Part 4: Teeth

Note: For background on this series, please read the Introduction to the 32-Parts Project.

I was eight years old when I received my first baseball and glove. We recently had moved into a new house in a new subdivision in Lawrence, a suburb of Indianapolis. The houses were small and the lawns meager. Trees lining the street were just saplings planted by the developer, held upright by stakes and guy wires. Boundaries were not yet established, and backyards blended together into one big lot with plenty of space for throwing a baseball around.

The day I got the new glove, I was in the backyard, tossing the ball in the air and catching it. The kid from next door wandered over. He wanted to see my glove. I handed it to him along with the ball. He put the glove on and began plopping the ball into it. The back door swung open, and mother came out, offering to toss us a few. The kid from next door gave her the ball.

I can see her still, stepping into the underhand toss. She wears a red and white checked blouse and khaki shorts. In a confusing moment – as the ball arcs through the air toward me – I wonder why the kid from next door is wearing my glove. It’s my glove, my ball, my mother. I prepare to catch the ball with my bare hands. I see the gloved hand lunge for the catch. The ball glances off the finger tips of the glove and changes course. I am unable to adjust fast enough. The ball crashes into my mouth. Stunned, I taste blood. I feel something small and hard in my mouth. I spit it into my hand, along with spatters of blood. My tongue runs over the jagged edge of a broken tooth.

The dentist said I was too young, my teeth too immature, to apply a permanent fix. I would have to wait until I was at least sixteen. A couple years later, I was offered a temporary solution. A metal cap, open in the front to form a window around the broken part, was fitted over my tooth. The window was filled with some discolored, gritty cement stuff.

This temporary fix lasted only as long as the next bout of roughhousing on the playground. The slightest jolt to the mouth knocked the cap loose and had me spitting out bits of pseudo-tooth. I don’t know how many of these I’d had, but after a while I decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Besides, these caps were no disguise. I wasn’t fooling anybody. I was disfigured by a broken tooth, and I had to live with it.

While watching grown-ups talk, I focused on their upper lips. I noticed that some people were all teeth, upper lip curled tightly above the gum line. But others, people I attempted to emulate, had upper lips that remained like curtains over their upper teeth. But my obvious stiff-upper-lip approach seemed to draw attention to my flaw rather than hide it. I learned to talk less. I rarely smiled.

During elementary school, I was firmly grounded in the Catholic education system. Along with my Catechism, I learned the value of prayer. Of course, Sister cautioned, we had to be careful about what we prayed for. We should not pray for small things. God didn’t answer prayers for small things. Communists, we were taught, took advantage of this to trick children into not believing in God. For example, a Communist would say, “You like ice cream cones? Go ahead, pray for and ice cream cone.” When none would appear, the Communist would explain righteously that there was no God. Rather, we were taught to pray for important things like the conversion of Russia, for pagan babies destined to spend eternity in Limbo, and for ourselves so as to spend only the briefest time in Purgatory.

Yet I believed in miracles and the healing power of Jesus. It became my ritual, during daily and Sunday Mass, to hold the communion wafer, the Eucharist, against my tooth. This, I prayed, would make it whole. But the dissolving bread revealed nothing but the same jagged edge, day after day after day – until finally I gave up.

The real miracle came at the hands of a skilled dentist, as promised, when I was sixteen. A tiny stainless steel pin anchored into my tooth is the armature for whatever marvelous material he used to rebuild the missing portion. It is there still, 42 years later. Unfortunately, my restored tooth didn’t make me popular, improve my grades, make me a terrific guitar player, or restore my fractured confidence. I didn’t smile more or speak up more. Instead, over the years I grew more quiet and introspective.

Examining my teeth in the mirror today, I see signs of years of wear and of aging. They are yellow and streaked, the gums receding. My lower teeth form a ragged row that does not correspond to the row above it. Orthodontics, back then, only was for those who could afford the luxury. For many years I had a habit of teeth grinding at night, causing small fractures to form in the teeth. Several of my teeth have broken as a result of biting down on something as tiny as a strawberry seed or a piece of apple peel. These have been treated with crowns. I’ve had just one root canal. But that tooth, unsalvageable, is long gone. Another has been pulled, too, because extraction was less expensive than repair.

Teeth are valuable things, serving more than one good purpose. It’s worthwhile to take care of them for as long as one can. And yet, they are not who we are any more than hair or nails. And yet again, a small thing as a broken tooth at eight years old can have a profound effect on the formation of one’s personality and world view.

Note: For background on this series, please read the Introduction to the 32-Parts Project.