Joe ~ May 20

 

All Mine

 

It is a beautiful day. It started by a visit to my wonderful dentist, who squeezed me into his busy schedule to put a temporary crown on a tooth I recently broke. Over forty years ago when I first moved to Manhattan, my teeth were in pretty bad shape. My parents were very scrupulous when in came to dental hygiene. I brushed regularly and we had a very kind and diligent dentist that inspected and repaired our teeth on a regular schedule. He had an office in his old house and the waiting had a large grandfather clock and massive fish tank, and there was a Mahogany tree in his yard. Which was very unusual as it was the only Mahogany tree in all of Northeastern Pennsylvania. All this worthy of a Saturday Evening Post cover. Despite the focus on our collective tooth health, by the time I was 25 years old, I was the only member of my immediate family who did not sport a mouthful of dentures. Of course their teeth were perfectly straight and their smiles were beaming and shiny and had that popular sparkle that was seen in toothpaste commercials. But, I had the knowledge that my choppers were the real McCoy and I took a great deal of pride in crying out, “They’re mine!!! All mine!!!”. So, after moving to NYC my teeth start to disintegrate. When they got to the point that pain was becoming more a factor than I could tolerate, I started looking for a dentist. My wife was working in a building that had dozens of medical offices and someone she worked with recommended a dentist. His office was on 57th street, above the former Steinway showroom. Now to get down to brass tacks…His name was Dr. Lee, and he was a Super Hero in the guise of a dentist. After a series of caps, crowns, bridges and root canals, he miraculously saved every tooth in my mouth. The caveat being, their are a lot of fillings in your mouth and I’m not sure how long they will stay in place. More work would be needed down the line. It took about 6 months of visits to rehabilitate my incisors, canines, molars and pre-molars but I could proudly shout out to the masses, still. “They’re Mine!!!, They’re Mine!!!”. So now I’m entering my seventies and only over the last couple of years have those teeth, repaired so long ago, have weakened and and needed to be implanted and canaled and capped to retain my toothly independence. In a world of constant upheaval and chaos, propaganda and hopelessness, I still have my own teeth. Oh yes, you might say they are prosthetically enhanced, but that’s OK. I have buried many family members where I had to store their dentures in a cup or worse yet clean them as they attempted to gum their way through a conversation of slurred words and syllables. The things we do for love. I don’t ever want my children or even that hospice nurse to have to deal with the mock teeth that are disguising the lack of real chewability which I proudly retain. So in the immortal words of the singing troubadour RAFFI, I will preach to my Grandchildren:

When you wake up in the morning. It’s a quarter to five

And you just can’t wait to come alive…..

You brush your teeth, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch

Because THEY’RE MINE!!!! ALL MINE!!!!