I lost a filling last night. The slim little white one on the inside of a bottom front tooth.

Turns out that it was a cosmetic filling—it appeared to serve no purpose except to make my teeth feel more even. This is what my dentist thinks.

I don’t remember if my childhood dentist said anything about that. I vaguely remember getting the filling. I remember it because it was a front tooth.

All along, I thought there'd been a cavity there. But there is no evidence of decay.

Before the filling, a retainer anchored there for years. Before that, years of orthodontics.

Ceramic fillings don't last too long. This one, superfluous as it was, exceeded its life expectancy by many years. In fact, this is only the second filling to be replaced of the several that were installed in youth.

I have a good set of choppers, my dentist says. He says, someone has taken very good care of my teeth (besides me; in spite of me).

I do have good teeth. I have teeth so nice people comment on them. "You have great teeth."

The older I get and the more friends that lose fillings and suffer the long-term effects of shoddy dentistry, the more I appreciate my childhood dentist.

For years I was pissed at him for the botched extraction of my wisdom teeth: Four impacted teeth and an overdosage of novocaine. "Get her out of here before she gets sick." Everything turned out all right, and he called me everyday to see that I was OK. In retrospect, once he was in over his head, there was nothing else he could do but fill my head with novocaine until the job was done.

That was the only betrayal in a relationship that spanned my childhood.

The story is that when my mother and I returned from Texas and my baby teeth were rotten from malnutrition, he fixed my teeth in exchange for food stamps. My pile of saved baby teeth contains many caps and ceramic fillings.

When I was 6, he told my mom that if I didn't have braces I would never speak correctly. My permanent teeth were forming a severe overbite. (I have the embarrassing school photos to prove it!) We started right away. First, the wire scaffolding around my head that, thankfully, I wore only at night. Next, the tiny rubber bands that shot straight out from my face when I talked and ate. They came in a little plastic bag on which was drawn a dirigible along with the word "Dirigible." (For years I stared at that bag and wondered why in the hell it didn't just say "blimp.") Then, railroad tracks and cut lips. Finally, removable and permanent retainers. My gma said the whole of the orthodontic work cost not more than $350.

That was years in the chair staring up at a ceiling with a mountain scene painted on it, a different scene in every room. (When I began mountain climbing, I learned that my dentist was a climber, too.) The only reason I know about W.C. Fields and Mae West is because my dentist had a "The Wit and Wisdom of W.C. Fields" poster in one of the rooms.

From age 6 until about age 14, I couldn't chew gum because of all the engineering in my mouth—torture for a kid during the Bubbalicious and Bubble Yum era. I don't know if the abstinence was the cause, but now I don't like to chew gum and I don't like it when other people do either.

One time, I pestered a pokey ligature so much with my tongue that it came loose. I liked to click it free from the tooth and push it around with my tongue. By the time of my next appointment, it was crushed like a tin can and wouldn't fit around the tooth anymore. Hee hee—The dentist wasn't very happy about that.

Nevertheless, I now have very straight teeth.

Thanks to my dentist's diligence, I look radically different than I would have if he had not intervened.

Yet, some clues suggest that he was a little compulsive, maybe a little cavalier in his perfectionism. The cosmetic filling for one, just to make the teeth seem more straight. He clipped my frenulum to give my tongue more mobility, too. I really don't know if that was necessary. And recently, when discussing sharp eyeteeth with someone, I discovered that one of my eye teeth had been filed dull—the one on his side of the dentist's chair.