement in the September 8, 1768, issue of the Boston News-Letter that offered artificial teeth to those who had lost theirs “to their great Detriment, not only in looks, but in speaking both in Public and Private.”
When bad teeth aren’t signaling failures of intelligence or patriotism, they signal menace. The most obvious examples are the vampires that my father imitated when he allowed his dentures to drop. The protruding canines of Dracula and his ilk create a human face with an animal’s mouth – as bad a look as I can imagine, especially for an English professor. Here the losing smile degrades from mere ugliness to real danger: If Dracula bites your neck, you’re going to have bad teeth, too. Equally menacing is Richard Kiel’s appearance as Jaws, the Bond villain who combines dentition of Dracula with the physique of the Incredible Hulk. And while the cartoon Sarge, with his grotesquely protruding molar, could hardly be called a true villain, he is definitely a bully. The swirl of fists, feet, and dust that marks his fights with Beetle Bailey shows that things are not going well.
The ultimate sign of things not going well, of course, looms large in the final chapter of the Universal Story of Teeth. In the Dance of Death, a wildly popular motif during the Middle Ages, a shrouded skeleton grins gleefully as he chooses his next by-now-toothless victim, The medieval memento mori, of which poor Yorick remains the most famous example, extolled the skull as a contemplative object – a toothy reminder that all flesh is grass. Yorick’s admonitory skull finds its modern counterpart in the gap-toothed grin on Halloween Jack-o’-Lanterns. It makes sense that these carved pumpkins are supposed to be funny as well as scary. After all, Yorick was a court jester by profession. If you are cursed with bad teeth and a slightly morbid sensibility, however, some of that humor will be lost on you.
* * *
I am undergoing my first extraction. Dentist Number Two, an affable man in his early forties, wastes little time getting started. It’s as if he has dealt with patients who got cold feet and bolted. For an instant it occurs to me that I could bolt, too, but before I know it I have swallowed a pill and he is repeatedly sticking a needle into my gums. Not long after my tongue has grown thick and insensate, he clamps down on the loosest molar and begins twisting and tugging. I can’t see anything, but I know that serious work is taking place from the constant gurgling of the suction tube and my constant need to spit blood into a little sink. The sounds are horrifying: the whine of a drill, the cracking of fragmented teeth, and the sickening pops of roots being torn. I can feel that he is applying considerable force to the task.
What I don’t feel, surprisingly, is any pain. The extraction process itself, one tooth after another, is appallingly old-school: just a man with strong hands and tiny pliers. But the pain management is first-rate. When it’s over, Dentist Number Two applies some kind of caulking to my gums, stuffs my cheeks with gauze, and writes me a prescription for ten more of those pills. After resting for a half-hour or so, I’m out the door. When I reach my car I immediately peer into the rear-view mirror. As promised, only the back teeth have been pulled, and I’m relieved to see that I don’t look disfigured. When I suck in my cheeks, however, ominous depressions form on the sides of my face.
There’s nothing toothier than a skull — and therein resides perhaps the biggest paradox surrounding our teeth. We spend our lives watching them yellow, rot, chip, loosen, and pop out, maybe during an ill-considered bite or a violent sneeze. Once we die, however, our teeth acquire maddening permanence, frequently outlasting every other part of the body. This is why teeth loom so large in the fossil record: Paleoanthropologists have constructed entire hominid lineages from fragmented dental remains and a handful of partial mandibles. Historical archaeologists use teeth as telling indicators — even in the absence of other evidence – of age at death, dietary habits, and social status. And as we all know from the CSI franchise, forensic anthropologists routinely use dental records to identify individual remains. By our teeth ye shall know us, even when nothing else of us is left to know.
A large part of human evolution involved dental changes that accompanied the gradual flattening of an animal face into a human one. With the shrinking of our snouts, our canines receded, and the V-shaped jaw of the typical mammal rounded into the parabolic arch that defines human dentition. Not only did our back teeth flatten to facilitate the side-to-side grinding of food, but their cusps got streamlined. The more primitive molars, exemplified in the chimp-like Dryopithecus of the late Miocene, featured five cusps with the grooves between them forming a Y. This gradually morphed onto a pattern of four cusps with the grooves forming a cross. Perhaps unwittingly prescient of my own future molar pattern of no cusps and no grooves, I wrote a paper about this in a college anthropology class.
Our teeth were able to reduce in size and become more delicate because the tools that we were developing did more and more of the heavy lifting, eating-wise. Hand-axes and flint blades made it blissfully easier to bolt down the typical Paleolithic meal. With our shrinking dentition and the development of more flexible tongues came the capacity to produce a wider variety of vocal sounds, and in time, we began to speak – initially, perhaps, about the food that we were chewing so easily. After a while, we spoke well enough to improve that food by cooperating with each other in hunting game and, eventually, in planting and harvesting crops. As we became increasingly civilized, we started to cook that food, which placed even fewer demands on our teeth. Somewhere along the line, however, we developed a sweet tooth – and at that point, things went downhill fast. We chewed and chatted, as people do, but the chewing grew increasingly labored as our teeth degraded to a point where the chatting got harder, too. We were now fully human: the Universal Story of Teeth had begun.
* * *
Dentist Number One, who made a mold of my mouth and sent it to a denture manufacturer in California, called this week to tell me that my finished denture had arrived. Having picked it up at her office yesterday, I am back in the chair of Dentist Number Two. The biggest of several big days is finally here.
These final extractions are more stressful than the earlier ones. Because my remaining teeth include implants, the twisting is intensified as Dentist Number Two struggles to unscrew them. He works quickly, and when the last tooth is out, he inserts the denture and tells me to hold it in place until it adheres to my gums. Surprised by how bulky it feels in my mouth, I feel a wave of nausea.
Driving home with the metallic taste of blood, I feel slightly overwhelmed — not by pain, but by the recognition that my transformation is official: I am now a person with false teeth.
The next few days were tough. I had been instructed to keep the denture in place overnight so that the tissues that were healing around it could conform to its shape. My mouth felt pinched and airless, and I popped an Ibuprofen every six hours to relieve the dull ache in my cheeks and jaws. My food was limited to macaroni and cheese, applesauce, mashed potatoes, and the blessed salve of ice cream.
Convinced that this would be my life from now on, I succumbed to some fairly dark thoughts, even for me. Chief among them was the recognition of how vulnerable I had become. Dentures had joined eyeglasses as fabricated objects without which I could not live – objects that are not me but are indispensable to being me. On bad days I obsessed over what might happen if my denture broke or got lost. It was easy to imagine myself begging through flapping gums for spare applesauce from strangers on the street. I tried to cheer myself up by remembering that if I had to lose my teeth, the present was the best of all possible times for it. Two and a half centuries ago I would have joined George Washington in having a bulky, ill-fitting contraption in my mouth – assuming, of course, that the Eighteenth-Century Me had George Washington’s money. Two hundred centuries ago I would simply not survive. Although anthropologists tell us that we became fully human by learning to help each other, Paleolithic generosity surely had its limits. I could see myself looking up from a campfire and asking my hunting companion: “Hey, Og, would you be a pal and chew my meat for me?” The Stone-Age Me would be terribly naïve, of course, to expect that degree of altruism: However sympathetic he may have been, Og had enough to do fending – and chewing — for himself.
I wouldn’t thrive in a post-apocalyptic future, either. What if a man managed to survive a nuclear attack but lost or broke his false teeth in the process? I imagined a dental variant of the famous “Twilight Zone” episode in which the bookish Burgess Meredith survives The Bomb and, having stumbled upon the ruins of a library, rejoices that he now has as much time to read as he wants. But then, just as he is settling down beside a stack of books, he breaks his glasses. While a broken pair of glasses would also incapacitate me, my doomsday scenario had just acquired an additional risk– crawling from a bomb shelter to a barbeque place only to discover that my false teeth had disappeared. Of course, if my teeth and my glasses were both missing, I couldn’t see to reach that barbeque place in the first place. Either way, I would have two distinct but equally decisive ways to be a goner.
Catastrophes aside, it was impossible to leave that dentist’s office without feeling diminished. Teeth symbolize strength: To be “toothless” implies its opposite. While this is obvious to anyone who watches National Geographic’s glances into a realm that is famously “red in tooth and claw,” the human realm is not much better. History offers a never-ending sequence of occasions in which people have felt compelled to fight “tooth and nail” – to seek not just an “eye for an eye” but a “tooth for a tooth.” When the speaker of Psalm 58 rails against “the wicked,” he goes out of his way to curse their dentition: “Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.” The Psalmist lived again in a phrase that I heard with fair regularity when I inhabited the roosterish world of high-school males: “I’m gonna knock yer teeth out” – or maybe “in”: I remember both versions. Even when the fighting is metaphorical, “toothless” remains a synonym for inefficacy. We acquire experience and expertise by “cutting our teeth” on something. When an ordinance is weak, we call it “toothless” and seek to replace it with a modified version that “has teeth.” While working on the revision, we “chew on” the relevant issues, and if we chew them thoroughly, we might produce something of substance, something that we can “sink our teeth into.”
* * *
At my post-op exam with Dentist Number Two, I’m finally allowed to remove my denture so he can examine my gums. He asks if the Ibuprofen worked and I say that for the most part it did. After saying that he’s glad to hear it and rubbing my gums a bit longer, he straightens up, flashes his own winning smile, and exclaims “You’re a good healer!”
At my final appointment the following day with Dentist Number One, there is less conversation: The aftermath of our spat is still hanging in the air. When I complain that one corner of the denture pinches a little, she shaves off a tiny fragment of it, which seems to help. In an attempt to break the tension, I decide to draw on a lifelong interest in ancient history and make some small talk about the Persian Empire. “When you were in Iran,” I ask, “did you ever visit Persepolis?” She gives me an odd look and says “No.”
As Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, “I suffered / somewhat.” I also acquired a new bedtime ritual. In addition to brushing my lower teeth, I carefully remove my denture, wash it off, and place it in its case. From an aesthetic standpoint, the denture is an impressive piece of technology. It feels smooth to the touch, its gums are convincingly pink, and its teeth have been color-matched to my lower teeth so that no one but my dentist – and, of course, anyone who watches me eat – knows that I’m wearing it. Still, I cannot perform this bedtime ritual without seeing my denture as a portable memento mori, my own personal Yorick. That it sometimes appears to be grinning at me suggests that I’m not as good a healer, psychologically at least, as Dentist Number Two thought. While I remember giggling like a fool whenever my father chased me with his false teeth, it’s harder to laugh now that he has finally caught me.
And then there’s eating, which has become a far more deliberative process than it used to be: more cutting, smaller bites, and longer chewing. Eating is also less pleasurable. Because my soft palette is now covered by thin plastic, hundreds of taste buds are isolated from whatever enters my mouth. When I chew something that offers any resistance, the denture occasionally shifts, and there’s a limit to how far I can open my mouth. Double-decker hamburgers have become fond memories, along with corn on the cob, hard candy, and whole apples. Particles of food that slide away from natural teeth will sometimes stick to a denture, which requires the intervention of a probing tongue and, in extreme cases, a finger. When it comes to cooking pasta, al dente means something different to me than it does to most people.
The phrase “left to one’s own devices” has assumed a literal – and ominous — significance for me. Devices of my “own” now include a new one that, like my glasses, is fabricated and therefore unnatural. This raises the question of what, exactly, is authentically me and mine? How is a newly Bionic Man supposed to see himself? Though I am gradually getting use to my denture, I still feel an occasional gag reflex when I insert it – not the best way to start the day, though I’m rapidly forgetting any other way to start one. Worse are those times when I find myself acutely aware of my denture. At such moments, the consciousness of having a foreign object in my mouth makes it almost impossible to think about anything else – until I realize how helpless I’d be without this foreign object in my mouth. What If Xerxes the Great, that illustrious forebear of Dentist Number One, were to conquer Silver Spring, Maryland, and the only available food consisted of stray apples that have fallen from the trees? The Current Me would be no different than the Paleolithic Me: “Hey, Norma, would you be a pal and chew this apple for me?”
One dark thought, of course, leads to another: What will become of my dentures when I die? Will they be buried or cremated with me? Thrown away? Donated to a novelties store? Incorporated into some kid’s Halloween costume? My late father offers no guidance here: I don’t know what happened to his false teeth because no one in the family kept them as mementos – mori or otherwise. Dad donated his body to a medical school; it was cremated at the end of its use as a teaching tool. Were his false teeth donated, too? Did they stay with him all the way to the crematorium? Will mine?
* * *
It has been six weeks since I got my denture, and I am about to deliver an annual lecture that I give at the college where I teach. Never a comfortable speaker, I’ve always suffered stage-fright beforehand. This time, however, the mild nausea that I am managing to suppress has a new cause. As I’m being introduced I can’t help thinking about my father’s false-teeth debacle at that long-ago funeral, and for the first time in years I find myself silently mouthing something that approximates a prayer.
As I approach the podium and take a sip from the bottle that I’m carrying, the water briefly floats the denture out of its proper position. I lay my notes on the podium, adjust the lamp, and firmly press it back into place with my tongue. After a deep but measured breath, I start to speak. I can detect a faint lisp in my voice — but since no one else seems to notice, I keep talking.
The audience responded reasonably well: Apparently, the talk had teeth even if the talker didn’t. Getting through that lecture was an important step in an incremental process of adjustment that is still going on. Every so often, however, I find myself sinking into admittedly unearned self-pity that I try to check with a measure of empathy: Many people are living their lives with prosthetic devices that are far more obtrusive and self-altering than mine. It also helps to remember that no man is an island, especially when it comes to bad teeth. According to the “History of Dentistry Timeline” posted on the American Dental Association website, “tooth worms” are mentioned in a 7,000-year-old text from ancient Sumer. An Egyptian scribe named Hesy-Re, who died around 4,600 years ago, is sometimes called the first “dentist.” A tomb inscription describes him as “the greatest of those who deal with teeth.” But while the ubiquity of losing smiles throughout human history offers a sense of community, I still find it difficult to resist the occasional wallowing: On bad days I scan the obituary photos in the newspaper, noting ruefully that nearly every face I see sports a more winning smile than mine, denture and all. Such brooding may reflect the fact that among the first victims of Dentist Number Two were my rear molars, my “wisdom” teeth. Or more likely, it reflects the muted rage of someone who has officially become “long in tooth” and is struggling against other changes – bigger ones — that he knows lie ahead.
At least, that’s what I’d tell Dentist Number One if I were having that tantrum in her chair today. I would also feel more empathy for her difficult task of having to deliver the bad news. Doling out such news on a daily basis might explain why dentists are so prone to suicide. According to the blog “Mental Health Daily,” their suicide rate is second only to physicians and just above police officers. Is this because they are forced to read the Universal Story of Teeth, day in and day out? Is it because they constantly have to deal with failing dentition as the harbinger of an entropic process that eventually swallows us all? Does that endless parade of teeth confront them with an ongoing memento mori from which they cannot turn away?
If these guesses have any teeth, it’s time to turn away from this foreign object in my mouth and stop keening over what it signifies. The winning smiles on those obituary pages suggest that as a kid I had it all wrong: What I thought was the Universal Story of Teeth was actually the Universal Story of Life. While it’s not pleasant to consider the diminished agency that marks the end of this latter story, I remember that my father, now ten years gone, managed to accept the limitations of old age without too much fuss, even without a winning smile. It just goes to show that a parent’s presence never ends, not really. Indeed, the teeth that I remove each night have prompted an unexpected reconnection with him: How to cope gracefully with their message that I am officially old is probably the last and best lesson that he will teach me.
• • •
Jeffrey Hammond’s literary nonfiction has appeared in such places as The Antioch Review, Hotel Amerika, Fourth Genre, River Styx, The Gettysburg Review, Ohio Magazine, and The American Scholar. His work has won two Pushcart Prizes (XXV, XXXV), Shenandoah‘s Carter Prize in Essay (2000, 2004), and The Missouri Review
Editor’s Prize in Essay (2005), and several pieces have
received “special mention” and “notable essay” citations in the
Pushcart annual and Best American Essays.