While I was cleaning out my father’s house after he died, an exercise I gallowsly described to friends as “throwing away my childhood,” I found a box labeled Walmart’s Finest Jewelry.
Inside the box was six marbles. Six marbles! It made me laugh and suddenly the marbles held tremendous value.
I also found my retainer, which my father kept (foolishly, hopefully!) for almost fifteen years. It still had my dried spit on it.
My father was obsessed with me and my brother’s teeth, in large part because he grew up working-class in rural Illinois and didn’t regularly see dentists until he was well into his thirties.
This, coupled with a two-pack-a-day Marlboro habit, gave him a lovely wreck of a smile, full of crowns and fake teeth and yellowed bird cages missing the birds.
A lover who worked in elder care once told me that the most obvious predictor of poverty was to look at a person’s teeth.
In any case, my father was determined that his children’s teeth be better than his, that we learn from his mistakes.
Thus came six years of braces, headgear (those cruel football-helmet-esque contraptions that ostensibly correct overbites), horrible little rubber bands that turn your jaw into a mouse trap, and eventually, retainers.
I wore all of these things in some variation from 12 until 18.
I was led to believe (and I don’t think I made this up!) that once I turned 18, my teeth would stop “growing” and hence, stay straight. That once I became an adult, I’d be free of all that.
I was wrong.
Your teeth never stop moving. Like sharks! In your mouth! I know this now, as a grown-ass adult with crooked-ass teeth.