Call me a nationalist, but I’ve long held the belief that if you set up residence in a country, you should do your best to assimilate yourself into that country’s culture. Last time I lived in Belgium, even though I knew it probably wasn’t forever, I went to night school to study Flemish (Nog nu kann ik een beetje Vlaams spreken.); when I lived in Singapore I ate nothing but local food for three years and adopted Buddhism. So it only seems right that now I have given up all notion of ever returning to England and have officially settled in the U.S., that I should try to be more American in my disposition.
Strangely, my teeth have never really bothered me in the 48 years I’ve had them. I do recall that once, when I was in my early teens (possibly younger) my mother – who remains solely to blame for the strength of the beaver genes that she, her children, and my children all apparently share – suggested that I might look into getting them fixed. But my father – practical and pragmatic to the last – cut that idea short, insisting that there was nothing wrong with my teeth, because they were perfectly healthy (which, technically, they were they were, even if my two front teeth had clearly had a falling out, resolving to distance themselves as far from each other as they could). I never even really suffered from taunts or bullying because of them at boarding school. Though that may be because there were just so many other ‘remarkable’ features for which I could be ridiculed: my extreme skinniness, my general (perceived) stupidity, and the permanent, dopey expression that set up residence on my face somewhere around the age of 13 and resolved never to leave until someone tried punching it off several years later… Either way, there was no compelling reason for getting my teeth fixed, so I never gave it a second thought.
Actually, I did undergo some dental surgery about 14 years ago, when I managed to chip a huge chunk off one of my two front teeth. No, there wasn’t alcohol involved – I just bent down to scoop a cat off the floor and didn’t notice the glass dining table between me and him. The table was unmarked, and the cat nonplussed, but as a result I had to go round looking like I had just the one big tooth at the front, until I got it fixed. But even then, I declined the option to have any ‘corrective’ cosmetics done while they had to reconstruct the one tooth anyway, and asked the dentist to just make my teeth look ‘the way they were’. I even naively took the chip (chunk) of detached tooth with me to the dentist in the hopes that they could just superglue it back on or something. They couldn’t, and instead just replaced what was left of the chipped tooth with a shiny white crown that refused to bow to the pressures of my daily coffee ingestion like the rest of my teeth, opting instead to stick out like a sore thumb (although having an actual thumb growing out of my upper jawbone may well have been less conspicuous…).
But then, about a year ago, my bestie pointed out that every time I laughed I put my hand over my mouth like a japanese schoolgirl with a fit of the giggles, and had a habit of stroking the old soup-strainer when I was talking. I hadn’t actually noticed this myself, but once it was brought to my attention, I couldn’t ignore it, becoming palpably self-conscious, as opposed to subconsciously self-conscious. This more-or-less coincided with my regular dentist, the very capable Dr. Olim Senior, transitioning his practice to his younger and prettier daughter, the also very capable Dr. Olim Junior, which made the prospect of trying to hold a conversation with someone who is trying to double-fist your mouth every couple of weeks for six months slightly less unappealing. Actually, truth be told, what won me over was Dr. Sarah being more open to trying a faster path to completion than the 18 months of metal hardware her father had originally threatened me with. This turned out to be five months of very discrete invisaligns that slowly nudged my existing six front teeth (actually only five – one runt of a tooth was just dispensed with entirely) into a position where teeth were actually supposed to be, at the end of which period, as a reward for all falling obediently into place, these teeth were summarily ground down (which is about as much fun as it sounds) and capped off with something much more pleasing to the eye. Or so I assume, although my kids failed to notice the new teeth for a couple of weeks after I had them – which, to be fair, is quite possibly more of an indication of how infrequently I actually smile at my children, rather than an indication of their inattentiveness. But I’ve resolved to make up for that now, by grinning manically at them, Gary Busey style, at every opportunity I get.
So there we have it. I am now the proud owner of a new set of American Standard gnashers. Now all I need is to feign interest in some kind of sport (any sport…Football, Basketball…maybe even NASCAR…probably doesn’t matter which one as long as I’m obsessive about it…), and I’ll be fitting right in, here in the good ole U.S. of A!
Just for the record, the following images show the traditional ‘before and after’ photos (although I probably didn’t really need to caption them…). They’re probably not for the squeamish, though…
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