Photo by Ozkan Guner on Unsplash
Uncle Chuck, the eldest of my paternal grandparents’ offspring --- Chuck, Max, Jack and Gert --- was the only one of his siblings to receive a college degree. My father Max didn’t finish high school and, although my uncle Jack and aunt Gert graduated from Washington High in the steel mill town of East Chicago, Indiana in the 1920s, neither made it to college. Consequently, it was quite an accomplishment that Uncle Chuck not only completed an undergraduate degree but graduated from Northwestern University’s dental school. In the early 1930s, Dr. Charles Blumenfeld opened a dental office in East Chicago and practiced dentistry there for forty years.
“Doc Blumenfeld,” as Uncle Chuck was known to his patients, was a paradigm of the decent and skilled practitioner: scrupulously attentive to his patients’ needs, generous with his time and not niggling about quick payment for his services, especially if the mills in town were on strike. His friendly appearance gave you the feeling of someone you had known for years, someone you could count on. Chuck had a big, bristly mustache; large, round glasses; and dark, bushy eyebrows. When he added a large cigar, as he always did after work, he bore a resemblance to Groucho Marx. Uncle Chuck prided himself on it. To enhance the effect, he even learned to flick his eyebrows up and down as Groucho did, though he did this only on rare occasions when he had had a drink or two. More important: Uncle Chuck was an outstanding dentist. For years after I left East Chicago, every new dentist I visited complimented me on my fillings. At first this surprised me, though eventually I got used to hearing:
“Open, please. My, what nice dental work! Who did these lovely fillings?”
To which I would reply with pride,
“My Uncle is a dentist. He had me into his office regularly throughout my childhood.”
“You are very lucky, young man. I’ve never seen nicer work.”
Whereupon I would smile broadly, showing my painfully-earned but excellent fillings.
As the eldest and best educated child, Chuck assumed responsibility for looking after the family’s medical and other needs. He cared for my grandmother, “Bubby” Rebecca, when she was diagnosed with diabetes, monitoring her insulin and teaching her how to give herself daily shots; he located a surgeon when she developed cataracts, shuffling her from one appointment to another; and he ministered to my grandfather Ben when he contracted tuberculosis. Chuck functioned, at least for our immediate family, almost as a true M.D.
Although Uncle Chuck was a sort of family factotum, his most heartfelt concern was for our dental health. This was not surprising, I suppose, for a dentist but in Uncle Chuck’s case it was almost an obsession. Though I was only a nephew (his son Warren must have endured worse), I got interminable lectures on dental health: how to brush my teeth properly, how to floss, how frequently to schedule checkups, etc. My uncle was distressed by relatives who didn't pay careful attention to dental hygiene. The chief offender was my father Max. I can still hear Uncle Chuck’s often recited rant on Max’s neglect of his teeth and gums. The rant was intended to make me a better dental steward than my neglectful father. Sometimes Chuck’s harangue came when he was setting up yet another dental appointment, which I was resisting. Sometimes he delivered it while I was in the dental chair, his hands in my mouth probing my gums or flossing my teeth.
“Your father had the best teeth in the family. And what did he do with them? Did he brush regularly? Did he floss or come to my office for a checkup? Not once, though I begged him to! All those sweets and soft drinks and not once a checkup. Free dental care and he passed it up. Until it was too late and he had to get dentures. I had the sad task of extracting the last of his teeth when he finally consented to see me. Better me than a stranger, he said. Believe me, it was no fun for either of us.”
I remember the extraction well. Max went into Chuck’s office looking like a frightened rabbit and returned later looking as though a train had hit him: face puffed up like a balloon, eyes runny, traces of congealed blood on his swollen lips and pale as a ghost. If I hadn’t known otherwise, I would have thought he was a goner. He stayed in bed for two and half days, with my nervous mother bringing tea or chicken broth and plenty of aspirin every few hours. My bedroom was on the same floor as my parents’ room and throughout the night I could hear his ceaseless groaning. Poor Dad. He should have heeded Uncle Chuck’s advice about dental care.
Chuck typically concluded his lecture about my father’s miserable dental habits by shaking his head dejectedly and admonishing me: “What a waste, David! Don’t let it happen to you. Be wiser and have those checkups.” Not that I had a choice. Dental misbehavior was not an option for a youngster with Uncle Chuck in the family. He saw to it that I was in his office every few months. I dreaded those visits and could understand why my father had forgone them, whatever the consequences.
Actually, a number of things conspired to cause my father to avoid dentists. One reason was that early in life Max developed an abscessed tooth and his dental experience did not go well. The family couldn't afford any of the local dentists and found instead a cut-rate fellow on the Westside of Chicago who would extract a tooth for a quarter. Arriving at the office, young Max saw a sign reading: “Meyer Bulgowski: Extractions 25 Cents” but no other indication that the extraction-for-a-quarter practitioner was a real dentist. No degree certificates on the wall. No receptionist. No nurse. Just a chair, a sink, a few crude instruments, and a guy with a grimy apron and a strong pair of hands. Despite his apprehensions, young Max plopped into the chair. The tooth hurt terribly and perhaps it was better to let Bulgowski extract it than to continue to suffer so. But when the quack dentist pulled out what appeared to be a pair of household pliers and attempted to strap him into the chair, Max kicked the man in the stomach and ran out of the office. His last memory was of the twenty-five-cent dentist doubled up on the floor grimacing and clutching his stomach, still gripping the pliers in his right hand. I never learned how my father’s tooth was ultimately treated. Whatever became of it, though, it had to be better than being extracted by “Meyer the Pliers.”
A second relevant event occurred at age sixteen, when Max had his four upper front teeth kicked out playing sandlot football. Bubby Rebecca told me that Dad came bounding into the house with his face and shirt a bloody mess, unable to speak and pointing desperately to the gaping hole where his front teeth had been. Bubby said she almost fainted. It was an unbearable experience for Max, with a long recovery period, after which he was fitted for a bridge. From then on, he avoided dentists like the plague.
Actually, Max had a curious, skeptical view of the entire medical profession. As he explained to me:
"Whenever you visit a doctor, he will manage to find something. Then you are in for it: tests, treatments, procedures --- all painful and costly. Whereas if you don’t go to the doctor, he won’t find anything.” “
I thought this was nuts, though the last proposition was certainly hard to dispute. My dad’s “medical philosophy” wasn’t successful with his teeth and it failed again later in life when his chronic neglect of recurring stomach issues eventually led to his having ulcer surgery. Yet our prejudices can be stubborn and Max clung to his odd medical perspective despite its unfortunate consequences.
Whenever Chuck complained about Max’s abuse of his teeth, he would also express his own dental aspirations,
“Do you see these teeth?” he’d ask me, pointing to his well-polished, well-attended-to pearly-whites. “They were never as good as your father’s but I have taken the best possible care of them. I promise you: When they lower my casket into the grave, I’m going to have every one of these teeth with me, still rooted firmly in my jaw.”
I was nonplussed. It was no doubt a good thing to care for and preserve your teeth. But delighting in taking them with you to the grave struck me as strange. Years later, when I was belatedly informed that my uncle had died, I recalled his pledge. Although I had no way of knowing, I felt certain that when they lowered his casket into the grave, all of his teeth were with him, still rooted firmly in his jaw.
In any event, starting when I was little more than a babe, I was constrained to visit Uncle Chuck's office on a regular basis. And, as if to confirm my dad’s medical philosophy, Chuck always found something.
“There it is. A cavity on your upper right bicuspid,” he'd say, reciting the tooth’s number. “It’s a good thing I caught it early. It won’t hurt at all to fill it now.” Won’t hurt who? I wondered. Won’t hurt you! It will hurt me like hell.
The date of my first filling was in the early 1940s. Unfortunately, dental instrumentation and methods of pain alleviation then were not what they are today. Even the smallest of my uncle’s drill bits appeared to be of a size suitable for boring an oil well and the racket it made as it ate away at my tender young teeth was deafening. The pain was agonizing and the smell of the burning enamel nauseating. The sessions were interminable and always required one or two follow-up visits.
“See you again in a week” Uncle Chuck would cheerfully intone.
“OK" I’d murmur pitifully through my swollen lips and sore gums.
Chuck was a kind man, who would not have inflicted needless pain on anyone. But the pain of a dental procedure was not needless pain. It was for the good of your teeth and to be endured stoically. Besides, novocaine, the pain-alleviating drug of the day, involved a small amount of risk. It was therefore to be used only to prevent “extreme pain,” a state whose threshold, in my uncle’s estimation, was very high indeed. Except for deep cavities, I was expected to “man up and bear it.” Perhaps it didn’t matter, though, since novocaine itself was not an unmixed blessing. First, there was the painful series of injections. The 1940s dental needle, which was reminiscent of a dull spear, bore little resemblance to today’s tiny, painless, razor sharp instruments of relief. At the first plunge of the spear, you felt like a stuck pig and the apparatus had to go in deep and stay in long to guarantee the full analgesic effect. Afterwards, half your head felt blown up to three times its normal size and there was an awful tingling numbness that lasted for hours after the procedure, leaving you unable to utter a single intelligible word.
“How do you feel?” Mother would ask.
“Um, mum, blub, murgle,” was the only response I could muster.
This is how it always was in the dentist’s office. What I wished for was an excellent, discomfort-free filling but, alas, in the 1940s it was nowhere to be found.
So loathe was I to visit my uncle's office that a strategy for avoiding it occurred to me. Prior to one appointment, I asked him,
“Won’t these teeth fall out and new ones grow in?”
“Yes, they will. We call the teeth you have now, your primary teeth, though most people refer to them as baby teeth. At some point you will lose them.’”
“When will that start?”
“Normally they begin falling out around age six. Then your permanent teeth will come in.”
“Well, if I’m going to lose my baby teeth, why fill them? It hurts, Uncle Chuck. If they are going to fall out anyway, what’s the point?
Horrors. Uncle Chuck couldn’t have been more upset than if I had expressed some grave theological heresy.
“Oh no, David. No, no, no. You’ve got to use these teeth for at least six years and so you have to take good care of them.”
“But I’m already five. What difference could it make to let them go unfilled for one more year?
I was certain that I had him. My argument seemed irrefutable. Although Chuck gave no reply that satisfied me, it made no difference. He was adamant and there was no way I could evade those trips to what I thought of as Uncle Chuck’s Dreadful Dental Dungeon.
The best thing about advancing from primary to adult teeth was wiggling a baby tooth until it came out. It hurt but felt good at the same time. This was a conundrum. How could something hurt and feel good at the same time? Yet somehow it did and when the root finally cracked in response to pressure, there was real satisfaction in seeing that baby tooth emerge from my mouth. I extracted a couple of my baby teeth myself and Uncle Chuck extracted the others. His technique was far better than mine. Whereas I had to work at it, easing the loose tooth back and forth for hours, sometimes days, to get it to pop, Chuck would simply insert his thumb and forefinger into my mouth and twist quickly.
“Is this it?” he would ask.
There the tooth was, right before my eyes without my feeling even a twinge of discomfort. It popped out instantly, leaving a gaping, unsightly hole that would soon be occupied by a full-fledged adult tooth.
“You’re good, Uncle Chuck," I'd say. "You should be a dentist.”
My uncle’s baby tooth extractions were amusing, though far from adequate compensation for the many painful hours in his dental chair.
Decades later when I visited a dentist for my first filling not administered by Uncle Chuck, I was apprehensive. I had a large cavity and the tooth was aching. Fearing the worst, I was astonished to find how much dentistry had changed in the intervening years. Soft music was playing in the office and when the dentist saw me, she (yes, the dentist was a woman, something virtually unheard of when I was growing up) assured me that my experience would be quick and pleasant. Quick and pleasant? She must be joking, I thought. More surprising yet, when she administered the analgesic, she used a small syringe with what appeared to be a tiny, exquisitely thin pin protruding from it. What’s that? I wondered. Certainly not the needle. As the dentist poised to inject me, she said apologetically,
“I hope this won’t cause you any discomfort.”
Discomfort? Hell, I was prepared for the rack. When she inserted the needle, I didn’t feel a thing. I was still waiting for the pain when I realized that the injection was over. After which the kindly dentist implored,
“Did you experience any distress, sir? I certainly hope not.”
“No, it was fine,” I replied.
As promised, the rest of the procedure was brief and painless. To further ensure my comfort, the dentist had her assistant administer some nitrous oxide, which made me feel perfectly lovely. I was relaxed and slightly high, floating to the gentle rhythm of the soft background music. The procedure so pleasant that I was looking forward to the follow-up visits and was le disappointed to learn that none would be necessary.
At first --- male prejudices being what they are --- I attributed this gentle new approach to the fact that I had been treated by a woman, and I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t gone to a male dentist. Then it dawned on me that the revolutionary new regimen had nothing to do with the doctor’s gender. This was simply the way modern dentists, male or female, conducted their practice.
During a break in the procedure, I told the dentist, who was quite young, about my gruesome experiences in Uncle Chuck’s dental chair in the 1940s and 50s. From the look on her face, it must have struck her as caveman dentistry. Then, before she resumed drilling, she remarked,
“If you feel any pain, signal in some other way.”
“I think I’ll say ‘Uncle,'” I replied.
“That’s hysterical,” she said and proceeded to provide me with an excellent, discomfort-free filling.
It later occurred to me that Uncle Chuck had what one might call a “dentro-centric” world view. Teeth were at the center of his universe of values. Final proof of this lay in a plaque that adorned his office wall. The plaque hung opposite his dental chair in constant view of his seated patients. For this reason, it outranked in importance even his nicely framed degree certificates, which were mounted over a small desk behind the dental chair. Patients might see the framed degrees briefly as they entered the room but they stared at the plaque the entire time they were in the chair. The plaque itself was a simple brown wooden affair with a few short sentences embossed in gold. As often as I stared at the plaque, it is no wonder that its inscription is indelibly imprinted on my mind. It read:
Without teeth, there can be no chewing.
Without chewing, there can be no digestion.
Without digestion, there can be no assimilation.
Without assimilation, there can be no nutrition.
Without nutrition, there can be no health.
Without health, what is life?
Anonymous
Anonymous left the conclusion the reader to draw, though it could hardly escape even a dullard: Without teeth, what is life? I rest my case.
David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is an 85-year-old former philosophy professor and associate dean who in retirement returned to writing stories, poetry, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. His recent publications appear or are forthcoming in The Caterpillar; Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals; Mono; Beyond Words; Balloons Lit. Journal; the other side of hope; Sport Literate; Better Than Starbucks; Smarty Pants; The 3rd Act; McQueen’s Quinterly; Holyflea!; The Parliament; Bloom; The Dirigible Balloon; Moss Piglet Zine; The Bluebird Word, Lighten Up Online, and various anthologies. Davidcblumenfeld.com