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Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

CROW'S FEET: LIFE AS WE AGE

No Dentures for this Guy

I’m working hard to keep my teeth

4 min readOct 13, 2025

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Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

I'm not a big fan of having my teeth worked on. But I am a big fan of preventive dental care.

I make it a point to see my dentist every 6 months for a deep cleaning and gum inspection. I've been religious about this for over fifty years. And it has paid off.

There is a backstory.

My mother hated having her teeth worked on, but she was all about prevention, which she passed on to us kids. Her attention to our teeth was manic.

Taking on a drill sergeant's personality, every morning it was the same conversation:

Did you brush, floss and rinse?

Of course, our answer was always yes. And there was hell to pay if we got caught lying about it.

Her high school friend was our dentist. He had the biggest hands I have ever seen. I was always amazed at how he could squeeze his fingers into our small, kid-sized mouths. While it wasn't painful, it was horribly uncomfortable.

He didn't have a hygienist who would scrape and clean. He did the work himself. And in the sixties, the equipment used was pretty primitive.

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Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Lee J. Bentch
Lee J. Bentch

Written by Lee J. Bentch

I am an author, a technology guy, a grandad, a widower, and a man with many interests. I write to inform and entertain. Email: lee@lbentch.com

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