Teach Us to Number Our Days

Contentedly chewing on my blueberry muffin the other morning, I bit down on something hard. It turned out to be a twenty-year-old gold crown that had come unglued from what was left of a right lower molar. Intimations of mortality—or at least of decrepitude—flooded in. I was not in any pain, but repairs were obviously in order. Three days later, I went off in the car to see our dentist, whose practice is an hour and a half away down I-95 in Connecticut. We moved to Southeastern Connecticut after retiring, but kept our dentist in the New York suburb where we had lived for the previous twenty-two years. A good dentist is hard to find.