Second Grade

Oh my God, the teeth, the TEETH! I had promised they were gone until junior high, but it turns out I'm wrong. Some a-hole photographer got me either answering a question or letting my guard down and laughing and you have this, a tiny glimpse into my own private dental hell.

Here's the short version: though every hygienist and dentist who sees me now praises my teeth, gums and general mouth situation with glowing terms like "genetically superior" and "99th percentile," the dark truth is that for years and years my mouth looked like it had been hit with a wrecking ball, like each tooth was on its own desperate mission to either escape my head entirely or attack its neighbor. My husband, attempting to sympathize, says his own teeth used to look like someone had thrown a handful of dominoes at his head, but I think my layout looked more violent because it involved actual pliers and needles and a systematic plan to defang me.

Evidently, a baby tooth loosens only when its root is bumped into by the encroaching adult tooth. My adult teeth were working from a different map than the standard human one, so none of my baby teeth got the message to move on and had to be pulled every couple of months, in pairs and on alternating sides of my mouth so I could still chew, with their roots still fully intact. My dentist had tiny plastic treasure chests in which to encase extracted teeth for the traumatized victim, as well as a big plastic turtle tub full of toys (you could choose one toy per tooth yanked). My teeth, still gritty with blood and pulp, never fully fit in the treasure chests, and I always chose plastic vampire fangs from the toy box. Each time I got teeth pulled, my dentist, a gray haired Brooklyn native named Dr. Smith who always implored me sadly not to start with the "water woiks"used this giant metal syringe with a needle that I swore was the length of my forearm to inject the backs of my gums with novocaine. It never fully took effect, so they started leaving me to marinate under the gas mask for up to 20 minutes at a time before doing the shots, so I remember a lazy spinning sensation accompanying the sounds of grinding and twisting tooth root in my head as my ears filled up with tears... But today, after all that and three years of braces, I have GENETICALLY SUPERIOR teeth that have never suffered a cavity! I bear them aggressively in driver's license pictures, like I might actually bite through the plastic at your thumb, because Jesus, why not?

Anyway. Second grade. Mrs. Ledbetter was my teacher and she had a wild tangly halo of dyed black hair and this beatific, relentlessly peaceful smile. She was older, and had seen her days of sun worship, so maybe that's why I thought she looked a little like Abraham Lincoln. In a good way. I hope I never told her that, but knowing me, I probably did.

What am I about to laugh at?  Have I suddenly realized that I'm actually wearing white tights, with socks, and high tops with after-market neon laces?  My fashion choices this year were a little closer to my preschool days, when anything spandex or Jazzercise-appropriate rocketed automatically to the favorites pile, accompanied by unnecessary accessories like rainbow suspenders, stackable neon plastic bracelets, or a belt that looked exactly like a pink phone cord. Evidently I was vocal and determined about appearing in public as though I was some sort of performance artist or circus escapee, and I remember very clearly a dinner at a nice restaurant around this age where I insisted on wearing a plastic leopard nose that attached to my face with an elastic cord. Somehow, my mother was forgiving of this, and had the foresight to keep her mouth shut and take pictures.

It was either this year or the next that school district's plan of artificially creating racial diversity in our midst by busing in kids of color from other neighborhoods finally met with enough resistance to be reconsidered. This sucked, because my friend Umeka got sent to another school the next year, but was OK because giant Hispanic Rosemary who used to shove me off the monkey bars, did too. I didn't fully understand until later why the whole thing pissed my mom off so bad, or why the redistricting actually meant that I should have gotten shuffled back in with the kids at the poorer school in the crappier neighborhood where I actually lived.  Oblivious to the politics, I watched the slow bleaching of our school population and noted only that the birthday parties seemed to get smaller and have more rules and that we stopped getting checked for lice so regularly.

What do you remember from grade two?