My dentist fetched a discoloured little handwritten note from out of my file today. In it another specialist to whom he'd referred me in 1970 described my three-year-old self as "lively and unmanageable".
My dentist has been my dentist as long as I've had dientes. He's also the Queen's dentist, but he was my dentist first and I'm not much of a royalist anyway. I enter my fifth decade without a single filling, though he modestly credits this to my exceptionally robust gnashers.
I've been going to see him in the same building all this time too, though some time before I went to prep school he moved his room down from the third floor to the ground. I told the hygienist today (I've been tortured and admonished by her for about twenty years as well) that I can remember coming into that very room with its olive green paint and dreadful landscape painting when I was ten, because I was reading Joseph Heller's As Good as Gold, and can picture myself leaving it on the table before clambering into the chair. I never finished that book.
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