If you didn't know it was your tooth you would
take it for an old-fashioned china cuspidor that had been neglected
by the janitor.
It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you
wouldn't have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that
tooth forever. You never want to see it again.
As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and
corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling
in the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going
over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole
where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a
basement there was to a tooth.
As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the
dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you
hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters.
And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you
are the one who is coming out.
Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human
composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what
science should do is to go on and finish the sentence.
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