Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Teeth

The other day, I was eating a piece of bread–an ordinary activity, I thought, during which nothing untoward normally occurs. As I chewed, I noticed a small, pebble-like object in the bread. When I managed to examine it, it turned out to be a piece of someone’s gross broken tooth. At first I thought that some pastry chef had dropped his or her dentures into the dough while kneading, but as you have already no doubt surmised, the chunk of gross broken tooth turned out to have come from one of my molars, which now was missing a piece slightly larger than one of the craters of the moon.

"I’m falling apart," I said out loud to my dog, Henry. I talk to Henry a lot.

"No you’re not," Henry said. "You look great. And you smell really good."

"What if all my teeth fall out?" I asked Henry. "What if I have to wear those chattering false teeth that you wind up?"

"I’ll still love you," Henry said. This is why everyone should have a dog. He added, "Can I have something to eat now?" As if to underscore the importance of this request, he gave me a little love bite on the shin.

"You don’t have to worry about your teeth," I said, obediently fetching him a dog treat. "You don’t even have to floss."

"I’m just a puppy," Henry said. "Every dog has his or her day." Henry is unstintingly politically correct.

"You’re right." I patted him on the head. "You’re having your day. And I’ve had mine. And now I’m falling apart."

"Please," Henry said, striking a yoga pose. "Scratch behind my ears. But don’t pat my head, it’s patronizing."

Henry and I lay down, him on the rug, me on the couch, wrapped in a blanket so that only my eyes were showing. One thing was clear: it was almost February. If you’ve been reading this column for the past nine–or is it ten? I honestly don’t know–years, you know that every winter, I curl up in fetal position and basically don’t move until spring. A few years ago, someone told me that this is called Seasonal Affective Disorder, and that I should try to get out more. However, I feel that getting out is part of the problem–it’s cold out there–and that staying in, preferably with covers over one’s head, is a much more sensible treatment method. Henry thinks that we should go for lots of walks, and I’m sure he’s right, but as I’ve explained to him, walks are cold and boring, and lying around the house is much better exercise.

Occasionally, I stroll from the couch to my computer, and just today I discovered an email from my friend Vickie telling me about an article she read in the Washington Post on Seasonal Affective Disorder (or SAD, as some wag has termed it). The article said that while perhaps SAD is chemical (caused by too much melatonin, too little serotonin, or, just my opinion here, not enough pasta), a large component of it is cognitive. People with SAD tend to avoid going outside in autumn because falling leaves remind them of mortality, which depresses them, so they go out even less, and don’t get enough light, which exacerbates the problem.

This had never occurred to me. Every winter for the past ten (or is it nine?) years, I have written a column complaining about February–its seeming interminableness, its soporific effects, its utter pointlessness–without making the connection between winter and mortality.

It’s true that I’ve reached a point in my life when things that I had thought would last forever have turned out to be more temporal than I could have imagined. My kids, for example, are almost out of college and soon will not need me at all. My parents are aging, and many of their friends, whom I knew all my life, are gone. A vision of my parents drinking martinis with a bunch of their pals some time in the mid-1960s pops into my head; they seem so old and sophisticated, though they are younger at that point in their lives than I am now. Their lives are vivid and fun, filled with cocktail parties and adult conversation about things that don’t interest me in the slightest–politics, cooking, gardening, i.e., the kinds of things I might now discuss. In my mind’s eye, my parents and their friends are all laughing at some joke I don’t understand, and their laughter rings out in the living room of the house my parents no longer own, the house I often drive past when I am home, late at night so I can try to see in the windows, though they’re always dark.

I dream about this house a lot–my sister does, too, and I think we both wish my parents had never sold it so we could all still live there. It was a huge Victorian, about five times the size of my present house, and in my dreams, people are always trying to kill me as I try to dash inside it to safety. The other night, I dreamed that I stood outside the house of my neighbors, a large family who lived next door, let’s call them the Joneses, yelling for help. In real life, the Joneses moved away a long time ago; both Mr. and Mrs. Jones have long since passed away, and I’ve heard that even one or two of the many Jones kids have died, too. I imagine all the Jones kids in their backyard, playing basketball, which they always did, the sound of their ball bouncing forever. It is always summer, and a song by the Beach Boys is always playing.

"What does any of this have to do with teeth?" Henry asks me, placing his paw on my knee.

"I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about permanence, and mortality, and about how things you think will last forever can be gone in an instant."

"Are you sad?" Henry looks concerned. It’s clear that he still doesn’t understand humans very well, but he is trying.

"It’s just my Seasonal Affective Disorder," I assure him. "By May, I’ll be bouncing off the walls again, don’t worry." It seems like I’ve known him forever, but Henry is only a little over a year old, so he’s not familiar with my annual mood cycles. "We’ll go for long walks in the park. I’ll toss sticks to you and you can run in circles and wrap your leash around me. It’ll be wonderful."

"I can’t wait." Henry looks at me, his eyes shining from beneath a mop of fur.

"Me neither," I say. I scratch him behind his ears.

"If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" he says.

"I was so smart to get a dog who could quote Shelley," I tell him.

Henry smiles up at me. "Can I have something to eat now?" he says.