Yanked Tooth

Regret, acceptance, and staying alive

I can’t remember the first time a dentist pulled one of my teeth. I was young. The tooth was permanent– one of too many teeth crowding my too-small mouth.

Was my mouth too small because my mom smoked while I was in utero? Or did the barley water from the desert Sea Org center, where I spent my infancy, fail to sustain proper bone growth? Maybe it was both. Maybe it was the head trauma from my many mysterious falls, several requiring stitches, all occurring before I was two-years old.

It doesn’t matter. My teeth came in and the dentist pulled them out. I hated the sour novocaine pinch but didn’t mind missing school, or the brief attention from my mother, otherwise fleeting.

My memories exist alongside one another: they spin like images on a slot machine screen, each contained in its own little box. I can’t tell you which school coincided with which appointment because there were too many of both, more schools than teeth. The teeth I kept for a long time– six or eight of them altogether–…