A Nail-Biting Experience

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For Lent I gave up two habits of which I am quite fond: nibbling on dark chocolate and nibbling on my fingernails. I never do both at the same time. That would be messy. I love dark chocolate so it seemed a meaningful item to give up for 40 days. I hope going that long without gnawing on my fingernails — admittedly a bad habit — will shed me permanently of this tic before I break any more teeth.

I have healthy but brittle teeth, about half now topped with crowns. The front ones have been patched several times. Years ago, I broke one dumbly and absentmindedly trying to pull out a watch stem to change the time while flying back from the East Coast. Another shattered  as I chewed gum while driving to a company Christmas dinner that I was forced to emcee with a hand covering my mouth. And one crumbled recently just before attending a major meeting. My dentist bondoed it once again but took a bunch of photos to prove that it was time to have both teeth replaced with crowns. It was either that or stick some Chiclets up there like Dennis the Menace did to fix Mr. Wilson’s dentures in the movie. But that would have been a short-term solution.

Like everything else, dentistry has gotten high-tech, with little cameras that can shoot close-ups of teeth and instantly show them to the patient on a computer screen. Even under the best of circumstances, a magnified, high-resolution view of a middle-aged man’s front tooth is not an appealing sight. Not many parts of a man with my mileage can stand up to 25X magnification. I’m just saying.

I told the dentist the tooth broke while eating a piece of celery, which is strictly true. But I felt something give earlier while chewing on a fingernail, so that is what precipitated the latest fracture. The dentist patched it, but it broke again before the aforementioned meeting. That’s OK, since the meeting was a disaster not worth rehashing anyhow. I was in the dentist’s chair at 7:30 a.m. the next day, where three women — the dentist, an assistant and the hygienist — held me hostage for seven-and-a-half hours.

All were extremely competent but excruciatingly cheerful, especially to a grump having his two primary front teeth ground away to stubs upon which expensive porcelain crowns will be placed. This establishment is so high-tech that the assistant uses computer-assisted-drafting to actually mill the crowns while I watch. That was much more interesting than reading back issues of People while drooling from my deadened mouth.

I walked unsteadily out of the office with two shiny front teeth that are a considerable improvement over the originals. Plus, they come with a five-year warranty. Nothing else on my body holds even a 90-day warranty, so this is a value-added feature. The dental assistant asked if I chewed my nails. I told her I had given up the habit the week before. Good, she said. And don’t use your teeth as tools to open candy wrappers, beer bottles or anything else. I promised I had long ago given up those as well, after a few misadventures.

The weekly drive back home to East Texas from Austin was the test. Road trips when solo are prime nail biting and pondering times. (I am couth enough to not chew fingernails among company, though I used to try to slip in a quick gnaw with my wife alongside.) You can get a lot of cuticles gnawed down to the quick in four-and-a-half hours of driving a wearily familiar highway. On the latest trip, I caught myself about to commence chewing at least 25 times and stopped each time. I could feel my fingernails growing with each passing mile. OK, not really, but my imagination ran wild.

I don’t even own a pair of fingernail clippers, I realized at one point in the trip. I had to ask my wife for a pair when I arrived at the East Texas domicile. I told her the entire story. This only reinforced for her, I’m sure, that she has married a quirky little man.

My teeth feel and look great. They startle me with their brightness when I smile in the mirror. That’s not something I do often, since at 56, the person smiling back is nearly unrecognizable, especially at 6 a.m. Who is that old guy with hair sticking straight up, staring back with squinty eyes?

I’m pretty sure that was me in the mirror, but my eye-doctor appointment isn’t until next week.

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