The Hole In Your Head
The hole in your head can be filled with food or drink, but mostly it’s permanently filled with teeth. The first half of your life is spent growing teeth, brushing teeth, flossing teeth, having a dentist fill cavities in your teeth, having an orthodontist straighten your teeth, and having a pretty dental hygienist clean your teeth. At the sexy halfway point in the first half of your life, you spend a lot of time exploring someone else’s teeth, only to discover teeth are not the sexy part of French kissing.
If your family owns a hunting dog, this is when you giggle because your grandpa says, “Listen to that hound giving tongue.” You get detention for guffawing when your English class reads about a young woman “giving tongue to her feelings.” That fleshy movable muscle is the other permanent thing filling the hole in your head.
Mouths come with certain assumptions. My wife came home with the runt of the litter, a freebie. Caper had no conformation, odd coloring, and a sway back. She was ugly, but everybody loved her. As they say in the dog world, she was willing. One day, my wife went to take a stick out of Caper’s mouth and discovered no teeth in half the dog’s mouth. None of us had thought to look the gift dog in the mouth.
The second half of your life is spent losing your teeth. The dentist who had been trying to save your teeth is now removing them. You may have an abscess that’s making your sinuses run, and so you need a root canal and a crown: very expensive. And only good until the day the roots give up trying to be rooted in your resorbing jawbone. Your dentist suggests an implant, then pauses and shakes his head: “There’s no bone to hold the post.” The teeth that couldn’t do sexy can suddenly hear very well. They begin surrendering one by one. You don’t need all those teeth until suddenly you can’t chew.
Partial dentures will do the job, removable teeth that are much more stain resistant than real ones. Taking impressions is agonizingly long. Remember grade school when you tried to hold your mouth open and count all thirty-six teeth? Couldn’t do it, eh? Now the impressions pop out of your mouth with a crown or two embedded. Oh well.
The good news is that, with half your teeth gone, the hygienic work takes half the time. The bad news is you really must worry about the last few solid teeth to which the partials clip. Extra nightly care using what look like tools of the Spanish Inquisition, digging between teeth. Every five years, the clasps around the solid teeth loosen, and your dentures drop out when you’re talking, aiming to prove nothing permanently fills the hole in your head.
