I’ve become my father, beginning with the way I repeat many of the same stories. (Did you know that I paid more for my last car than for my first house?) I am a dyed-in-the-wool Southern liberal. At age 70 I still have good-looking legs. Until I had my recent cataract surgery, I couldn’t see worth a damn without my glasses and—if you ask Candice—my hearing still remains suspect. I love to read and tell others about the books I’m reading. 

One of the things I don’t mention, however, is that I also have my father’s teeth.

As a child of the Depression Tom Brown had bad dental care and lost a few teeth over the years. Dentures were a part of his oral history.* And for as long as I can remember, Daddy also had a gap between his two front teeth.

The spacing came naturally and was part of the gene pool he passed along to me. He used to say that if a gap-toothed grin was good enough for Ernest Borgnine it was good enough for him. Had he been from my generation Daddy could have referenced David Letterman, Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Michael Strahan, Eddie Murphy, Uzo Aduba, or other famous gap-toothed celebrities.

Aduba, the Orange is the Next Black actress, says that “In Nigeria a gap is a sign of beauty and intelligence. People want it. My mother desperately wished she had the gap, but wasn’t born with one. She continued to lay on the guilt, explaining that my gap was ‘history in my mouth,'” 

I love that thought: “History in my mouth.”

Willem Dafoe even starred in a short film about his “air cooled” teeth entitled Mind the Gap. The film star says gaps are “openness, possibility, room to savor . . . Everything I bite,” he adds, “stays with me a long time.” The strange, some would say alluring others would say weird two-minute film—which was sold at auction to benefit a children’s charity—ends with the intense actor coming down hard on his love of his imperfect teeth. “They say you can never be too thin or too rich. I say there can never be enough gaps.”

Gaps and crooked teeth are actually fairly normal to this day in Europe and the rest of the world. Only in America do we obsess so much over the perfection of our teeth.

It was the parents of my generation who began that trend for the middle classes. When we discussed braces in high school the orthodontist told my parents that I had “a mouth that was too big for my teeth.”** He would straighten them out and close the gap—which he did—but unless I wore a retainer the rest of my life, my natural gap would return.

As I aged, I worried about that growing space between my front teeth. I did actually return to a retainer in my 40s, but again got tired of wearing it every night while I slept. My answer was to smile with my lips closed. Not exactly the most open, inviting, and expressive look I have to admit.

I see now that I had slipped into a form of personal body shaming, which is not good when applied to ourselves or when we apply it to others.

This began to change in retirement.

As we travel the world for National Trust Tours, I walk around with a face that has a perpetual look of wonder and amazement. On a recent trip, an older traveler approached me and said, “I love seeing you as you talk, or when you’re walking on a tour, or when I pass you in the hall because you always have this big smile on your face.” That stuck with me. I know when I smile naturally that my air cooled teeth are exposed. She was saying that she liked it.

So I decided that at 70 years of age it was time to not just tolerate but to love the imperfections of my very imperfect teeth. And when I recently needed a new head shot, I decided to embrace the imperfections. Those teeth—and the open smile—would be front and center.

I rather like it.

I have come to realize how important gaps are in our lives as I wrote in the first of my Gap Year Chronicles in 2019. Writer Satya Robyn has said that when she steps out gently from the busyness of life to engage the world through curiosity and wonder, she also stops struggling. She floats as in a river, embracing the liminality. But you need the space to be able to bash into some joy along the way. And when I retired, one of our trustees told me not to be afraid of blank spaces on my calendar, because it was in those gaps where the good things happened.

In this new phase of life I’m now loving the openness. The possibility. The room to savor. You can never have too many gaps.***

More to come . . .

DJB

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*Of course, if politicians keep legislating based upon the insane ramblings of our Health and Human Services Secretary—Robert “I don’t think people should take medical advice from me” Kennedy, Jr.—and we ban fluoride in our community water systems, then we’ll all go back to the poor dental health that was prevalent in the 1930s. This is a Health and Human Secretary who willingly exposed his grandchildren to “widespread fecal contamination and high levels of bacteria, including E. coli.” Is America really this stupid? (Don’t answer, that’s a rhetorical question.)

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**You can make up your own joke. I’ve heard them all.

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***Pair this post with Bashing into joy and you just might decide that I’m throwing caution to the wind in my old age. I’m not there yet, but that’s the road I’m taking.

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Photos of DJB by Kristina Sherk