-Mason Cooley
This is definitely not how I expected to be spending one of the first mornings of my much-needed spring break: lying on a quasi-operating table, having the rubber-gloved hands of some annoying stranger probe my mouth as she concurrently makes fun of my intruding gum line.
“Have you been brushing and flossing regularly?” the dentist’s assistant asks me loudly.
“Of course,” I oh-so-casually reply. Or, at least, as oh-so-casually as I can reply while my mouth is being forced open, suction tubes running the line of my bottom jaw.
And that above exchange is the foremost reason why I absolutely hate going to the dentist’s office: it is the only place in the world where someone can catch me lying to their face. She can totally see, from her high-stooled perch, that my teeth aren’t pearly white and that my gums are incredibly sensitive. She knows that the garbled sentences coming out of my never-flossed mouth are just straight up lies, murmured only because I do not want to have a conversation with her. Which is completely true, mind you.
But it’s too far late for that.
“What school do you go to now?” she begins, asking for the fourth time this morning, “Oh yes, that’s right. My son almost went there but he went to community college instead for two years and then transferred out. We always joked that…”
Her poor tries at an oft-rehearsed stand-up comedy routine are quickly tuned out, providing only a shrill soundtrack to the next half-hour, and I slowly stop paying attention to my surroundings.
But after only a few minutes, her voice again returns to my consciousness: “But how have you been? How have your first few months of college been going?”
She has thankfully stopped talking about her simply hilarious family anecdotes for a brief moment and, instead, turned the tables on me. Of course, I don’t answer, if not because I don’t care, but the main reason that I physically cannot. There is no possible way to respond to her, as whatever minty chemicals she’s currently shoving into my mouth have made sure of. But if I could, I’m sure it would go something like this:
“My life is going just great, I can assure you, even up to this moment, as you scrape my teeth of food residue and pump my mouth full of banana-flavored fluoride. But, if we’re going to be honest here, I haven’t had much time to myself in the weeks leading up to break, to write or to think or to pray. Not because I’ve been studying, of course, but because of just all this damn stuff I need to do. And my life, whether it be academic or religious or social, is suffering because of it.
“All of my friends have come back from school with all these party stories and hook-up trophies and relationship statuses and, in that regard, I have nothing to show. If anything, the only thing I have worth bragging about is my once-a-month “Brandon Time”, when I spend a Friday evening alone in my dorm watching a movie and eating ice cream without a shirt on, instead of going out to a party or to hang out with friends. It’s hardly the most enamoring college story, but it’s a college story nonetheless.
“And now Freshman year is almost over. I can honestly say that I would have done absolutely nothing differently, besides study a little bit more. Wow, that’s a really refreshing personal realization. Thank you so much for listening to me and letting me get that all off of my chest.”
I open my eyes (I guess they had been closed this entire time) and glance around my surroundings. She is still talking, blissfully unaware of whatever chat we, imaginarily, had:
“…and he was singing the Beta fight song! Ninety-one years old and his mind is in better shape than mine! I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.”
And, just like that, she stops without another word or a warning, adjusts the chair, hands me a bag with a new toothbrush, and tells me I can go. My tongue traces over the smooth ridges of my teeth as I half-grin to say good-bye, feeling a little more confident in both my life and my smile. Thirty minutes was all it took to restore the whiteness of my teeth and the “spring in my step”.
Maybe the dentist’s office isn’t so bad, after all.
