chew on this (ouch!)

I remember getting a C one time in my freshman year high school math class. It was like this stain; it made me feel like I was somebody else, somebody who got C's.

I felt that way this morning, except the C stood for cavity. That's right, for the first time ever yous trult left the dentist and they told me that I had to schedule another appointment... to get a FILLING. Because I have a CAVITY. In fact, to be perfectly frank, I have two.

I'm not quite sure why it feels like a moral lapse. I ran into my boss on the way into work and she asked me, "How was the dentist?" I told her about my first cavity and she said that she had a few, they weren't so bad. (She's a total overachiever, straight-A student type, so I was frankly quite surprised that she, too, had this blot on her permanent record.) I guess a lot of people (most people?) have had cavities, but not me. Until now.

I remember being in elementary school and seeing those posters on the wall showing a walrus with his mouth open wide, tusks shining. The caption: "Look, Ma, no cavities!" I remember going to the dentist and him telling me that I had "big, healthy, Italian" teeth and that they would never fall out ever (he really said this) as long as I kept brushing and flossing. I thought I had been genetically blessed. I guess I let my guard down.

I had not been to the dentist in at least two years before this morning. I feel a little guilty about that. When I was in school (even when I was in grad school in England), my aunt would always hector me to get to the dentist every six months. I would dutifully go to see him when I was home for Christmas vaction, just to pacify her. Because I always received such glowing reviews, I suppose I thought I that the visits were just a formality. But every Achilles has his heel. I never thought, for instance, that it might have been because I went for teeth cleanings with such regularity that I had such good dental hygiene.

I've changed in a lot of different ways over the past year. I counted recently and I had 18 sexual partners between June 2004-June 2005. In the year previous I'd had two (and one didn't really count). I've become more jaded, hard-boiled, fashionable etc. But this is the one change that doesn't even have a tincture of cool attached to it. What's cool about a cavity? No one wants to admit that they're letting their mouth go to pot.

I should have known this was coming. Back when I was dating Helmut, I got very insecure about my teeth because they seemed to have yellowed. Rather than shilling out any money for a sophisticated bleach job on my molars (which, along with laser hair removal has always seemed to me the height of needlessly expensive vanity) I got some drug store tooth-bleaching gel. Not whitening toothpaste but an actual gel that you apply to your teeth and leave on. I'm not convinced it did anything. It's indicative of the changes I'm going through that I tried to effect some kind of superficial appearance-saving whitening, when the actual core of my teeth was rotting away underneath...

I sat in the dentist's waiting room this morning (before I knew that I had holes in my teeth) and I thought about the fragility of the human body. I had to fill out a medical questionnaire and, thankfully, I was able to check "no" next to every single ailment listed on the form ("Angina"; "Diabetes"; "Heart palpitations"). It felt obvious that I wouldn't suffer from any of these, but I looked around at the middle-agers in the waiting room with me and realized that none of us is invincible. Our systems are delicately balanced and my muscles and organs have been pumping for 26 years straight. They're not going to last forever. The health care crisis in this country is so appalling (how many millions are uninsured) precisely because health problems are so universal. Every single one of us is a machine and we will start sputtering sooner or later. I thought about health insurance companies, presenting themselves altruistically when they're business model necessitates their trying to withold payment from suffering people. I thought about the old days, before fluoride in the water, when everyone's teeth fell out early.

And I felt myself getting old.