Smile and Show those Braces!

      

Finally she cracked a smile and I saw them – braces on her top teeth with blue and orange colored bands. She was unimpressed with them basically because she just had them put on and was in pain. She couldn’t eat all the foods that she liked, only soft foods. I felt her pain, since I had recently gone through some minor mouth surgery and couldn’t eat solids for eight days.

Then she rattled on about Damon Braces, which are one of the newer ones with sliding doors, etc., and this only left my mind in the dust as I listened to her talk but didn’t understand a word she had said.

I never had braces. Oh, I probably could have used them since I was a big time thumb sucker. When I say big time…I mean Big Time. My mother could have written her own chapter as how to break a little kid from thumb sucking. They would have used that chapter in Gitmo prison in how to make a grown man cry instead of a little kid.

My mother would put Vaseline on my thumb. By morning the inside of my mouth was as smooth as a baby’s bottom along my thumb. Then it was the old Mercurochrome. She would use the small stick from the bottle and swab my thumb. I had four white fingers and a red thumb. (Sorry if I offended any Native American by using the word, red thumb. It was not my intention). After, she would put a white sock on my hand and tie it off with a nice little bow. By morning, I had done my best Houdini imitation. I awoke with no yarn, no sock, and my thumb now matched my other four flesh covered fingers.

Yet, it was my older brother that got the braces – not me. He always got things that I never got…like he was allowed to play a beautiful brass trumpet, while my desire to play a harp was ignored. Oh well, I guess not having braces didn’t hinder me, I thought as I watched my granddaughter take a few aspirins for the pain.

When it was dinner time, she did order a plate of delicious looking spaghetti with homemade sauce at Bella Luna’s Restaurant. Unfortunately, she ate her food gingerly and seemed to forget how to twirl the spaghetti on the fork. For a second I thought I had stepped into a scene from the movie Lady and the Tramp, where they gobbled the food in one long strand.

Oh well…in a year, I bet my granddaughter, Mika, will have beautiful teeth to go with her beautiful smile. But for now, I have a story to tell. She has some pain ahead of her and she’ll have doors in her mouth. How cool is that?

Smile - let’s see those cute braces, Mika!