Teeth Like God's Shoeshine

My mom has big teeth, my dad's are smaller.  I get my dad's mouth and my mom's teeth and so they don't fit in my mouth, which meant that when I was a kid I had to have, like, four of them yanked out as my other teeth grew in. I remember being able to put a pencil in my mouth and close my mouth completely, with either end of the pencil just sticking out.  It could just sit in there where the four teeth had been.  This was before cable, see. 

Then I learned that my teeth have high and mighty crowns and were impossible to clean, so that when the lady came to elementary school to teach us all how to brush properly by giving us these weird red tablets to chew which stained our teeth, after we all brushed our teeth I could NEVER get the red stuff out.  Ever.  Like right then I should have told my folks to start saving up for my dentist bills because the next ten years was one cavity after another until the back of my mouth resembled moonraker.

Needless to say, I was no fan of the dentist, especially after that one in Yuba City who left me alone too long under the gas and I had my first hallucinogenic episode.  Seriously, if you don't know what's happening, there's nothing recreational about the hallucinations - it's just scary, the world spinning around and all you can see is the pale green paper bib and a spit sink. Then there was the time I got braces and every time I got my rubber bands tightened my mouth hurt so much that I would cry.  There was the orthodontist who tugged so hard that I actually punched him in the face, and the orthodontist who had to actually BURN away the gums which had grown over parts of the braces.  Nothing like the smell of your own gums burning to sear (ha ha) the hatred of dental work into you. (I will never forget the word 'gingevectomy' for as long as I ever, ever live.)

So when I left the organized life of law and started paying for my own health (and dental) care, I kind of sort of let all the dental stuff go.  Sure, I flossed regularly, brushed, blah blah, but I figured that the teeth would go one day, catastrophically and there'd be nothing I could do about it, dentist or no dentist. 

And then, thanks to the WGA health plan, I thought, why not go the dentist?  It's on them.  So I went. 

My teeth, apparently, are perfect.  I have no idea how, except that maybe everything that could go wrong has already gone wrong and been removed, sanded down, filled in or otherwise magicked away.  That, or the dentist lied through his impossibly straight, white teeth.