IN THE DENTAL CHAIR

"Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn,
which came up from the washing;
whereof every one bear twins,
and none is barren among them." (Song of Solomon 4:2)

That's the first time I have ever quoted from Song of Solomon on the blog! I just thought that sounded better than, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" or "gnashed with their teeth"! This morning, I was in the dental chair. It was my third time in the chair since the 4th of July. My previous appointments this Summer were pretty extensive. The one from about three weeks ago was PAINFUL! This time, it was just for a routine checkup and cleaning. X-rays were also taken during this appointment.

As I sat in the dental chair, I thought about how much the experience of sitting in the dental chair has changed during my lifetime. My first dental appointments were when I was a child around middle school age. The dentist was Dr. Cletus J. Dunn in downtown Canton, Massachusetts. Dr. Dunn was at the end of his career at the time. I believe he retired around 1967 or 1968, and he was in his late sixties at the time. Dr. Dunn's office was above a block of stores in an old wooden building on Washington Street in downtown Canton.

I suspect Dr. Dunn's office circa the late 1960s was no different than it had been in the late 1930s. THIS was TOTAL "Norman Rockwell"! Dr. Dunn did EVERYTHING. There was no dental hygenist. There was no dental assistant. There was no other dentist in the practice. There was no secretary. The chair and equipment was all circa 1930s. There was a black rotary dial telephone. Dr. Dunn would be in the middle of cleaning your teeth,and would have to drop everything to run and answer the phone. He was NOT a native New Englander. Dunn was from somewhere in the midwest; maybe Iowa or Nebraska. He had an upper-midwest accent which was very foreign in suburban Boston at that time. I can still hear him telling me to, "Open big!" He would say that repeatedly as he worked on your mouth.

After Dunn's retirement, we went to Dr. Riley in Norwood. Riley had been recommended by some law enforcement friends of my Dad's. My father was very impressed with Dr. Riley. The rest of the family WASN'T. He did have a secretary and a dental hygenist. Riley was very opinionated and always talking. He was probably the first person in his Irish-American family to "make it"; and like Fox TV's Bill O'Reilly was always talking and pontificating in the office about something. His hygenist was a pain. LITERALLY! Your mouth was in agony for days after she worked on you! After several years, Mom led a dental mutiny against my father. She RARELY disagreed with my father or defied him, but she told him we just WEREN'T going to Dr. Reilly's anymore. We began seeing Dr. Chodroff at Cobb's Corner at the Canton/Stoughton line. (I think technically the office was in Stoughton but you were about 100 feet from the Canton town line.)

Chodroff was 35ish and very cheerful. He was always boasting about something he'd achieved in his life. No matter what you were interested in, HE was interested in it. And, what YOU had achieved, HE had also achieved it. I thought he was a pretty good dentist, but I wondered if you could believe everything he said. Well, about two years after we started with Dr. Chodroff, my brother Eddie was in a mini-bike accident which resulted in two of his teeth being knocked out. My mother was VERY disappointed in how Dr. Chodroff handled this. He DID give Eddie a couple of false teeth, but (pun intended) it was like pulling teeth to get Chodroff to make time for Eddie's appointments and do the right thing. At the recommendation of two family friends, we switched to Dr. Seymour Schiff who was located in the Ponkapoag section of the northern part of Canton.

Schiff was an Orthodox Jew. He was dark complected, kind of hairy and very middle-eastern looking. He spoke with typical urban Jewish/Yiddish inflections, and he was a super nice guy. Dr. Schiff was my dentist for probably twenty years. For several years in our early marriage, Mary Ann and my kids (then very little) saw Dr. Schiff. He always gave us a pretty good sized discount. Dr. Schiff lived in Brookline and was a neighbor of Michael Dukakis. He told me, "I know Michael Dukakis about as well as I know you," and told me if Dukakis got elected President he'd see if I could pray at the inauguration. I think he was serious!

My wife and I were pretty disappointed when Dr. Schiff retired, but at that time we became patients of Dr. Hubley in Framingham. He was just starting out. I knew his father who is a Baptist pastor. It's hard to believe we've been patients of Dr. Hubley for probably fifteen years. Today, when X-rays were taken, a large lead shield was laid upon my "trunk". I don't think they took a precaution like that forty years ago. In fact, I remember when X-rays were taken in the 1970s and 1980s, you'd have to HOLD some piece of what seemed like card stock in your mouth with your fingers...and all that radiation shot into your fingers! I also remember that for awhile that cup think you rinse with used to sit on a stainless steel thing which would trigger a mechanism that would always keep refilling the cup. THOSE are long gone. I have a feeling a lot of them must have malfunctioned and flooded some dentist's offices! Dr. Schiff's hygenist was PARANOID about A.I.D.S. This was the late 1980s. She used to wear this big clear plastic thing all around her head. It looked RIDICULOUS! I used to want to say to her, "Are you KIDDING me?!"

Possibly the most important change since the Dr. Dunn era is the COST. Today, the hygenist commented to me about how EXPENSIVE dental work has become. It was frankly pretty cheap in the 1960s but has just kept rising and rising. If it were not for my wife's dental insurance, I probably wouldn't go to the dentist very often.

Finally, this would not be complete without me commenting about the hygenist who cleaned my teeth, Gail Barrs. She is my cousin Janet Baril Mustonen's DOUBLE! No kidding. She looks just like her and talks just like her. When she cleans my teeth, it is just as if Janet Mustonen is cleaning them, and that's kind of weird. It's like when you're watching a movie and you realize the cowboy in the movie was the young doctor in a soap opera you used to watch, or that the female murderer in a movie was a nun in a comedy many years ago. It's like when Stephen Collins who played the minister and very nice Dad on "Seventh Heaven" played the corporate bad guy in "No Ordinary Family" on ABC last year. You just kind of "go with it" but if seems weird.

Do I have A.D.D.? I don't know but this is what I thought about while in the dental chair today.