My Teeth are the Timekeepers
Updated: Aug 19
My teeth have been a source of concern for as long as I can remember. When my permanent teeth were first growing in, my adoptive mother would peer at them, frowning. A variety of toothpastes were purchased in an attempt to whiten them. My biological mother had evidently taken some kind of medication when she was pregnant and now my teeth bore the tell-tale stains.
When I was around twenty, I was told by a modeling agency in Denver that they could only find work for me if I were willing to do something about my teeth. They sent me to a marginally skilled dentist who created a set of porcelain veneers that covered the stains, but were too thick for my mouth, leaving me with an overbite that made me feel like a horse. They made me so self-conscious, I kept my mouth closed most of the time.
A few years later, a new dentist in Boston refashioned the veneers, making them smaller and thinner, but also not well matched to the color of my back teeth. Another dentist in Orange County attempted to correct both the color and the shape. The saga continued.
In the late 90s, I still had dental insurance, a long-forgotten luxury at this point. When I moved to San Francisco, I chose a dentist in my neighborhood, and I proceeded to see her twice a year for the next thirty years. During that time, absolutely nothing changed in her office. The cheap posters depicting the streets of Santorini faded in their frames. The X-ray system, which was already outdated in 1995, grew ever more obsolete. A procession of dental hygienists draped a lead cape over my chest and instructed me not to breathe or move. As they clomped down the hallway to capture the image on ancient X-ray film, the arm of the machine would bounce up and down with each step, producing an indistinct gray blur that looked a bit like one of those UFO photos in the National Enquirer. I can’t imagine that it was of much diagnostic value. My dentist would glance at it briefly, then remind me to use the sensitive toothpaste if my molars hurt.
My teeth are the time keepers, tracking each bite of blueberry pie, each sip of coffee or red wine. Each hasty morning with no time to floss, each tense night spent grinding as I processed the news of the day. Now, at the age of 60, they are showing signs of wear. The silver fillings in my molars have spent the last 50 years expanding and contracting with each sip of hot tea or ice-cold lemonade, and just like the granite walls of Yosemite, began to form fissures, which deepened over time into cracks.
Which is how it came to be that one of my molars, neglected for years, cracked all the way up into its root, creating the most acute pain I ever felt in my life, literally bringing me to my knees into child’s pose on the floor of the kitchen.
“It sounds like you need a root canal,” the receptionist told me over the phone, “so you’ll have to go see an endodontist or an oral surgeon.” The dentist never even bothered to call me back. Thus began my latest adventure in dentistry, to try to repair half a lifetime of deferred maintenance on my teeth.
Don’t fight the pain. Try to befriend it. Get curious about it. Dig deeper for adjectives to describe it. Stack rank it throughout the day – is that a 6 or a 7? How much higher will it go if you take a sip of cold water or a bit of something slathered in tomato sauce? Is that an 8? Will it get to 10? I remember from going through childbirth that there is a moment when you break through the top and have to start a whole new scale of 110+, 10++, 10+++, etc.
Stop thinking about it. Try to keep the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth. That will release your jaw, which is supposedly where all of this started. Pretend that your tongue is actually Crazy-glued to the top of your mouth. Don’t move it.
Try to find that electric massage wand gizmo we used to have. Is it under the bed? Why do we waste money on this kind of stuff if we can’t even find it when we need it? Oh, lord, the dust! But don’t worry about it now, just plug it in and let the healing begin. Ok, now I remember why this thing got shoved under the bed. I feel like I’m riding an electric lawnmower! My teeth are actually vibrating inside my head. And, yes, there it is, that jaw muscle, tighter than a steel band. It clenches and grinds all night. And there’s that nerve that shoots up behind my cheekbone and eye socket.
See if you can stop resisting this and just relax. If nothing else, it will distract you from the acute pain of your exposed molar. Just keep ahead of the Advil, like the dentist advised. Where is that Advil? Wasn’t there recently something about how it makes people’s stomach lining bleed? Or was that aspirin? Try not to think about it. Maybe just see if Google has any additional insight about pain management. Meditation, right, of course – the answer to everything. It should be perfectly easy to meditate now, right?
Welcome to the lunar landscape interior of my head in hi-res black & white. Please come inside.
Like mushrooms growing deep beneath the surface of the earth, my teeth push upward, stretching and reaching for my brain. One of them has a long, deep fissure running down its side: it’s the Grand Canyon inside my face.
On the outside, I feel nothing. The air gun, the tap test, none of them can make me flinch. It’s a strange superpower: the inner nerve that had me on my knees in child’s pose just a few weeks ago is now completely dead and numb. As much as they try to probe and hurt me, I can’t feel a thing.
And yet, underneath it all is a faintly metallic taste that won’t go away, regardless of how much I brush and floss. It’s there when I wake up in the morning, and it accompanies me throughout the day. And wait – what is that throbbing sensation? Is it just a reminder that I’m still alive? My heart is still beating, for the moment at least.
My ancestors must have endured this kind of thing with so much more bravery and grace. Living in damp caves, mud huts, log cabins – there was no option for sedation. They probably just reached into their mouths with a pair of rusty pliers and took care of it themselves.
But of course, they didn’t have the hi-res images, which illustrate in stark contrast the landscape of the upside-down inside my head. I can see that the roots of my teeth have grown into my sinuses. Did the endodontist just use the word “penetrate”? Or “perforate”? Was that “protrude”? Or “puncture”?
At any rate, welcome to the other side of my face.
I can probably come up with a few good photos of the outside of my head to make me look as though everything is perfectly normal. So far, only the two of us know the real truth.
It all goes rushing by like water under the bridge.
I once again had the opportunity to reflect upon my teeth this week as I sat in the chair waiting for my new dentist to begin what he refers to as “Phase 3.” This dentist has no faded prints hanging on his walls – instead, it features an array of state-of-the art digital flat screens.
That tooth helped me to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, chew and swallow. It gave me fuel and it bit down whenever I needed it to. And then, at some point, it cracked under the burden of its never-ending task, and then it slowly died in place, nestled between its colleagues in my skull. It still chewed, but it no longer felt or noticed what it was chewing on. I know there’s probably a metaphor in here someplace, but I don’t know what it is. It seems to me that the human condition is just a constant process of chewing and swallowing, whether we taste it or not. At any rate, they had to pull it out.
I’ve been in this body for 60 years and I’ve ridden it hard. I know there are ways to cover that up on the outside – cosmetic procedures, lotions, potions and creams. But my teeth always tell the truth. They’ve been sitting here inside my head, gnashing and clashing, gnawing and grinding for decades. Taking on the patina of a worn ivory spoon, with shades of ecru darkening to deposits of outright brown in places. It’s inevitable with all that coffee and red wine down the hatch. You can’t stop the process of aging, they remind me.
And yet, they sit right here, front and center, at the gateway of speech, food, kisses and more. I want them to gleam like the newly fallen snow. Which is why I agreed to have my teeth covered with some kind of toxic tasting rubbery goo that set up like cement, then allowed myself to be manipulated and photographed like the suspect of a crime.
And it’s also why I am now staring at those photographs, larger than life on a panel of hi-def flatscreens, grinning like some kind of deranged circus clown. I have no one but myself to blame for this, but this is not what I anticipated when I agreed to this “smile design.” Of course, I expected them to try to sell me some teeth bleaching or maybe even some Invisalign. And sure, it does seem like the ultimate absurdity that a woman of 60 would even consider throwing down a ridiculous sum of money on Invisalign when the world seems to be careening toward the apocalypse.
In my defense, I was just yearning for some kind of concrete and achievable long-term goal in the midst of all this uncertainty. Something that could be broken down into small, manageable chunks. Instead, I subjected myself to one of the most bizarre, humiliating experiences I can recall.
Today, I will try to remember to taste as I chew, both the bitter and the sweet. Feel it as it goes down, as pleasant or unpleasant as that may be.
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