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I have always had problems with my teeth. Every dentist I have ever had has said that I had the softest teeth he had ever drilled. I had one of my front teeth knocked out about age 11 at the West Tampa Boys Club. There was a Pepsi machine in the game room that had bottles that were suspended in a row between two metal plates. When you bought a drink you slid the bottle down to the end of the rack and a metal triangular stop moved down to let you get the bottle out. The dropping of a dime into the cash box released the catch that allowed the hinge to swing open. When you pulled the bottle out, the metal triangle fell back and secured the catch back in its unopened phase.

Well, Johnny figured out that if you held the triangle, you could stop it before it "caught" and then you could simply slide another bottle down and out. But you had to have the touch. So I was enjoying a drink that somehow always tasted better when it was free, and Anthony Castellano came running over from the other side of the pool table. Now Anthony was one of these kids that somehow never outgrew his baby fat even though he was 12 years old. The politically incorrect description was chubby. He was also clumsy and right before he reached me in anticipation of getting a sip from my Pepsi, he tripped on his own Chuck Taylor sneakers and falling into me succeeded in shoving the bottle down my throat and taking a front tooth with it.

Well, there was no correcting it. Subsequently in later years you could take your tooth, if it had been knocked out root and all, wrap it in a towel that had been soaked in warm water, take it to the dentist, and if you were lucky the tooth could be replanted in the cavity and live to chomp another day. But at this time I had no front tooth and that was that. I went on to lose many other teeth in my day, and just had to get a root canal on a tooth under a bridge last week. But things have changed at the Dentist's office. In the past when an x-ray had to be taken, you had to submit to a little card stuck in your mouth that was like one of the old Kodak slides that Dad used to take in place of prints and can still be found in round holders that will only fit into projectors that no longer exist. That was how the x-ray was exposed. A whole set of teeth required probably a dozen or more of these cards and since they had to be developed, you had to wait until the next visit for the Doc to tell you what was up.

Today, the x-rays are taken by inserting a

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