Peter McKay

This past Sunday, I paged through the Real Estate section of the paper to see if we could find a home closer to my children's orthodontist. Most people look for an easy commute to work or want to be near good schools. The way things have been going lately, most of our time (and money) seems to be spent in trying to keep our kids from growing up to look like hillbillies or the British royal family.

I have five kids, all of whom have big beautiful teeth and small cramped jaws and will need some form of orthodontia (Latin for "torture of the mouth"). I had no experience with orthodontists growing up, as my teeth were small (think Tic-Tac size) and therefore fit my rather large head quite nicely. I always envied those kids with huge white smiles. They seemed destined to be presidents, movie stars or international superspies. My tiny-toothed smile literally screamed "accountant," "tax attorney" or maybe "undertaker."

My wife, on the other hand, has a bright grin of beautiful big white chompers. And while she is always complimented on her smile, it came only at the cost of years of visits to the orthodontist, which included the removal of two of her (massive) molars.

Having no experience with this, my first visit to the orthodontist was a shocker. I had expected a small waiting area, a receptionist and possibly a patient or two. Instead, I found a large room with row after row of adolescents with sore, bulging lips, each morosely waiting to hear his or her name called. There were plenty of parents, too, and most of them were gazing off into space, daydreaming about the cruises or sports cars they'd have now if their kids' teeth didn't need so much realignment.

As each name was called, the prisoner would get up and shuffle toward the back room to his "appointment." Parents would follow, like wardens accompanying the condemned down the Green Mile.

Inside the back room, my jaw dropped. I had expected we'd get a private examining room but instead found rows and rows of chairs in one huge, brightly lit chamber. In chair after chair, all I could see were pairs of battered sneakers, wriggling in discomfort and little hands with white knuckles grasping armrests. The patients' faces were obscured behind the technicians' backs. From some of the chairs, I heard mechanical whirring noises, and every once in a while, a pair of sneakers would jerk violently in the air, and a technician would cheerily call out, "Oops! Sorry about that!"

I had ended up with this appointment because my wife had been to the last 25 in a row, I had been to none and she seemed to think it was my turn to go (wives can be unreasonable that way).

This appointment was especially bad because my son was there to have a mold made of his mouth. This involved filling a tray with shiny pink goop and then shoving that tray into my son's mouth, where it would have to sit for three or four minutes while he searched in vain for some alternative way to breathe. As my son kept motioning to his technician that he was going to give up and move toward the white light, she soothed him by saying, "It's OK. Only 2 minutes and 48 seconds to go!"

I sat on a nearby bench, trying to avoid looking at what was being done to my 8-year-old's tiny mouth. Instead, I found myself face to face with a teenage girl having an "expander" glued into the top of her jaw. The device contains a small expanding screw that must be turned every day or so while the child squirms uncomfortably and the frustrated parent tries not to poke holes in the child's already stressed palate.

I turned my head away from this poor girl just in time to see the technicians ease the big block of now-hardened goop out of my son's mouth. As he gulped for air, I steadied myself, too. I haven't fainted since having my blood tested before I got married, and I didn't want to do it now.

As I walked my wobbly son back toward the main counter, where I would have to schedule ahead for his next "treatment," I looked around the room at the puffy-lipped patients, each like a science project gone wrong. For the first time in my life, I was grateful for my tiny Tic-Tac teeth.

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