I do not like my teeth.

My adult teeth all descended before any of my baby teeth exited. As a consequence, all of my teeth (save one that I hit on my brother’s head, as previously discussed in a prior entry) sit crooked in my mouth.  On top of that, I received tetracycline as a baby but two years before the cut-off date for the class action lawsuit, so I got nothing from that litigation.  The tetracycline caused permanent yellowness.  I never wore braces and the calcium depletion during pregnancy further damaged my teeth so that I have broken ones. I’ve been accused of not taking care of my teeth and that’s probably a fair accusation as well.

Take a hand mirror out, stare into it, and smile.  Do you like what you see?  I don’t.  Every woman I see, everywhere, has beautiful white straight teeth.  That seems to haunt me.  It’s called, the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, and my friend Mike Smoots told me about it.  I’m thinking about my ugly teeth and other women’s beautiful teeth and every female that I see has straight, even pure-white teeth.  I can’t get away from it.  I’m not complaining, mind you:  My mother did the best she could for us, and the choices I made for myself along the way such as drinking too much coffee and not going to the dentist often, contributed to the state of my mouth.

Yet here I am — 59 years old, with a mouth that I don’t like to open to show my joy; legs that don’t work right so that people everywhere stare at me when I walk; near-deaf ears; and eyes that play tricks on me as the virus eats away at my brain.

I look into a mirror and know that what I am is what I am and always will be.  I think to myself, What can I do, but laugh? Because with all this shit, there must be a pony!

And so submitted for your consideration:

Me, c. 1978

Me, 2014