Faster Smile Improvement

Today my youngest hit a milestone he wasn't too excited about: orthodontia.

That's okay; I'm not excited either. Three out of four children in this family have needed dental realignment. Reminded of this, our dentist shrugged. "They owe you a car," she said. "It's a car you didn't buy."

Funny, but wrong. She must not know about our habit of driving cars until they drive no more. Somewhere I have a photo of a 15-year old van in the wrecker's parking lot, where it died after eking out one last trip for us. We had to push it toward the violent commotion coming from the yard behind the office, where someone paid us $200 for salvage.

Anyway, I don't subscribe to the opportunity-cost school of parental accounting, because where would that end? With me owing my parents five cars, that's where. Or maybe even ten, depending on the scope of the audit and the make of the car. The point is, everyone concerned knows that zero automobiles will be paid back.

My boy was stoic through the metallica installation and the brush&floss briefing afterward. At home, he flashed the braces on command but didn't get much sympathy from resident siblings. With my phone I sent a snapchat pic of his teeth to his sister in Halifax, and she obliged by snapping herself horrified--"The Scream" face--which would have made him laugh if I could have shown it to him before the image disappeared. Ten seconds of connection is all you get before your message self-destructs.

That's the essence of this strange snapchat app: repetitive disappearance. There's an adrenaline rush of captioning and sending, followed by emptiness. Supposedly you can save screenshots, but I haven't figured out how yet. My daughter gave me a snapchat tutorial this week (over Skype--extended meta moment as we faced one another virtually, worked our phones, showed each other the phone screens on the computer screens, finally got the app to work for me, became distracted by news...) and still, the appeal of digital charades escapes me. 

What we do not need, at this moment of our history, is faster-and-lighter communication. I'm down to my last nerve here, my attention span sliced and diced. And consider our lecture halls, where hundreds of snaps per hour will now zap around the room: quick pics of a slide with too many words/a fly crawling across the wall/a student sleeping/a teacher talking, across which will be scrawled, "Time-suck!" and it will always be true.     

You know what is genuinely faster and better these days? Orthodontic technology. When I was young, it was the full train tracks for two whole years of high school. My brother's treatment went on even longer. On the cusp of joining the Army, he had to threaten to rip the bands out of his mouth himself before the orthodontist reluctantly agreed to do it. Today's braces are lighter, stronger, and much less visible. They come off in a year or so. There are fun coloured elastics and customized retainers to choose from, even camo patterns--more than a few options to raise the excitement factor for my (latest) kid with braces.