dumdumdum...
So, why I'm writing about my dentist appointment is because my dentist, being rather old and getting on in years (he used to service my dad when he was a little kid--and he hasn't aged... at all... we suspect black magic), decided that he should become only a part time dentist and spend the rest of his life with his troublesome grandchildren, who usually come in and yank at the chords while he's trying to brush your teeth (very disconcerting). So he had to move from his old place in Peachtree Battle Shopping Center (since the rates went up and any place that's any good has had to move!! stupid Peachtree Battle people...) to a new place downtown in this ugly mechanical looking buildling. Talk about the little guy getting pushed out! *how I cry* (my title!! ooh, what now!) Anyways, so, I was in his office, and it's all grey and cold, and the nurse who'd been with him ever since I was a baby wasn't doing my teeth--it was some other lady, who was all grumpy cuz she wanted to go home. And I missed the other nurse so badly because I've never had anyone else do my teeth for me except for the last time when I came in and someone else did it that time too--only they were nice! Anyways, this lady ended up being nice too, she just needed to get out of there, because if she didn't in time her day care center would charge her A BUCK A MINUTE to keep her kids! Can you believe that??? Anyways, so, I was sitting there on the chair, thinking about the old dentist office and how nice it used to be, and I remember my language arts teacher in sixth grade saying that he told us all these stories (because he told a lot of stories) about random people because he wanted to keep their memory alive forever, so that they'd never die, and that we should do that too with the things we really liked, kind of immortalizing them, you know? So, the old dentist office: (I shall describe it, to your great sagrin (is that how you spell that?))
The waiting room was entirely done in pink, save the fake palm tree leaning lopsidedly against the corner next to the doorway down the hallway. The hallway was where all the dentist rooms were, there were only three, filled with little green easy chairs with headrests on them, and lots and lots of wires poking everywhere. The cielings, which were made out of the cardboard our school's cielings are made out of, were rotting slightly, and they gave off a nice musty smell that dampened the overall affect of listerine that the place had gradually come to accumulate.
Behind the welcome desk was a lady named Tracy. She doesn't work with them anymore now that they've moved to the bigger office cuz she got fired. She was always in a bad mood, but that's only because she'd been in a crash and gotten wip lash that'd never fixed right, so she had to get a steel plate in her back and constantly be on pain killers for five years straight. But when you got her on a good-pain killer day, she was very nice, and she used to keep little pictures drawn by her children all around her little walk in cubicle, that you could see as you took different forms to fillout from her through the opening from the cubicle into the waiting room. The waiting room always had little baby books mixed in with People magazines, but you never had to wait long, because Sherry, the nurse I was so used to seeing, would come and get you after a few minutes, and take you down the long hallway. You would pass, on your way to the seat of green doom, this little cupboard which was their form of an employee's lounge. It had a little cylinder filled with instant creme for coffee, and a microwave that looked like it'd been unplugged since the 1980's. Then she'd sit you down in the green chair. The chairs were all tinged green, and the light she pulled over your head to look into your mouth was really cracked, but tinged yellow. There were always landscapes on the walls, really bad ones that you couldn't quite make out but which were somehow comforting when you were getting a root canal (though that might have just been the laughing gas). My mom usually came in with me though, when I was little, to get her teeth done first to show me that it wasn't scary. And I would wait with her in the room, instead of the waiting room, because there was only one nurse in the room and she didn't mind, and of course Dr. Bodner (that's my dentist's name) didn't mind either, and Tracey probably didn't really care much. While I was waiting for my mom, I would sit in this little alcove underneath the white countertop that the dentist used to put x-rays of your teeth on and models of teeth and stuff like that, and always little pamphlets about how gengivitis was bad. The little alcove had one side, the side the patient could see, whitewashed, but the otherside, the side no one could see unless they were in the alcove, was still wooden, and had little creases in it from where the fake wood had been fitted together. I had this little pouch of cars I kept with me, and I used to drive these miniature cars up and down these cracks in the wood until it was my turn to get my teeth done. Sometimes I would play with beanie babies too, or fiddle in my mom's purse. They were the same cars I would play with in the cracks of the sidewalk outside La Madeliene's before it went out of business, and I still have them :)
Then they would clean my teeth and tell me (usually) that I had some sort of problem and should come and see them again. And I remember one time they let me take home a Mr. Sippy (the thing that sucks all the drool out of your mouth, in case your dentist was particularly unimaginative and never gave it a name--you do have to name things, you know, when you're about to stick them inside a kids mouth--just don't name green beans, like my dad did--I would get to attached to them and he'd make them dance, and then I was like, "like hell I'm going to eat that!")
They were always very nice and now the place's gonna be turned into some fancy restaurant, but I figured I had better write down that little alcove before I forget all about it. I don't want to forget about it, you see. Even if I do hate the dentists.
