Dentures bridge young and old

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Dentists! One word says it all, right?

With my new man-made teeth glued firmly in place, the dentist’s pretty assistant proudly looked at me and asked: “Is this your first bridge?”

I shifted my butt in the false comfort of the dentist’s chair.

Back to her question about bridges: No, she probably wasn’t asking about river crossings here.

I resisted a brief inclination to burst into song. “Like a brrriiiidddge over trrroubled…..”

My jaw wouldn’t move. It was still too frozen, and “iiiiiieeee a rrrrrggge ooooorrrrr rrrooule aaaeerrs….”

I guess she wanted to know was this my first dental appurtenance, kind of a dumb question to ask after she and her boss had been digging around in there for the last hour and a half.

Maybe she means people like me get these thousand-dollar little fake gold-filled, pearly-white cuties often in life and then somehow lose them, have to come back and get another bridge.

“Yes,” these sorts of absent minded teeth-misplacers might say, “this is the third one that I’ve lost.” If indeed that might be the case, and these things come and go that frequently, what are they gluing them in with, Elmer’s?

I examined her more closely, wondered what she’d think if I answered: “No, it’s not my first bridge.” Then I could look at her, glance suspiciously both ways, and say: “I lost the last one at the national stud poker championship in Vegas when I bet the gold in them on three deuces with kings back.”

Then I could continue: “The year before that, I was cast adrift on the Pacific Ocean by a mutinous crew, and had to use a tooth as a fishing lure to survive.”

My very first bridge, I might tell her then, went because I couldn’t make the one thousandth orbit of the earth in the space shuttle Atlantis due to gravitational pull against the centripetal mass exerted by 17,450 miles per hour forward velocity. I ejected my bridgework from a ship’s portal to lighten the load.

All these thoughts passed in an instant. She was still holding that mirror, looking at me expectantly, waiting for my answer. She perhaps needed my reassurance that bridge-building had been the correct career choice for her. She was so young, walked so springily, probably flossed several times a day, had all her teeth; Yet was somewhat insecure about my new teeth.

I cleared my throat, lest she think I’d slipped into a coma. “Well,” I started to say.

And then it dawned on me exactly what she was asking me, when she asked about this first bridge thing.

She wanted to know, no doubt, was this my first science-assisted crossing into old age, where other science-assisted inventions waited for me, stuff like crutches, walkers, hearing aids, heart bypasses, retinal implants from hogs, and finally, the simple but always popular bib, to catch those embarrassing drools.

I briefly saw on my kitchen table the application to AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, which had come in the mail yesterday. It said, “Did I not feel privileged to join other persons over fifty years of age in the struggle to maintain our rights as — as —as — aaaggghhhomigawd! Mature citizens?”

Oh, that hurts. It’s not bad enough that I’ve crossed the age barrier on a two-tooth bridge, now I have to carry a card attesting to it, on top of everything else? A card I can whip out in a drug store when I say: “Ah ha! You have to give me a discount on Geritol, I’m iron-deficient, and I’ve got a license to prove it!”

My friends will whisper among themselves: “He’s got The Card; let’s have him buy for us.”

Well, then, I said to her: “If you put it like that, I guess this really is my first bridge.”

Probably not my last, though.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.