Our little granddaughters enjoy going to the dentist. That, as much as anything I can think of, illustrates the colossal differences in our generations.
When the girls find out they have an appointment to have their teeth checked or cleaned, they are elated and look forward to it.
They love their dentist and the dental hygienist. They chat and laugh with them and like to pick out something from the “treasure chest” when they leave. They get toys instead of toothbrushes.
My boyhood experiences with dentists were limited, and I was grateful for that. I don’t think many kids had regular dental checkups back then. We just went to dentists for emergencies.
Most of the youngsters in my hometown literally got a bad taste in their mouth for dentists when our schools participated in the first fluoridation program any of us had ever seen.
I remember that time back in the 1950s when a dentist chair was set up by the flagpole in front of the school. Most of us had never seen a dentist chair and had to be told what it was.
A man and a woman in white medical coats were there to swab fluoride on our teeth. We were called out one class at a time to get the fluoride that was supposed to curtail cavities.
Looking back, I doubt if those folks were dentists, and I don’t think anybody ever told us they were. We were just instructed to stand in the hot sun that day until somebody put us in the dentist chair, tilted us back and mopped our mouth with fluoride.
Some of the students got an overdose or something, because their teeth got tan streaks in them. Fluoride treatments got better when they put it in toothpaste and water.
My first visit to a dentist after that was when I was diving for a fumble in a sandlot football game, hit a guy’s head face first and knocked a front tooth out.
I picked it up and put it in my pocket for some reason, and my parents took it with us when we went to see Dr. Tanner. I think he was the only dentist in town.
He must have been pretty good, because he sewed the tooth back in, and it never gave me a problem all through school or college.
But the first year I was working at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, it started to become discolored. A dentist there said I needed a root canal and a cap on the tooth.
The day before that procedure, I was at a Mardi Grad parade and a masked guy hollered at me by name to come get some beads. It was my dentist, and he was thoroughly intoxicated.
It would not have been necessary for him to give me any kind of anesthesia that next day. He could have just blown his breath on me and knocked me out.
There were other times in my younger days when dentists scared me. One of them when I was in college didn’t like to do fillings. If he found a little cavity, he pulled the tooth. I lost a couple that way.
Our coach who sent me to him said he was the only dentist he knew who could remove a tooth before your 15 minutes were up on the parking meter.
I’m not sure if it was worse having a tooth pulled or having one filled when they used those old drills that made about six rotations a minute. The Russians never tortured spies that much.
Fortunately, dentistry got extraordinarily better decades ago after some of my early life experiences in dentist chairs. My dentist for the past 30 years or so is especially gentle with me since he knows my dental history.
He said he still considers me the biggest sissy he has ever had as a patient, and he has learned to talk to me a while about sports and politics and things like that before he looks at my teeth.
One good thing about my dental anxieties, he said, is that my teeth are in pretty good shape and he has never had to do too much work on them over the years. It must have been those fluoridation treatments back in elementary school.
I really like my dentist, but I have told him that it wouldn’t kill him to have one of those treasure chests for his patients.