Chin Music
It was dental day for me today, the normal 6-month checkup, plus she (my dentist) was anxious to see how my obscenely expensive implant and gold crown was holding up. She has a habit of asking questions while scraping and poking in my mouth, questions that require answers in sentences and paragraphs rather than grunts or eyebrow signals, but I feel like it would be impolite to spit out her tools and fingers to deliver them. We’re about the same age - we met her and her husband at a barbeque quite a long time ago - and we both have kids about the same age. She made a statement about how expensive it was to have two kids at the University of Washington, and segued into a discussion that I was unprepared for, involving exotica such as gum grafting, orthodonture and even more hardware to remember to wear at night. If I didn’t trust her implicitly (and I do), I’d have attached more significance to the juxtaposition of the two topics.
She suspects that my lower front teeth are migrating and might benefit from a retainer worn at night. She already has me (and my wife) wearing plastic nightguards on our upper teeth. Maybe she thinks we’re at the point in our marriage where conversation plainly articulated is not as salubrious in the bedroom as it once was, and is doubling as a marriage counselor.
And more than once she’s used the phrase “As we age…” to preface a pronouncement about some phenomenon taking place in my mouth. There is a bit of comfort in having that said by a contemporary, and it sets me to wondering how my parents and mother-in-law feel (their old health-care providers mercifully retired from practices whose competence had no doubt eroded) when a 20- or 30-something uses a similar entree. I hope it’s said with a degree of respect and empathy that I perhaps would have found lacking in myself at that callow age.
