Prone in the dentist chair, Dad held up four fingers: "The last time I was here," he misremembered, "the dentist pulled four teeth. Four!" The experience had been traumatic for him, and the pulling of two teeth may have indeed felt like four. Both yanked from the right side of his mouth, one was an old implant connected by a bridge to an artificial tooth, so the number of new holes felt like three. Dad winced as the hygienist cleaned the empty gums where a year ago had been teeth. "Is that sensitive?" she asked with unrhetorical kindness. "Uh-huh," he managed. She explained that the empty pockets where the teeth had been can capture bits of food, and encouraged him to focus his water pick in those areas. The cleaning completed, and waiting for the cursory dentist check, Dad remembered how he had approached his mother repeatedly about the unbearable pain in his mouth, and how she finally took him to a dentist, and how his molars were full of decay, and how the dental solution of the mid-1950s was simply to pull the 14-year-old's teeth: four of them. "I really felt violated," he said sadly, looking far off into memory, a tinge of feal resentment still lingering these 75 years later. "Four teeth," he lamented. Fourteen years after, "Doc" Nicholas constructed and implanted the bridge that would span the next 60 years until infection abscessed into the anchoring bone. My own mouth contains Doc's excellent work from when I was 14 with decaying molars. Back at home, I invited Dad to coach me from his power wheelchair as I used his DeWalt trimmer to shape his three dozen bushes. "Do you want them flat-topped or rounded?" I asked, knowing already he would say "Rounded." I paused frequently with the questions, Is this okay? and How's that? A smile and a "perfect" were his consistent answers. The bushes had merged with spring growth, and I carefully reasserted the separations needed for the individual bushes to manifest, not unlike a row of clean but crooked teeth. Perfect. We both sat exhausted in the family room after our exertions. I commented again how glad I was he enjoyed the framed photo of Sarah surrounded by her nieces and nephews. "Yes," he said, slipping into sadness. "I still feel some painful hole inside me that won't be filled." I feel that hole, too, Dad. He wrote to one grandson this week, "I still cannot cope with Sarah's death, that she is gone. When I think about it, I feel overwhelmed with some dread feeling. I do not know what to call it, but 'sadness' is not enough." He went on to write that he is by nature a happy man, blessed in many ways, and expressed his determined belief that we create our own happiness when we follow the principles of happiness, the greatest being love.
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