So Buffalo got two feet of snow on Thursday, which makes me want to say – thank you, mom and dad, for moving away from that city when I was a kid and never looking back. :) Sure, I’ve been complaining about the unseasonably warm Texas weather… but two feet of snow in October?? That’s even worse than still needing shorts and t-shirts every day… Actually, it was only about 74 degrees yesterday, and it felt really nice. I ALMOST needed a sweater when I woke up in the morning, because it was about 59. I thought about it… but I knew if I actually put a sweater on, I’d be too warm within an hour or so. But I think this is a turning point… I think autumn is really here this time. Really. (I’m going to be optimistic about it…)
The cold front that brought the 59-degree morning has been big news about town – I had a dentist’s appointment the other day, and everyone in the office was talking about it. It was that sort of excited chatter you hear when someone is expecting a long-lost friend – “hey, so-and-so is back in town!” Hey, cooler weather is back in town! Let’s all give the cooler weather a big hug and take it out to dinner! If we wine and dine it, perhaps it’ll stick around…
And speaking of the dentist – when I was younger, they always used those little spinning brushes to clean your teeth. They sort of tickled your gums and left grainy bits of toothpaste in your mouth, and it took quite a while because the dental hygienist would clean each individual tooth one by one. But now (at least at my dentist), they use this baking soda mixture to polish your teeth, which is applied with some sort of high-powered fire hose. It’s a lot faster than the little spinning brush, but it tastes really terrible, and the baking soda flies all over the place. You have to wear a helmet and goggles and protective elbow pads, and when they’re finished cleaning your teeth, they send in a construction crew to patch up the holes in the walls and repaint the ceiling. (I may be exaggerating slightly, but I swear I had baking soda in my eyelashes when I left the dentist’s office…)
My dentist now is the same dentist I went to when we first moved to Texas – back when I was nine years old. When I was eleven, I needed braces (I was starting to look a little bit like a chipmunk), and my dentist decided I should have four teeth pulled so there’d be room in my mouth for my wisdom teeth. And that actually worked out quite well – by the time I was sixteen, I had all my wisdom teeth (all my teeth appeared really early) and I grew quite fond of them, to be honest. There’s just something great about having three sets of molars to really chew your food well. And then a few years ago, not too long after I’d moved back here from New Jersey, one of my wisdom teeth cracked – a little part of it actually fell off. That just didn’t seem good. Never a good thing when part of your tooth chips off. And since I didn’t have a dentist here yet, I decided to go back to the same one I’d had as a kid. This time he recommended I just go to an oral surgeon and get rid of the wisdom teeth, since they’re hard to keep clean and the people who hang on to them usually wind up needing root canals and crowns anyway.
So I bid my wisdom teeth a mournful goodbye (I actually DO miss them sometimes). But then I realized that ultimately, I didn’t need to have those first four teeth pulled, did I? The original idea was to remove those teeth so I could keep all my wisdom teeth. (Or perhaps the idea was to make sure the wisdom teeth weren’t impacted, so they’d be easier to remove in the future?) But now the wisdom teeth are gone. So I think I’d like a refund – I want my first four teeth back. It seems only fair.
I think I need to go shake the baking soda out of my ears…
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