One Thing or Another: Chew On That

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

“You can miss the color of someone’s eyes, or the shape of their nose, but a grin with no teeth dares you to ignore it.”

You know you’re getting older when half your teeth have abandoned you, leaving your mouth like homeowners who’ve found a better neighborhood. You want them to stay. You offer incentives (“No more sugar, I promise!”), but they leave anyway, wiggling their way from the root up until they either fall out or get pulled out by a dentist who’s been lecturing you for ten years to use an electric toothbrush.

Teeth are equal opportunity offenders, too. Not content to leave from the back of your mouth, they’re just as likely to come loose in the front. You’ll be eating a muffin one morning at your favorite diner, catching up on the headlines with a smartphone next to your plate, when suddenly there’s a small, hard object in your food that had been part of you a moment before. Sometimes you don’t feel a thing, you just notice a tooth in your blueberries or a space in your mouth where the runaway tooth used to be. Oops. There goes another one.

I could live with the loss of my back teeth—and still do. But the front ones are the public face of me. They represent me every time I open my mouth in anything wider than a whisper. You can miss the color of someone’s eyes, or the shape of their nose, but a grin with no teeth dares you to ignore it.

Some folks can’t afford dental work, and some just choose not to do anything about it. I was lucky enough to have insurance for my first permanent bridge covering my bottom front teeth, and to have inherited a windfall when the uppers needed to be done. What people assumed were my pearly whites were really my pearly porcelains. They were anchored well … or so I thought … and for several years I almost forgot they weren’t my real teeth.

Then a bad decision by the dentist who’d done both bridges came back to bite me. Apparently he had not secured the top one properly, and the underlying teeth came loose.

My choices were simple: cough up another nine grand to replace a permanent bridge I’d already paid that much for, or go the much less expensive route of a partial denture. Knowing I’d like to see that difference in my bank account when I retire, I opted for the plate.

The first time this happened I refused to get a removable denture. I remembered my mother taking her teeth out every night, and I wasn’t willing to “put my teeth in a jar,” as I phrased it at the time. But now, six years later, looking at an eventual fixed income and really annoyed with a particular retired dentist, I said okay. I’m married. My husband will still love me with teeth I leave in a Polident bath every night before strapping on the CPAP nose pillows. We’ll get through this.

It’s been over a year, and I’m used to a partial plate. I still  have the lower bridge, so at least I’m only missing half a set of teeth when I sleep. My tongue has made peace with the plastic on the roof of my mouth, and I don’t really think about it much until I get something stuck in there. That happens a lot, especially with vegetables. And once in a while when we’re eating in a restaurant, I excuse myself to use the restroom. I slip the teeth out, free the stray broccoli, and get back to my dinner with no one knowing I’d just removed the heart and soul my smile. I offer another one to my companions, and the meal goes happily on.

Mark McNease is the author of eight novels and two short story collections. He’s the editor and publisher of LGBTSr, “where age is embraced and life is celebrated.” He was the co-creator of the Emmy winning children’s program Into the Outdoors, and currently hosts two podcasts.