Hello, Tooth Fairy!

Losing a tooth at age six is exciting; losing one at age sixty is not.

At age six, the tooth-gapped smile is a sign of maturity. Those front teeth, once the suspected source of infant irritability, are celebrated as they wiggle free. At six, the improbable saw-toothed permanent teeth emerge into the double-wide gap like so many daffodil spears rising up through pink earth. Those treasured baby teeth are tucked under a pillow, where the tooth fairy takes them with silver.

Without fail, I carried those quarters and half dollars to the variety store three blocks from my home, where I squandered them on candy. If only I’d known, at age six, to invest the money in stocks for when I neared sixty, I could have cashed in blue chips to repair chipped teeth and buy gold crowns. Even an ordinary savings account with compound interest would have added up over all those years.

But the tooth fairy magic has been replaced by dental insurance, which isn’t nearly as good as cold cash under the pillow. And even if those teeth came with a lifetime warranty, the lifetime Baby Boomers expected at birth would start expiring right about now.

A Boomer born in 1950 was expected to live to 65; but a Boomer who’s now 65 is expected to live past 80; those of us who make it to 80 could be looking at ninety – or longer. So those teeth that started coming in during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were supposed to last the rest of much shorter lives. And it turns out that the lifetime on teeth, at least in the case of my back molar, expires after fifty years of grinding service.

At six, losing a tooth is as simple as trying one end of a string around the loose tooth and the other to a door that an obliging brother gleefully slams, winging the tooth out of your mouth. It’s not as simple at sixty.

First, there’s the exquisite facial pain as the nerves of a back molar die with dramatic fanfare. Next, a visit to the dentist, a root canal, and a temporary crown that fails with the first bite of a chicken salad sandwich. On to the oral surgeon.

I’m in the chair, annoyed because I’ve used up my allotment of dental insurance for the year, and I’m going

to have to pay out of pocket to have what’s left of this already expensive tooth removed. But this and all thoughts evaporate when the oral surgeon appears wearing blue scrubs, his face masked like a terrorist, wielding a scalpel in front of my face. He says, “Open wide.”

I close my eyes.

The tooth comes out with difficulty, and my jaw turns black and blue.

Per my dentist’s instructions, I ask the surgeon to lay the groundwork for an implant.

The surgeon lowers his mask and asks, “Why?”

Before I can answer, he says “Teeth have two purposes: to smile and chew.”

I nod; my mouth is too numb for speech.

“Your molar doesn’t affect your smile,” he says, “and you still have plenty of teeth for chewing.”

At long last, I learn to eat slowly – because I have to, and I become dedicated to my new, cordless electric toothbrush, which beeps at thirty-second intervals during the two minutes it takes me to brush. This allows me ample time to calculate that if I do this twice a day, I will spend twenty-four hours and twenty minutes each year brushing my teeth – and that doesn’t include flossing.

I floss.

I’ll do everything I can to avoid or delay the bionic years of false teeth, including spending a month of the next thirty years brushing. After all, I’m just in Middle Age.

 My Tooth Fairy first appeared in The Rutland Herald on March 25, 2105.