“What flavour would you like for your
fluoride treatment, Yvette?” the dental hygienist asks. “Orange, bubble gum, or grape?”
Every decision is crucial during the annual
Extreme Gag-reflex Test, the fluoride treatment. I already have the essential equipment : two nestled blue plastic cups that will collect the dribble, and three tissues, one for each side of my mouth and
my chin.
“We can rule out bubble gum right off the
bat,” I answer. “I think I did
orange last year, so let’s go with grape this time.” The fruit flavor might offset the fluride’s cloying sweetness that triggers my gag-reflex as much as the foreign objects she will put in my
mouth. As Lori prepares the treatment,
I steady my breathing, through my nose, slow and regular. Breathing will get me through the next
three minutes. Much too
soon, she stands before me, one u-shaped plastic cup brimming with white
grape-flavored foam in each hand.
For some reason, I think of Anne Boleyn on the platform at the Tower of
London, panning the people before her and the city beyond, deciding the moment
to signal the executioner to wield his axe.
I shake my head to dispel the image, smile
at the incongruous juxtaposition, and tell Lori I’m ready. I open wide. She inserts one cup on the top, and inverts the other for
the bottom. I bite down. Grape was a good choice,
but still, my stomach heaves. I remember to breathe. She might as well have turned on the saliva tap. The count-down begins.
Images of other moments when time slows
down project onto the Disney Circle-theatre that my mind has become : the slow motion chronology of burning my
thigh with boiling water; any kind of waiting—to see a doctor, for test
results, for a text message from a child on the road; the first few weeks of
anything new—a job, a relationship, a baby’s birth, a holiday; the final three
minutes of a CFL football game, when your team is either ahead or behind by a
touchdown or less. To be honest, I
must add clock-watching during a boring class. As a teacher, it hurts to even contemplate that some students have probably felt that way during classes I have taught. They might share John Green’s resolve
in Paper Towns : If I am ever told that I have one day
to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High
School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years. Oh, and a three-minute fluoride
treatment.
The slow shuffle of time, then, is often
associated with anxiety, boredom, loss, stress, or danger. So, we want time to fly. We make choices because “it passes the
time”, « ça passe le temps ».
We kill time, we have don’t like having time on our hands, and we are
pleased when time passes quickly.
A full calendar, a wedding, time spent with friends, visits from adult
children, absorption in a passionate activity, all seem to run on an
accelerated clock. Maybe we want this
rapidity because we perceive it as a sign that things are going well, that we
are prosperous in the economic, emotional, and social senses of the word.
As the tissues get wetter and the plastic
cups fill with fluoride residue I wonder if we are being cavalier about time. Why do we want time to pass so
quickly? All of us are journeying
toward the same end. I am in no
hurry to get there, to arrive at the finish line of my time. In fact, I want to savour every morsel,
like a decadent chocolate. I want
to collect it like drops of water in a drought, or ration it like an expensive
cream. I want to rein time
in.
That means I must stay awake : pause on the front step to smell the
fresh morning air, stop on the
highway shoulder on the way to work to watch the sunrise, set aside my work to
listen to a colleague, suspend my to-do list to post a blog after an absence of almost two weeks.
It also means not to wish away
anything, even the last eternal seconds before Lori returns to remove the
fluoride, and I can go home.
