Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash
Fifteen years ago, if asked, “Do you like flossing?” I would have said, “No! At best, it’s an annoying disruption. That’s why I rarely do it.” Today, in response to the same question, I would still say that I dislike flossing, considering it an irritating intrusion, but acknowledge that I floss every day. The evolution of this habit recently became the subject in a Zoom call I had with two of my friends, each of us sitting in our separate homes facing a computer. Before Covid-19 interrupted ordinary life in America, we met at a café once-a-week; now we’ve exchanged the café for the miracle of Zoom.
Online or in person, we begin with a check-in, reporting on our activities and sharing how we feel. During my turn, I said, “It’s been a good week,” adding toward the end of my comments, “I’m also writing a short essay on flossing.” Ages, sixty-three, sixty-seven, and seventy-one, I am the oldest in our trio, but each of us grew up in the era of Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan, each embracing their early music, each identifying with their poetic lyrics, cultural criticism, and quirkiness. Because I mentioned my essay, our discourse galloped to consideration of dental hygiene.
On screen, Jim and I were watching Lee, the 63-year-old, toothpick in hand, mine the detritus between his teeth. Conversation devolved into an appraisal of the utility of that tool, comparing the work of that ancient instrument to that of modern dental floss, the banter rich with sarcasm and truth-telling. Jim, the 67-year-old in our triumvirate, aware of my flossing clients, proclaimed, “The perfect opening line for your essay, Paul, is: If it weren’t for flossing, I wouldn’t have an emotional life.” Lee then added, “Write it down, that suits you to a T.”
Jim is a close friend I’ve known for forty-five years. Meticulous about personal hygiene, he keeps his teeth and gums healthy. Remarkably, Jim’s dentist ordered him to cut back on brushing, lest he continue to destroy the enamel on his teeth. Three years after my wife gave birth to Abby, our first child, Jim sought to instill in her a devotion to toothcare as robust as his, presenting her a toothbrush on her third birthday and for many subsequent ones. Predictably, he gave Abby a brush on her wedding day. Two of Jim’s girlfriends have enrolled in my flossing program, apprenticeships he heartily endorsed.
Lee’s teeth are as shiny as his fifteen-year-old Scion, a silver-gray car that appears to have rolled off the assembly line this past week. A friend of his for almost thirty-five years, I grumbled, “I don’t like toothpicks.” Lee praises them, so does Jim. I rarely wield a toothpick, and then only the paper-wrapped, mint-flavored kind if I happen to notice a small dish of them upon exiting a restaurant. I prefer floss.
My friend, Susan, a gritty art teacher who at seventy-six still embarks on five-hundred-mile bicycle trips with her neighbor Jenna, visited my wife and me in 2010. At bedtime, she brandished her floss dispenser. “Susan, I am not a flosser,” I confessed. She preached the hygienic benefits of using dental floss, asking if I’d like to floss regularly. Although sour on the idea, I conceded the value of the practice. She declared, “It takes twenty-one days to establish a habit. Just push yourself to floss for twenty-one days and you’ll be all set.” She boasted, “I did it.” Acquiescing, I acceded to her challenge, and it worked. For twenty-one days, I pulled the nylon string between my teeth. Despite the aggravation, I still floss every day.
Having become an addicted user of floss, I now offer a free program to aspiring flossers, a homegrown system for cultivating the habit. It requires the postulant’s assent, a twenty-one-day supply of floss, poetry, and my pivotal role as floss champion, which blends the skills of athletic coach, high school English teacher, and spiritual director.
Whenever I recruit a willing novitiate, she—all seven of my apprentices have been women—must agree to the rules:
· Rule 1: Floss once-a-day for twenty-one days consecutively.
· Rule 2: In exchange for such effort, I will each day send a personalized flossing-related poem, more accurately doggerel, to focus the trainee’s mind on her intention to floss.
· Rule 3: Every five days, I will check with the beginner to explore how she is negotiating her side of the contract, pledging to avoid judgment if she admits to any inconsistency concerning her daily practice.
· Rule 4: Believing that habit formation is best achieved relationally, I agree to respond to all communications from the aspirant, even those unrelated to flossing.
· Rule 5: Should I discover the post-twenty-one-day newcomer has “fallen off the wagon,” I will make available to her a seven-day refresher, including newly composed verse.
Twice I have employed the one-week follow-up, the first time when my tenderfoot, Rebecca, struggled to continue flossing after giving birth. Outside a café, a new baby in her arms, she confessed to me to breaking her newly acquired habit of flossing. She suggested a “refresher”; I complied. When my physical therapist fell away from flossing soon after her twenty-one-day program concluded—“Dropped like a hot potato,” she demurred, “after a supportive twenty-one-day relationship involving poetry”—she availed herself of the seven-day booster. Earlier, she jumped into the three-week program when her new father-in-law, a dentist, offered to handle her dentistry for free. To dodge his discovery of the shabby condition of her gums, self-reported, she enrolled.
The light verse I write typically consists of rhyming couplets. Some tap into guilt, others offer humor; a few are evocative of familiar poems. The following examples of my doggerel target my former clients Lynne, Jane, and Rachel respectively:
Day 4 Flossing as Meditation
Our days on earth are certainly numbered,
When a datebook's packed, we feel encumbered,
When flossing’s added to everything,
We become perturbed at that flossing string,
Our flossing must become meditation,
But that, of course, takes dedication,
Make flossing, friend, your daily chore,
Please slide it through and don’t ignore,
Joy can reside in a very “thin place,”
Even ‘tween teeth, we encounter grace,
Lynne, make today a contemplative one,
Find peace in a practice you ought not shun.
Day 9 Psalm, Prayer, Creed
No purpose we have but to sing
Our praise for all created things,
Of birds and deer and every leaf,
Of snakes and clouds, the sky and teeth,
How truly wondrous our God in heaven
Who fashioned, for us, incisor seven.
Dear Jane, the psalm above I gladly share,
And beseech you now to repeat this prayer:
Oh, dear Flossing Spirit of ages past
You led me, your Jane, to this sink to ask
For mercy, a pardon, and some floss,
Humbly now, down I bow before you, Boss,
To ask your help to free jammed food
With floss, I pray, that’s not been used.
Now Jane, make these words your solemn creed:
In floss, a gift divine, I do believe.
Day 17 A Ravin’ Flossing Nightmare
For Rachel, verse barely based on E. A. Poe’s “The Raven”
Once upon a midnight dreary I failed to floss,
I was too weary, A “Poe-tent” moment I recall,
Oh, would that I forgot it all,
But drama is the night’s mean gift,
Toward its horror I now shift
Lest I be dogged by mem’ry’s sting
I now to consciousness must bring
That story deep within my soul
‘bout one bad choice that left a hole
In my portal's daily oral hygiene:
Total neglect of my flossing routine.
I turned away from floss one night,
From deepest sleep I woke in fright,
A dream possessed my restless mind,
And filled with dread could not unwind,
I dreamt of sweets and tooth decay
Of pinkish gums turning gray,
And from my mouth a foulest stench
For want of floss I could not quench,
So truly frightening this dark story,
Irksome, intrusive, and predatory,
When I arose, I quietly vowed
To floss, ne’er
Into erstwhile neglect of the string,
Yes, yes! To daily flossing I will cling.
Some other titles in my collection of flossing poems include: “Romance and Flossing,” “Ought,” “Paradise Resumed,” “The Tao of Flossing,” “The Charge of the Floss Brigade,” “Recipe for Hot Floss Buns,” “A Moving String Gathers the Dross,” and “The Eschaton.”
These poems vanquish laziness, succeeding, as they do, in fostering habit formation. One of my early successes, so pleased by her achievement, wanted to monetize my program, asking if she could use my doggerel to make money. I told her that I operated as a volunteer, offering my program for free; I wished to keep it that way. She backed off. After discussing with my dentist, a former high school student of mine, the nature of my flossing program, he said he would love to share my poems with his flossing-averse patients. I sent him a set of twenty-one poems. During my next visit to his chair, he told me that he shared my poems with several patients. I wondered if he had actually read them and how their content might affect his practice. My most recent client wrote this note to me, several days after concluding the program: “I believe that flossing is an officially established habit. Early on, after the twenty-one days were over, [my boyfriend] asked me about it and I said, ‘I'm doing it for Paul.’ He claimed that wasn't real habit formation and maybe he's right, but I think I'm starting to Just Do It now.”
To be stuck in self-sabotaging patterns of conduct is indeed a central feature of the human condition. Personalizing doggerel to prepare clients to adopt the habit of flossing amuses me, but it also immerses me in one tiny corner of the pathos and drama of human sluggishness. When mired in self-defeating behaviors, most of us yearn for effective strategies to deliver ourselves from the quicksand that impedes us from breaking free. Sympathy for those who are stranded in such dysfunction prompted me to offer my Poem-a-Day Flossing Program.
With my art teacher friend’s help, I myself engaged in the daily rhythm of flossing, a cadence that ever-so-slightly elevates my mood. With gums pink, clean, and supple, I gain a dash of birr, satisfying enough to keep me flossing. As with meditation, its psychological value creeps up on me, not as a quantifiable product but a barely describable enhancement of my disposition. Flossing yields a tidiness, like the trimness of a well-made bed or spareness of a haiku, that prompts in me a delicate but upbuilding inward turning; perhaps this is true of all self-care habits.
While I have occasionally considered sharing this story to some grander effect, say, through The Moth Radio Hour, I prefer working in the margins. I delight in this slim, bare-bones enterprise. Lee, ardent advocate of the diminutive toothpick, heralds this philosophy, periodically reminding me that “Bigger is not always better.” Possessing no desire to emulate the man in Frank Zappa's song, “Montana,” who claims he’s “movin’ to Montana soon” to “be a dental floss tycoon,” I nonetheless would be pleased to find others replicating my pint-size, one-on-one model for such habit formation.
Paul Graseck, an educator, also plays clarinet in an activist “Honk!” band. An occasional character portrayer, he performs as Gandhi, generating interactive dialogues for multiple-age audiences. He has published in Persephone, Friends Journal, Kappan Magazine, History Matters, Star 82 Review, 3rd Act, and elsewhere, and lives in Pomfret, CT.