Would You Laugh if You Swallowed One Month's Pay?

For the last eight months or so, I have been having challenges with my veneers. My upper four front teeth have veneers because, for all of my childhood and much of my adulthood, people would comment about my yellow teeth. Yellow teeth run in my mother's side of the family, and whether that's a genetic thing or a geographical thing linked to the water, I don't know. But I've never liked them, and so about 15 years ago, I did something about it.

Lately, the adhesive has not been holding, so I have made frequent visits to my dentist, who, bless her soul, is always trying new ones on me. Denette gets excited about trade shows, hoping she'll find a miracle product to use on my veneers.

Denette is such a mensch that she hasn't been charging me for all this rebonding. She's probably fit me into her busy schedule a half dozen times during the last eight months. So when one of my veneers kept falling off, I didn't want to bug her. I thought I'd wait for my next teeth-cleaning. So during the past three months, my veneer has come loose a hundred times or more. Sometimes all the way off and sometimes just a little. Sometimes it ends up in my food. Sometimes other people see this!

I wanted to get this taken care of before I left for Canada tomorrow, so I have a dentist appointment in about a half hour. The only thing is during lunch today, I swallowed my veneer! Can you believe it! Three months of me gluing it in place with Elmer's and of futzing with it no end, and then hours before my dentist appointment, I swallow it! The irony of this has not escaped me.

All I can do is giggle.

And then I remembered how much veneers cost. Oh, my God! $500--my entire monthly pension from Cal State! I wonder how many people would laugh about swallowing their entire month's pay! Perhaps that should be an online dating question. It would certainly be a great divider of the world's people--those who could chuckle and those who would curse.