Dental Entropy

         I am in a good mood because yesterday I had two teeth pulled and a temporary bridge spanning 6 teeth installed, a procedure I had been dreading for about a month now, and it all went without a hitch. So far, anyway. 

        When I was about 8 years old, I was living on Sierra Ct., in Palo Alto. I was at home, and was supposed to be licking and installing S&H Green stamps into their books, but I tired of that pretty quickly and went outside to play on my skate board. You recall that “back in the day,” a skateboard was not a sophisticated semi-flexible platform with low-rolling-resistance resin wheels and needle bearing trucks. It was as the name implied, a board with a skate nailed to it. And we were the ones, or thereabouts, who helped put a man on the moon.  Who knew? 

        I was using my skate board as a kind of sled—I had one knee on it and was pushing myself along with the free foot, both hands on a wooden cross bar nailed to the front, like low handlebars. I encountered an overly large gap in the sidewalk and the skateboard stopped abruptly but my head (and the rest of my body) continued on, arcing downward until my face hit the sidewalk. More precisely, my two front teeth, both of which broke off about half-way to the gum line. 

        Later that same day, my mother came home from work and, as I remember with crystal clarity, I was lying on the couch eating a banana as she entered the living room, and I showed her what happened to my teeth. Her reaction was violently dramatic, with lots of anger directed at me. 

        I felt horrible. It was, after all, my fault. Plus, it happened because I was shirking my duties concerning the Green Stamps. My punishment seemed to be that once root canals were performed on each front tooth (think: Theodoric of York style 1958 dentistry) each tooth was capped with a stainless steel crown. Both of them. I don’t recall being ridiculed for this, but I didn’t like it. 

        Over the years I had—a guess—maybe five sets of crowns installed on these poor broken front teeth. I always had dreams where my front teeth fell out, and I would wake from them in a very real panic, checking with my tongue and fingers that they were actually still there. 

        A few years back, the root tip of one of them became irreversibly infected and that tooth got pulled. Yesterday, for the same reason, the other one got pulled. 

        It actually feels like a relief. A 62 year-long saga has finally ended. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way I feel. I expected to feel depressed about having no front teeth, but, no. It’s fine. Good riddance. I now owe the universe one less thing!