show us your choppers

<--Before and After -->

Except not really before but more like middling, because the dentist and I have also been bleaching my teeth. I haven't mentioned it because frankly it hadn't been successful yet, to his and my disappointment: the dreadful vertical line down the left front tooth that looked like a crack went away entirely, but overall the teeth were still french-manicured and, because of the uneven success, also newly blotchy. In the three weeks since I ceased with sleeping with a tray nestled around my uppers--more reminiscent of middle school than anything I've done voluntarily in years--the blotchiness has evened out considerable-like. I am much relieved, because I had been considering the, as far as I'm concerned, cosmetic rather than restorative step of tooth-colored filling-material veneers, and now I don't have to. They're still not all one color, let alone all blindingly white (which I didn't want), but the piebald effect has faded. And the bottoms are bleaching much more consistently and quickly than the tops did. Me and Vanna White, baby!

And the chip. In early third grade I fell off the jungle gym and broke my front two teeth. It must have been third grade, because Center School didn't have that jungle gym before then. Maybe second grade, because I did already have my adult teeth, possibly as late as fourth. Mrs. Newman, my beloved speech therapist, came and sat with me in the nurse's office until my mother arrived. The front two teeth were capped--I've alluded to this twice before--and what mystifies my mother and me is that no dentist since has ever detected any trace of said capping, despite my vivid memories of the fall, the blood, the "wust" taste, and the tape-recording, despite my mother's memories of being called, racing to the school, and having me capped.

Anyway, eventually I managed to chip off a corner of the right front tooth again. For ages I considered it Character. Didn't Sally J. Freedman's teacher have a deliberately chipped tooth? I was thinking it was the father's secretary in Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing but Peter was befuddled by, not envious of, her beauty routine. It's been a while since I considered it Character. I have been able to justify it, in my own head, as repair, not make-up. And today I had it done.

(The title is from Geek Love.)