Mr. Fehrley was not Just a Dog

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“It’s just a dog,” he said. “We can’t help but grow so attached to dogs that we end up loving them, but in the end, they’re just dogs.”

“Just a dog? Just a dog?!” we say. “Do you have any idea how much I loved that dog?” In their reaction to our defensiveness, we see that while we all grieve in own ways, some of us console in our own ways too.  

Years prior, I took a vacation. I had another dog that I had to kennel him for that time. “What if he comes back different?” I asked in a rhetorical manner. “I’ve heard it happens. I’ve heard that some dogs don’t want to play as much when they come back from a kennel stay. What if my dog is different when I pick him up?”

“Get a different dog,” he said. When I argued, he added, “What is a dog’s job? Their job is to play with you, let you pet them, and provide some companionship. If you pick up your dog, and he’s not doing his job anymore, get another one.” This unemotional, almost mathematical response did not come from Siri or Alexa, but from a living, breathing human.

“When your child begins to turn on you, in all of the rebellious ways our offspring will, are you going to get another child?”

“A child is a complicated human being,” Alexa and Siri, disguised as a human, said, “but a dog is just a dog.”  

In science, a dog is just a dog, and he shouldn’t matter as much as human do in our pack. In mathematical principles, a dog has a lesser denominator. When they remind us of the equations involved, it should console us to know that math and science offer more permanent and indestructible solutions that contain order and eliminate the random matters that are so difficult to control, and chasing an emotion like happiness is a messy, chaotic proposition that never ends well.  

Contrary to his anthropomorphic name, Mr. Fehrley was nothing more than a dog who managed to carve out a prominent role in our lives, our family, and a prominent and permanent place on my list of best friends of all time. As painful as the shock and awe of his demise was to us, we all knew we would have to move on in life. As Franz Kafka once wrote, “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will come back in another way.”

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance are the traditional stages of grief. Everyone grieves in their own way, and some of us go through reeling, feeling, dealing, and healing. In the dealing stage, we accept the idea that “Everything [we] love will probably be lost,” and that it’s the nature of existence for survivors to be left behind, but for some reason the math doesn’t make it any easier to sort through all of the messy emotions involved in trying to achieve the healing stage.  

We’ve all experienced loss of loved ones, and as painful as the reeling stage is of it is, we know we’ll recover. We’ll never forget, but we will move on. When we make some strides to move through the reeling and dealing stages, the pain of routine takes its place. The immediate memories strike us during the reeling period, but when we encounter the little moments of routine, they can prove just as emotionally crippling in the healing stage.

We had a morning routine with Mr. Fehrley, a treats routine, the routine of the “bye-bye” car rides, the long walks to the fence, and the night routine. When the morning after arrived, it dawned on us that there was a gap in our being that we never knew existed until he filled it by resting between our legs on the ottoman. When the time for the other routines arrived, and the new dog didn’t respond with puppy-like glee, we realized that we made those routines so exciting. When the wound is still fresh, our routines of life feel just a little more empty, and boring. If we explain this to anyone outside our home, they might smile politely, and they might recognize the power of routine through those they have with their own dog, but they’ll never understand how important these little routines were to us.  

Mr. Fehrley was just a dog, but I never realized how affectionate he was. I never realized what a luxury it was to have a dog who always wanted to be around me, leaning on me, and touching me. I sit on the couch now, and no one leaps into my lap anymore. I go out to the backyard, and no one wants to join me, and no one even notices when I’m gone. I return home, and no one is overjoyed to see me. These are but examples of what a dog can add to a person’s life, and if the reader has a dog who is so affectionate that it can be annoying at times, I tell you to appreciate it for what it is. It doesn’t last forever, as we all know, but we should all take a moment to create a memory we’ll wish we created when they’re gone. 

We had a basketball routine. Every time we went to play basketball at the park, we almost always brought Mr. Fehrley along. Mr. Fehrley stayed on the outskirts of court, sniffing everything available to him, running in circles for no apparent reason, peeing, pooping, and playing with imaginary friends.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll run away?” an observer asked when he noticed that Mr. Fehrley wasn’t leashed, and that he stayed within certain parameters. There was no accusation or condemnation in the man’s voice. He was in awe of the discipline Mr. Fehrley displayed by not running off. 

“He ran off before, numerous times, and we had a number of reactions. One of them was to leash him up. Another was to take him home and not take him on such outings again for a while. After a number of these incidents, he learned that if he wanted to go along with us and remain unleashed he would stay within certain defined parameters.”

It might seem far-fetched to say that a dog can learn lessons in this sense. Most people don’t think a dog can associate not going out with us as a punishment for a momentary, small transgression. Most people don’t think a dog could make that type of connection, especially when an amount of time between outings occurs, but I’m telling you, as I did the observer that day, Mr. Fehrley did make those connections.

A friend of mine once said, “A dog spends their whole life trying to make us happy.” Based on the actions and behavior of my dog at the time, I disagreed with her. Mr. Fehrley taught me that he learned when we’re happy, he’s happy. Mr. Fehrley was a bright dog who learned his lessons well. He was, by far, the best dog I’ve ever owned.

“My dog would never stay like that,” this observer added. “You give him an inch of freedom, and he strives to take a mile.”

The initial instinct is to regard that comment as a compliment to the manner in which I raised and trained Mr. Fehrley to stay within imposed limits. If I didn’t train him to learn those imposed limits, through repetition, I wouldn’t have been able to do half of the things I did with him. I would’ve had to leave him at home in the manner everyone else leaves their dogs at home when they go out to do such things. Yet, when a dog passes away, and the cavalcade of emotions penetrates all of our vulnerable nerves, we think back on these conversations, and we wonder if we trained him so well that we trained him too well. Did we deprive him of some initiative, and did we inhibit some of what it means to be a dog?   

I initially thought the reeling stage would be the most painful part, but as with the progression of a physical injury, the healing stage proved almost as painful as the reeling stage. The realization that all of the routines we built up for ten and a half years were over proved to be one of the more painful elements. 

We had our little fella for a glorious ten and a half years, so it would prove difficult to appreciate him to the level I wish I would have every day for that long, but I regret some of the moments when I could’ve appreciated him more. Weather permitting we took this little 33lb, Puggle everywhere we went. Friends laughed at us for feeling guilty on those occasions when we had to leave him at home alone. Someone once said, “When I die, I want to come back as your dog.”

As happy as Mr. Fehrley was, and we provided him a fun, full life, I wasn’t spared the road of regret I feel that I took him for granted in some ways.

***

Justanswer.com suggests that there are approximately 68 million domesticated dogs fulfilling families in the U.S. alone. Even if we wonder how they arrived at such a figure, we all know that the figure is very high. What role do these dogs play in all of these households? Visit a home without children, and the dogs’ roles tend to play a more prominent role in that household. Even in homes with children, however, dogs play a prominent role. As kids love their dogs as much as adults do. Most of us love our dogs almost as much as we love our children, but we might never know the prominence they have in our lives until they’re gone.

If you’re anything like me, one of the first things you do when you enter someone’s home is seek out their dog. If you love dogs that much, you’re bound to encounter a dog you don’t enjoy. Some say they’ve never met a dog they didn’t like. I’ve met two. I thought their owners, guardians, or whatever people prefer to call human companions were relatively nice people. I later found out I was wrong, and I realized that our relationships with dogs tend to be symbiotic in that a dog can define a person in some ways, and a person can define a dog in some ways. Our personalities rub off on dogs, and their personalities rub off on us.

How much time do we spend around our dogs? How much time do we spend playing with them, talking to them, petting them, taking them to parks for walks, and everything else to shape and mold them? Dogs notice things. They pick up on behavioral cues, patterns, and routines, and they learn how to behave to get along with us better. If we say hello to everyone we encounter in a park, for example, they will too. If we’re confrontational people, our dogs might be more confrontational. How often do our neighbors have to raise and develop crazy dogs before they realize they’re the problem? 

Have you ever met a neighbor you initially considered relatively stable and friendly, only to find out their dog was out of control? Did it shape how we viewed that person? There’s usually a reason a dog is so out of control, and when we find out that that neighbor has another side to him, a nutty, out of control side, when he isn’t leaning over the fence for a chat, we learn to read our tea leaves better. We learn to pay more attention to their dogs. Our personalities help define our dogs, and they define us, and everything in between.

As we often say of those who pass, Mr. Fehrley died doing what he loved best. He died chasing a squirrel across a street. If you were lucky enough to know Mr. Fehrley, you knew that chasing squirrels was his joie de vivre (exuberant enjoyment of life), and he loved it so much that it became his raison d’être (the most important reason or purpose for existence). To deprive him of that would’ve been the more responsible thing for me to do, and I was warned, but I didn’t want to deprive him of that joy. 

Years prior, I saw a junkyard dog check both ways before crossing the street. The junkyard dog was everything you’d imagine. It had various sores, patches of hair, combined with some spots of mange and bald spots, and it also walked with a noticeable limp. I never saw a dog check both ways before crossing a street before, and I considered hilarious at the time. The more I thought about it, however, the more I considered it a little sad. This dog, obviously, had no one to protect it from harm. It obviously had to learn, from firsthand experience, how painful cars can be when they hit. The key to the junkyard dog’s survival involved checking both ways before walking across the streets cars drive on. Mr. Fehrley never checked both ways of course, because he didn’t know any better, because he never had to develop that survival skill. I did that for him. So, I could wallow in the misery that I forgot watch for him that one, fateful moment, or I could think about all the times I prevented him getting hit. Developing coping mechanisms such as this one help, as does having a family with which to share the pain, but when incidents like these happen, we all go through them alone. 

The Quest for the Great, First Sentence

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This sentence, right here, is so difficult to write that it’s been known to cause stress, anxiety issues, depression, alcoholism, and in some prolonged cases even suicide. Why is the first sentence so important to writers? If that first sentence wasn’t intriguing or alluring in anyway, you might not be reading this sentence. The subject matter, combined with a great title, are vital to attract, developing a level of consistency will keep them coming back, but they might not read an article from the greatest writer who ever lived if their first sentence isn’t engaging enough to keep them wanting more. 

I wrote a great sentence once. After I wrote it, I couldn’t believe I wrote it. I kind of wrote it on auto-pilot, but when I was done, I took some time out of my day to stare at it and appreciate it. I was so proud. Wow, I thought, what a great sentence, and I wrote it. It can take writers hundreds to thousands of words to say what we want to say. Every once in a great while, we do it in one clear and concise sentence. When that sentence falls out of our head, no matter how hard we worked to achieve it, it almost slips out the witty womb.

The problem, I realized soon after I spent a minute appreciating it for what it was, was that that great sentence didn’t happen until I was all but done writing that article. I put in so much work into writing the article, that when the sentence arrived, I was mentally exhausted. Nearing the end of an article gives the writer as much a sense of completion as reading it does the reader. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and now…I’m…done with it. Wait a second, that was pretty good. That’s really good! 

As great as it felt to write such an incredible sentence, I felt like I was wasting it by putting it in the conclusion. Writers know that if we’re lucky enough to have a reader click on my article, most of them aren’t going read all the way through to the conclusion. With that in mind, I tried something revolutionary, for me anyway. I put that glorious sentence in the intro, and I rewrote the entire article to retrofit it. I rewrote an entire, 2,000 word article to show some sense of appreciation for whatever forces led me to create one great sentence. I also did it because great sentences don’t come along every day, and when they do, we need to build a proper shrine to them. Even though I worked my damn tail off to showcase this sentence, I’m still not sure if I paid it proper homage.  

***

Wait a second, I know what you’re saying about the difficulty of finding Great Sentences and all that, and the glory that follows, but you’re suggesting that I put a conclusion into the intro? “Is it a Great Sentence?” I understand, but don’t you agree that intros and conclusions have decidedly different feels and beats. “Is it a Great Sentence?” Yes, but certain beats and feels have a welcome mat feeling to them, some act as a quality bridge from on paragraph to another, and others just have a wrap up, parting feel to them. “Is it a Great Sentence? Just answer the question. 

“You get what I’m saying here, but your internal struggle will not permit you to put a conclusion into an intro.” It just feels like it would be breaking some kind of cardinal rule of writing to do so. “You don’t waste a Great Sentence by putting it in the back nine, and to every question you ask now, until the end of time, I’ll put, “You don’t waste a Great Sentence!” on repeat, in the manner of the refrain Chuck Palahniuk built for Fight Club: “You don’t talk about Fight Club!”    

The basic definition of a sentence is a string of words used to express a complete thought. There are only so many words an author can use in the English language an author can use to express a thought, some guess that that number is somewhere below 800,000. So, how does a writer achieve the difference between a proper sentence and a great one? It’s an impossible question to answer, as it’s so relative to the subject matter, the goal of the piece, and the manner in which we build a shrine to it after it occurs to us. The difference, in my humble opinion, is more clever than humorous. Humor is great, and it makes your article engaging and memorable, but clever, unique, insightful, and provocative are the crown of the realm. If you can achieve all that with a sharp level of brevity, the world will click a path to your door. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” as the bard once wrote. Seven words is better than eight, and if you can accomplish a profound, provocative point in fewer words all the power to you.  

Your definition of a Great Sentence you wrote is no better than mine, and vice versa. It’s not a competition. It’s an internal excavation process. As opposed to most other areas of life, I don’t view the creation of a Great Sentence in terms of competition. The best, and somewhat flawed analogy, I have for this is golf. 

I don’t know how anyone else analyses their frustratingly infrequent great shots in golf, but I don’t watch my shot thinking that, right there, was so much better than Larry’s. I just wallow in the glory of my great shot, and all of the horrible shots I took prior to that one won’t permit me to view that shot with any level of arrogance. All of the horrible shots I’ve taken in life have also beat me down to the point that it would be almost silly for me to think I might be a good, competitive golfer. I have had some really good shots though, and when they happen I might take a second to admire them, internally reward myself for finally getting one right, and I will then relive it as often as I can. 

There might be some level of competition in golf when it comes to comparing scorecards, but there are no members of a defense trying to curve that golf ball on the tee before we hit it, no one is trying to block our shot, and depending on how we golf, no one will try to tackle us to prevent us from getting to the ball. As with writing the Great Sentence, golf involves the struggle to synthesize the mind and body for the perfect hit. 

No matter how much experience, or training golfers and writers have, a great drive or putt, like a great sentence, surprises us as much as it does everyone else. We know when we hit it perfect, but if we knew how to perfect the mechanics of the shot, we’d do it every time out. 

A great sentence is a relative term, defined by the writer, as the perfect way of summarizing and synthesizing everything we want to say in a few words. It is also the payoff for all the hard work we’ve done leading up to it. When we put in all the hours of reading others’ works and writing our own, we hope that there will be some kind of payoff, or an ultimate clarification. Writing, or at least my writing, is as much about discovery as it is for readers, and the payoff for all the hard work I put into writing the article is that one Great Sentence that clarifies everything I was trying to convey, wraps it up, and puts what I consider a not too tart, not too sweet, Goldilock’s strawberry atop the pie.   

Some call the quest for the great first sentence, The Blinking Cursor Syndrome (cue the foreboding piano keys), others call it conquering the blank page and punching the plain parchment. It is a block, but I think it differs from the infamous writer’s block. I think writer’s block is more a movie contrivance, a trope if you will, than a reality. It portrays the character of the story, who happens to be a writer, as a complicated genius, or someone who’s lost it. We do have to be sympathetic to moviemakers for it wouldn’t be very interesting to watch a writer write. It’s much more dramatic, complicated and intriguing to watch a writer who lost it or can’t find it. True writers, I think, write through blocks, but the difficulty of finding that great, first sentence is real.

The quest for a great first sentence proved humbling for even the best writers. They sorted through hundreds to thousands of words to find the best combination of words before they find something they think hits it just right. Some of the most seasoned writers talked about the difficulty of writing great sentences, and how if they write one great sentence a day, it’s a good day, and most of them figure that about 1% of the sentences they write are great sentences. If that’s the case, what percentage of that percentage proved great enough to be a provocative, engaging first sentence? Some of the most famous writers have admitted that they spent so much time trying to find that perfect combination of words to start a new book that they turned to chemical enhancement as an aide. Before we condemn this for what it is, it does make sense in that they’re trying to approach the material from a fresh perspective, even if it is an altered state. By doing so, they’re also admitting that they couldn’t find it in their normal state, something with which we can all empathize, so they sought the altered state for assistance. They must have had precedent for this, or why would they continue to do it?  

Even for them, the greatest writers who have ever lived, I suspect that the Great Sentences did not arrive in the early gestation periods of the birthing process. Every writer has probably arrived at a great sentence or two in the first draft, but it happens so rarely that they can’t remember it.

Great sentences, in my experience, arrive after the framework is complete. In the beginning, we’re reporters. “Just the facts ma’am.” We’re reporting research, or just reporting our idea. There’s very little room creative writing, until we reach a point where we’re somewhat satisfied with the foundation we’ve laid for our story. This part of our process involves self-imposed stress, anxiety, and whatever we have that drives us to get it right. Once that is accomplished, and we start the cumbersome, and never-ending process of editing, revising, deleting, and rearranging, we relax into a more creative and more emotive state of mind, until we achieve a perfect conjugal symbiosis of a physical and chemical peak that  produces life.

In the final stage, we’re done with all the work, and we think, “What’s the perfect way of wrapping all this up?” That search is so much more relaxed, and when that “Aha!” moment finally arrives, and the writer writes a sentence that could be one of the best lines they’ve ever produced, it can change the theme and the entire scope of a project. It can also lead us to believe that every hour we spent writing to that point was a waste, unless we use it to help us find a better story or article than the original one we wrote.

“Was it a Great Sentence?” I know it when I see it, and yes, that was a great sentence. “Then rewrite the whole article accordingly.” I was done though, or so close to done that I felt done. Now, you’re saying I should rewrite everything? “If you write it, they might read.”

The internet is a blessing and curse for modern writers, as we now have greater access to more readers than anyone in history. The curse is that everyone else knows that same luxury. How do we separate ourselves from the pack, that overcrowded pack, and write a quality article that attracts some attention? A remedy, as opposed to the remedy, might be to take that one Great Sentence you wrote and worked your tail off achieve and put it into the most attractive spot in your article, the beginning. 

The problem arrives after we supplant that first lede with the original conclusion, and we need to create a new conclusion. What would happen if we arrived at a better sentence in that second conclusion, better than the first? Should we supplant the new lede with this second conclusion? Should we rinse and repeat, in other words, and keep repeating this cycle until we have a 2,019-word article of overlapping conclusions? I’ve yet to encounter such a problem, but if my next, edited conclusion is better than my first, I would go back and do it all over again, as often as it works. This process doesn’t always work, of course. As I wrote, some conclusions assume too much to be quality intros, but I think that in the age of hyper AD-HD, internet readers, writers have to do whatever we can to attract readers and keep their attention, and this was but one way I found to do it when I was writing an article and I created one beautiful and intoxicating Great Sentence. 

The Voluntary Visit to the Dentist

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“As nice as you are, I’ve come to realize that you are not my friend,” I informed Ms. Mary, my dental hygienist, after she provided a deep cleaning procedure that involved the sights and sounds of my worst nightmares.

Ms. Mary is an extremely pleasant woman. Some might even go so far to say that with her disposition, she’s the perfect hire for such a position, and she has a voice that would sound perfect for audiobook versions of children’s books. She may have missed her calling, we think as we listen to her. She also has an unusually melodic laugh that makes us smile regardless how much trepidation and fear we feel sitting in her chair.

In a place many of us consider one of the scariest places on Earth, Ms. Mary’s bedside manner (or in this case chair side) puts us completely at ease. She is, indeed, the perfect hire. At some point, however, and we both know that this moment is inevitable, Ms. Mary will twist to the left to get down to business, and her business is not kind, sweet, or endearing. Her business involves something called a Sickle probe, a Scaler, and the most feared dental tools of all, the drill, a dental air drill to be precise. She doesn’t cackle when she picks it up, and no one cues up harrowing music to inform us that the setting is changing. She just quietly turns to gather her tools, while we’re answering one of her polite, sweet questions about our lives, and she returns to start the process. 

Some of Ms. Mary’s tools make the most awful sounds, and some of the others chip away at the plaque and other buildup her patients have so recklessly acquired over the years. They’re all painful. At some point in the process, we inform Ms. Mary that we obviously don’t have enough painkiller, and at another point in the process we know there never will be enough. Ms. Mary appears to do her best to accommodate us, but we know, somewhere deep in our heart, Ms. Mary is an awful person who enjoys this. 

When I tried to assure Ms. Mary that I was just joking when I said ‘you are not my friend,’ she said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. I love my job.” That convinced me that she knew I was joking, but it also led me to wonder if she might be something of a psychopath. She loves doing this to me? She loves doing this to kind, well-meaning people like me so much that she’s been doing it for over ten years? Ms. Mary has such a beautiful portrait of her family up in the corner of her cubicle, and as I said earlier she is so pleasant and seemingly well-centered, and happy that I’m sure I’ll feel different about her tomorrow, so I have to write this today.

I know this is Ms. Mary’s job, and I know someone has to do it, and I know that neglectful clients are almost required to find someone to do this, but I can’t help but suspect that if Ms. Mary enjoys doing such awful things to otherwise pleasant individuals like me, who never do anything to harm anyone, she might have some psychopathic tendencies. If as Diffen.com says, “[Psychopaths] can pretend to be charming and loving, so those around them can’t always detect their lack of empathy,” I suspect Ms. Mary might have some tendencies that remind us of psychopaths. Before we dismiss this idea entirely, I think we should look up the job history of some of our country’s worst psychopathic serial killers to see if we can find some corollaries. My bet is we find one who says:

“I was a dental hygienist for a couple years, and I found it absolutely thrilling, but I realized I needed to inflict more pain after a while. There was a reason that I was attracted to the profession in the first place though.”

No one portrayed the sadistic tendencies of a dentist better than Laurence Olivier in the movie Marathon Man. There was one relatively horrific scene, in this otherwise boring movie, in which Olivier threatens to pull a healthy tooth from his patient without painkillers, unless the patient gives him the information he needs. The reason I consider the horror in this scene relative is that when I’m nowhere near a dentist’s chair, I don’t understand why anyone would consider having a healthy tooth pulled without painkillers so frightening that they would give up state secrets. When Ms. Mary and the dentist liberated me from their office, after about an hour of a level of torture all clients know, however, I recall that movie scene with a shudder.

The scene we’re starring in involves us lying supine, mouth open, and vulnerable to whatever they have planned. In the moment, I know I would’ve talked if Laurence Olivier prodded some sensitive nerves, telling me, “You need to take better care of your teeth.” If he hit those sensitive nerves with the high-pitched sounds of his drill, and I had no painkillers, I suspect I might give up every state secret I know.

Some talk about the high-pitched sounds of a drill with abject horror. This conversation is so common and the need to address the fear is so prevalent that most dentist office’s now provide their clients headphones to drown that sound out. Clients and prospective clients also talk about how much they hate the pain involved, so they take all of the painkillers the dentist has to offer, plus the nitrous oxide. Some potential clients seek dentists who have all of painkillers the state will allow, including putting them to sleep.

Prior to this particular dentist office visit, I informed everyone I knew that I turned down all but the basic painkiller, because I wanted the dentists and their assistants to hurry up and finish whatever procedures they proscribe for the horrors going on in my mouth. A younger, braver me opted to endure the pain to expedite the process. I did not want to wait for the nitrous to take hold. I just wanted them to start, so they could end sooner. Something changed over the years. I don’t know if I psyched myself into a frenzy or what, but when they started drilling, I raised a hand and asked for more painkiller and more time for the nitrous to take hold. I took all the painkillers they had at their disposal this time and the headphones.

***

I’ve heard about the Stockholm syndrome in which the captive begins to develop unusual feelings of trust and affection for their captors. Some of the captives, used in various case examples, develop an emotional attachment to the captors who torture them, and they do so because they become reliant on their captors for survival. At some point in the torture, they slip from being a hostile captive to a cooperative one, and finally to one who unwittingly begins to side with their captors’ cause. Everyone develops coping mechanisms for stressful moments, and while we understand that sitting in a dentists’ chair is not in the same league with all of the various forms of torture known to man, it does give those of us who know nothing of real torture some insight into what we might do when our captors know the right nerves to hit to get us to talk. 

My coping mechanism for dealing with this relatively, low-level stress was writing the article you’re reading right now. I wrote most of this article, in my mind, while Ms. Mary chipped away at my plaque, and I completed it when the dentist finished me off. When Ms. Mary tapped a sensitive nerve, I laughed. I did not laugh because I’m impervious to pain. I laughed because I thought of a great line I wanted to add right here … but I forgot it. Did I forget it, because our mind sweeps out negative memories to keep us happy? Some students of the mind suggest that the mind distills bad memories from our thoughts to keep us happy, in a manner similar to the liver distilling unhealthy products from our body to keep us healthy. I thought not, because the session wasn’t that horrific. I blame it on the drugs Ms. Mary induced. Whatever the case was, I remembered thinking that it was such a great line that I should hurry up and write it down before I forgot it, as I knew that it would get lost in the ether, or to the ether, and I probably should hurry up and write it down. I didn’t write it down, or even say it to Ms. Mary to make it more memorable, because as much as I live for great sentences, I didn’t want to prolong the process for even a minute more.    

I experienced a small window into how I might fare under torture when Ms. Mary drilled into a nerve that was not sufficiently dulled with painkillers. She responded in the manner I hoped she would, but I couldn’t help but think of what I might do if my captors not only didn’t stop when they hit that nerve, but they continued to explore the extent of my pain to get me to do whatever they wanted. We all love to think that we’re the heroic captive type who would never talk, but receiving a drill to a tender, exposed nerve reminds us why we revere those who endured what we cannot even imagine. I thought about how much I might hate the people doing this to me while they were at it, and I thought about how glorious it would be for me when they decided to stop. 

When the dentist finally decided I had enough, I appreciated his mercy so much that I felt grateful. It’s over, I survived, and I appreciated his contributions to my survival. The Stockholm syndrome suggests that the captive might appreciate their captors’ mercy for stopping. Those who study this effect say it doesn’t always happen to captives, but it has obviously happened so often that we’ve developed a term for it. For those who want to understand how this anomaly might happen, try going ten years between dentist visits. When the scraping, grinding, and drilling finding ends, it feels like they’re acting in a merciful, kind, and sympathetic manner, and the euphoria you feel might lead you to inexplicable feelings of affection that you don’t have for people who have never drilled anything into your face for a couple hours.

***

The thing about going to the dentist is it’s voluntary. We don’t have to go. If we want to keep our teeth, and keep them in such good shape that they might last for most of our lives, we must visit the dentist biannually. Some even suggest that a deterioration of our oral hygiene can lead to a decline in our overall health, but  it’s still voluntary. When we don’t visit the dentist’s office regularly, no one will think less of us, because no one will ever know. They might see the degradation of our teeth over time, but few will suspect that it has anything to do with the fact that we haven’t visited a dentist’s office in a while. They just cringe when we smile, and they think less of us, but they likely won’t make the connection. 

My dad had a miracle cure for bad teeth, milk. He thought the calcium in milk helped preserved his teeth so well that he didn’t have to brush, and he would never have to go to a dentist’s office, and he didn’t for most of his life. He thought milk, and the calcium therein, were the miracle cures to maintaining oral health to the point of having his natural teeth into old age. A high school friend of mine never brushed his teeth either, and he never visited the dentist’s office. His miracle cure was Listerine. Both men found the error of their ways during “the most painful experience I’ve ever had” when they eventually found their teeth so painful that a visit to the dentist proved to be the lesser of two evils. 

If they hadn’t volunteered this information, we would’ve never known, because no one lauds a person for responsibly visiting a dentist biannually, and no one talks about a person who doesn’t. “There goes Stewart, he hasn’t visited a dentist’s office in ten years.” I’ve never heard anyone say this, or anything else, about a person regarding the regularity of their dentist visits. There’s no peer pressure, parental pressure, or any other form of pressure, other than internal, to routinely address what could be a problem if we don’t.

“It’s voluntary? You mean I don’t have to subject myself to pain if I don’t want to do so? I have to be self-motivated to subject myself to the pain involved? Even those who regularly visit the dentist responsibly experience some pain in every visit? Who, in their right mind, would do this on a biannual basis?”

“The longer you wait the more painful it will be,” they caution.

“So, the only motivation to endure regular, painful visits, is to stave off the prospect of more pain?”

Most of the rewards for enduring everything Ms. Mary has at her disposal on a biannual basis, to maintain a healthy mouth, are long-term. If we maintain that biannual schedule, it’s possible that we might never experience a toothache, if we proactively follow their prescriptions for greater oral health on a daily basis. Yet, if we never have a toothache, how much do we appreciate it? If there are so few tangible, short-term rewards, what are the long term ones? Well, if we’re lucky enough to live into the 70s, 80s, and beyond, we might be able to luxuriate in the idea that we’re one of the few in the retirement community who still has most, if not all, of our natural teeth, but we’ll have to wait decades to lord that over our peers. When we finally arrive at that glorious day, how will they react? What will be our lifelong reward for having the various dentists and their Ms Marys drilling into our face for an hour, two times a year, for decades? If we’re lucky enough to live that long, we might one day receive nothing more than an unceremonious shrug from that guy who is now forced to wear dentures.