Life's a bowl of cherries

Now we've spat out the pits

A recently spotted swimmer having a good time at Anakiwa.

Summer’s coming to an end. The day is sunny, we’ve had a glorious swim and all’s well with the world.

But the sun’s off the deck earlier, it’s dark in the morning and the feijoas are coming onstream.

Besides, a few deeply symbolic things have happened that signify the end of difficult times and the start of a new era.

We’ve had equipment problems in the pottery, but at great cost we seem to be over them now (fingers crossed).

I don’t have to write any more weekly swim stories, our long swim trip is over and, for the first time in 60 years, I have all my teeth.

To everything, there’s a season (someone should write a song about it) and our season of stress is being put behind us.

It’s a funny thing about the teeth.

In early 1966, I was still 17 and I’d just left home in Whangarei for Auckland University. I was living in a hostel for young Christian gentlemen in Parnell (right by the cathedral and around into Brighton Rd). I had a terrible toothache.

I don’t know what led me to a dentist somewhere near the bottom of Queen St (I think it was pain). He sat me in a chair, poked around for a while and told me I had an abscess and he might as well pull out the tooth.

At least, that’s how it seemed in retrospect. He could have said anything. I was young and impressionable and he was an authority figure, so off he went.

My teeth weren’t that good when I was young and this one seemed full of fillings. Whether that was the reason I don’t know, but the whole thing exploded in the grip of his mighty pliers, leaving him to pluck random chunks out.

For weeks, little splinters of tooth edged their way up through my gums, but that eventually stopped and in the fullness of time I got used to having a gap in my face.

Years passed and before I knew it 50 of them had gone by. At the age of 67, my benevolent employers sent me off with a kind redundancy package and I decided it would be a good plan to get a few crowns in place of broken and unstable pieces of my toothware.

I thought that was the end of it, but by last year I’d had another extraction and had a few other things needing attention. I’d been shopping around for a new dentist and found one in a fancy building in town who suggested I get an implant in place of my most recent gap.

“While you’re about it, what about an implant in that other gap?” He was talking about the space I’d had by now for most of my life. Apparently, the second one would be half price. What the hell - you’ve never too old for a new experience.

Accordingly, last September I had holes punched in my jawbone and these nifty little titanium pins put in.

They’re very clever. Hollow and threaded on the inside, a little cap is screwed on to tide you over for a few months while things settle.

As if in protest, the pin in place of my ancient gap screamed at me for a week or more, asking why I’d upset the equilibrium of my face, but it settled down and the little caps came to feel very comfortable - a lot less vulnerable than naked gums.

It took a while for me to complete the next step. With one thing or another, it took until February for me to go back and request the crowns that were to be put on top of the pins. By then, I’d also broken off another tooth, so that was another crown needed.

The new dentist I’d found, in a fancy building in the heart of town, wanted $2700 per crown.

That made my eyes water.

I rang around and found another dentist, working out of an old house, but from a well-known and well-respected Nelson family, who quoted $1800, so I rolled up there and had the job done.

So now I have the full complement of gnashers.

It’s a symbol that things that were wrong are being righted.

On another tack, all the broken pottery machinery has been fixed, we’re in the Marlborough Sounds at our holiday bach and we’re going to be here for three weeks of the next four.

I’m not going to talk about the future, but now that the past is out of the way, we have plans.

Who would have thought?

Want to subscribe? No cost, but stories in your email whenever they get written.

Or share with a friend.