Freakodontics

As if sixth grade were not awkward enough, I spent mine as an orthodontic freak show. I was eleven years-old when I went under the knife for an impacted incisor tooth. Basically, one of my eye teeth was trying to shoot through the roof of my mouth. The oral surgeon exposed the tooth (ouch), attached a bracket to the exposed tooth (mommy!) and tied the bracket to the wire of my braces (ouch to your mother!).

Yeah, I was into heavy metal in the 6th grade.

It was very Looney Toons dentist with a string pulled taut between two teeth. The goal was to drag the one tooth into place, but I kept waiting for the string to break and some dental work to go flying.

The string that was supposedly guiding my tooth into place was knotted off in a big heap. It resembled a soggy piece of popcorn. I’d be giving my oral presentation on cumulus clouds at the front of the classroom and watch as the furrowed brows of my classmates tried to tell me: Kendra, you have a piece of--

I know. A piece of popcorn stuck in my braces.

The process of relocating my rogue tooth took three months, which translates to a biblical eternity of stale popcorn smiles in the social minefield that is sixth grade.

The good news is that it worked. The even better news is that I get to regale every dental professional with my history of freakodontics.

The Stanton children were an orthodontic powerhouse. I also rocked the mushroom cut long after the age it was okay to do so.

***

When I was 22, I went to a dentist whose office was near the community center where I worked in Boston. While the dental hygienist scraped and picked, I noticed a list on the office wall. The list included the names of all the patients who would be seen by the dentist that day, and next to the names were the patients’ phone numbers.

I considered the at-risk youth that I would be working with that afternoon, whom I saw every day but whom I made sure never got a hold of my phone number.

When the dentist entered, I asked him about the policy of placing patient names with contact information in such a public place. He said it convenienced the staff, having all the information so handy. But couldn’t the list be placed where no patient could read it? I asked.

I watched as the dentist took a ballpoint pen and crossed off my name and phone number. “That all right?” he asked. “No one can read it now.”

Feeling violated, I called the HIPAA hotline to see if I might have a case against this dentist for what seemed to me a sloppy management of personal information. The hotline attendant said my case was weak, especially as the list had been posted in a room with a limited viewership. It wasn’t as if the whole waiting room was privy to our digits.

I staged a silent protest of the dentist’s policies, like spitting into the wind. I never went to see him again.

***

Within four minutes of being seated in the chair at my dentist's office in the south, the dental hygienist, whom I had only just met that day, asked me about my plans to add more children into my life. She scraped and picked and gave me the sucking implement for when it was time to spit.

My mouth ajar, the only reflex I could control was my urge to spit. This is, as I have learned since sixth grade, sometimes all any of us can control.

Until we open our mouths, we can conceal so much. Our fears about invasion of privacy. Our feelings about having a(nother) baby. Our pieces of stale popcorn, real or facsimile, wedged conspicuously between our braces.

They told me to put my chin down because my glasses were causing a glare here. I thought it was my pearly white teeth!

My relationships with dental professionals have been numerous and frequent. In many ways, I can thank them for exposing not only my teeth, but my deeply-lodged fears and anxieties.

But I also find that our fears and chagrins have a way of fighting their way out. Every sixth grader eventually finds reason to speak. Just as every dental patient will eventually find reason to cry, “ouch” or “stop.” When the moment of truth finally arrives, we cannot reverse history. The laws of motion seem to make no exemption for spit.

It doesn’t take an oral surgeon to expose our most hidden deposits. Sometimes all any of us has to do is open up and say, “Ah.”

Here's the dentist - dr-averbuch.co.il.

We are moving house again and I have a case of the _______ about it.

Landlord called and said they'll be selling the place we've been squatting renting for the last three years. I've been absorbing this news for the last few days and even though I've been telling myself to just man up because it's not a military draft card. Or a warrant for anyone's arrest. Or a one-way ticket to the Yukon Territory. But this move is hitting me right in the feels, dear reader.

We will likely move within a mile radius of headquarters, and yet I am weepy on the inside as I remove fingerpainted poster papers from these rented walls. I ripped the band-aid tonight and started packing boxes and it felt so punishing. The ink had barely dried on the cardboard since the last time we moved from all those states away. I am aware that I sound as feeble as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie when they were trying to figure out the public bus system on "A Simple Life." I just don't think I've ever been this dangerously close to calling into "Delilah After Dark" and dedicating a song. To my feeble self.

Little Man took his first steps across this living room floor. Baby Girl sounded out her first sentences in this same room. We made a whole new life in a whole new state with a whole new community and it began here in this place that is heavy with significance.

Three years is an oft-repeated bracket of time for me. It's the longest tenure I've ever held a job. It's the time we lived in our Boston condo. It's the age of Baby Girl when we moved to Tennessee. It's the age of Little Man now. It's three times the age of my marriage. It's 11 times my age. And now I'm just forcing it.

Just like we're being forced out of our home into another that won't be as nice!!

There are a few things over which we have control and ultimately they are the things that matter most. We will still search for rimbos. We will still make cute messes. We will seek to do life better with those we hold most dear, under a roof that keeps our heads dry and under the stars that hold promise--against a background of the dark unknown, the twinkling possibilities shine brightest.

What the Ohio State Marching Band is teaching me about obedience

I trust you, too, have sat in front of TV screen or computer monitor, or best case scnario, high above the 50 yard line at the Horseshow Stadium and watched with mouth agape as the Ohio State Marching Band has reinvented the half-time show. I mean...what on astroturf? What on artificial grass is happening down there? Because from where I sit, it ain't your pro-forma conga line of tubas playing their cheeks off to "Hang on Sloopy."

Last week it was Michael Jackson moonwalking.

This week it was Superman, Harry Potter taking flight and a freaking T-Rex going all prehistoric predator on some poor bando.

Total insanity under a chin-strapped hat is what that is.

And I could go on about all the other great things to come out of Ohio, like Thomas Edison and Mead notebooks and the word "treelawn." But I am thinking today less as a native Ohioan and more as a journalist. How are they doing that? How are they doing things that only the Chinese can do at the Olympics opening games? Is it a computer software that figures this out? And why is this hokey art form suddenly elevated, like the Cirque du Soleil of marching bands?

Does anybody care? Because everyone from the Today Show to the L.A. Times is just sort of standing aghast at this performance art on a football field. Like, Oh hey, did you see this? Because if not, here's the Youtube. We're going to take a break from asking questions and just stand awestruck for a minute and wonder what is going to come out of Columbus, Ohio next week.

There is plenty of room in this world for real spectacle, for technical marvels that require such precision, such calculation it's unfathomable.

As someone with a penchant for spontaneity, though, these art forms, these technical marvels are so beyond my realm of comprehension. I can barely make it to work on time 5 days a week IN A ROW. I cannot think about making sure I am standing at the right 45 degree angle in a stiff polyester uniform while holding up my trombone just so and piping out the appointed note in alignment with a whole fleet of people doing the same.

This is what is most marvelous to me about the Ohio State marching band: they can't see what we see. The musicians know their marching orders, and that is all. The artists don't hear what we hear, they don't see what we see. They don't see the canvas as they are painting it. They only know that if they follow these directions, and they trust that if everybody else does, their formation will astound. All the while, they are keeping the beat, marching in place, now moving this way, now making a scatter plot of people to obscure the formation and now, BOOM, is that Clark Kent changing in a phone booth? Un.Be.Liev.Able.

So goes the call to obedience. We don't know at any moment why we are given certain orders. We don't know why we are told to move clear across the field. We don't understand why it appears everyone else is moving forward and we are the ones just looking the fool, tooting our flute to the beat, marching in one place. We can't see the big picture, we can't step out of our lives and see this whole band marching in one accord.

Rare are the moments when we feel we are apart of something larger than ourselves. Even rarer are the moments when we hear the whoops and cheers from the stands, OMG THIS IS CRAY CRAY! But those moments somehow make following those marching orders, all those rehearsals, all that sweat equity so so worth it. Am I right?