Three weeks ago today I lost my last baby tooth. Around Christmas I could feel a familiar childhood ache, I reached into my mouth and I could wiggle that tooth. I was never one to try and force a tooth out, or yank it out, and I definitely never told anyone after the first time or two because Dad would always say “let's see” and next thing I knew he had a tooth in his hand and I had a bloody hole in my head. Same this time; I told no one. I just slowly worked it back and forth over the next several weeks and after dinner, Saturday February 18, when I wiggled it, it obediently laid over on its side and finally, in my 63rd year, gave up its ghost.

This past week I had a dentist appointment. I have been seeing this Dentist for more than 30 years and for more than 30 years she has been after that tooth. I am happy I never let her have it. Now, she of course wants to fill the space, talking about bridges and skyscrapers and drilling deep into the subsurface and other heavy construction, but as with the baby tooth I will again put her off for as long as I can.

I am collecting holes in my head. In addition to this newly acquired collectible, I lost an insufferable adult tooth (probably) 20 years ago and never had that hole filled. In 1998 I had a square cut out of my skull for a vestibular neurectomy and a week later went back for surgery to repair a leak in which my brain juice (cerebrospinal fluid) periodically came flooding both out my nose and down my throat. I have also had both eyes resurfaced (cataract surgeries) which may not qualify as new holes but in the neighborhood, and a few weeks ago, in a routine brain MRI, they found a “tiny cavernous angioma” – incidental, not dangerous, and oxymoronic, but perhaps the prize of my collection. UCLA Health says, “A cavernous angioma is a blood vessel abnormality characterized by large, adjacent capillaries with little or no intervening brain.” Not only a fairly uncommon hole, (0.4 percent of the population), but the “little or no intervening brain” part substantiates what my wife has been saying for years; you can imagine.

Brain, yes. Eyesight, yes. Fix those holes and fix them quick. But incidental? Not dangerous? Not even painful? Oxymoronic? These things can wait. What is more oxymoronic than a 30 year urgency for a 60 year old baby tooth? But then what do I know? After all, it is a medical fact that I have little or no intervening brain.