The Significance of Teeth

Growing up in park slope is wildly different, from say growing up orphaned in a village in southern Uganda. Although us true Park Slope residents are ridiculed mercilessly by the outside world about our Food-Coop, our private, selective preschools and our viscous, competitive, spiteful mommies. Yet, part the air of pretentious, self-centered malcontent, and you find a lovely thriving community of families, who are damn well happy about any thousand dollar dentist practice.


I don't often read my mother's articles, she has worked for major news corporations all over the world and is maddeningly good at her job. But yet I found some heart in an extensive project on the massive turnout for a free medical and dental clinic in southwest Virginia. More than 1,800 volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and assistants collectively worked on the small town In the Appalachian Mountains, setting up enormous field-hospital-style tents in which they saw 2,500 patients over two and a half days in late July of 2008. 


When you see a young woman begging, pleading with the doctors to take all of her teeth even the healthy ones out, because she she knows they will just get infected again, it's awful. Beyond cavities, the doctors deal with people with such badly infected gums they have to take out pieces of the jaw bone. Splinters of rotten teeth in the gums, fleshy sensitive nerves exposed.


 More than painful to watch, its the desperate people trudging on that is so devastating. They camp for days to get the only medical care they can, the free clinic's annual trip down to the ravaged southern Virginia.I can't imagine the pain of waiting for days with an infected jaw bone, mouth tumors or rotten splintered teeth. The poor souls up in the mountains also give us a little bit of hope to grasp, horrifying fearful hope for their sakes to get to the end of the line, over the hill and into the white, beckoning tents of the clinic.


But what's in a tooth you may ask, a tooth is not like a fingernail or a strand of hair. No a tooth is a bit more permanent, they have been in your mouth for decades, chewed every meal felt every clink, grind and chatter. It a part of you and therefore it becomes so not immediately but overtime , this silly little piece of calcified enamel and nerve, now has personal attachment to your life and your shared experiences. This little tooth is you and will always be


So for every tooth yanked, splintered, rotting inside, and for every infected gum and jaw we can only sigh as the little part of us if savagely twisted and wrenched out and send it on it;s way as a separate entity entirely.