Oral Hygiene

Having achieved fogiedom, I've lived a good many of my years without the benefit of an oral hygienist, but times, as they seem to keep doing, have changed.  After a session of scraping and digging below the gums, the woman informed me from behind her surgical mask that I had bad oral hygiene.  I was about to tell her she had no business calling me a dirty old man, when I reflected that my teeth, like the rest of me, aren't what they used to be.  I asked what I must do.

“Do you have a timer on your tooth brush?” she inquired.  I didn't even know there were such things, but I pretended I hadn't sprung for the option.  She told me I should brush my teeth for at least two minutes; I should floss for a minute and then rinse with mouthwash for one minute.     My rebellion was quelled, and I gave it a try, but not without doing the math.

I now brush for two minutes.  I don’t need a timer on my toothbrush, any more than I need a telephone that can find the nearest pizzeria, but I have a watch.  I floss for another minute and rinse for a minute.  I figure I spend another minute getting things out of the cabinet and putting them back.  Annette likes it if I clean the sink. 

So I spend five minutes twice a day.  That makes seventy minutes a week.  Now with fifty-two weeks a year that makes 3640 minutes a year or 61 hours.  Allowing for eight hours of sleep, I dedicate the waking moments of 3.81 days per year cleaning my teeth. 

All right, I've exaggerated a little bit. I multitask and put away the toothbrush, floss and Listerine bottle while I’m sloshing the mouthwash around , and on some mornings  I make the excuse that I haven’t gotten anything between my teeth since I flossed the previous night, so I skip that chore.  So let’s forget the 81% of the fourth day and round it off to three days.  It’s still a lot of the time I've got left before what Saul Bellow called “the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act.”  

I’m reasonably healthy so If I give myself an optimistic ten more years, that’s thirty days.  Do I really want to spend a month at the bathroom sink? So far I've knuckled under, but I’m thinking it over.  I didn't rebel much in my youth.  In the fifties I had a brown leather jacket, not a black one, but it isn't too late to misspend my old age.