Brushing Up
NOT optimal toothbrush organization.
We just passed the day of the year that is responsible for the biggest increase in bathroom activity of the year. Don’t be gross. I’m talking about Thanksgiving and toothbrushing.
Today while I was scrolling through Facebook catching up on the latest Black Friday deals and conspiracy theories, I came across an advertisement for a manual toothbrush. I realize we live in a world where patience is stretched too thin to wait for batteries to charge, but I had to stop and think. Isn’t a manual toothbrush a. . .
Even with the teeth I lost over the years due to my record consumption of peanut brittle, I’ve brushed a lot of teeth in my time. I’m old enough to remember the pain and suffering I felt when they boosted the price of candy bars from a dime to fifteen cents. But even then, my manual transmission toothbrush worked just fine, dealing with everything from Pay Days to Peanut M&Ms with cheerful efficiency.
That same dime bought me a nutty buddy when the Ice Cream Man, who was not a creep trying to lure small children into a lifetime of cheap snow cones, drove through the neighborhood in his specially outfitted freezer truck, selling Push Ups, Ice Cream Sandwiches, and chocolate covered vanilla popsicles. I’m old enough to forget the name of those, but they were delicious and cold on a hot, summer day even when your fingers stuck together from melting ice cream running down the stick.
Which reminds me that I’m old enough to remember when a Push Up was not an item of lingerie.
You can see I brushed a lot of teeth - not counting the times I brushed extra because there was a tiny piece of chip from the Mexican restaurant down the street stuck in between my front teeth and I couldn’t find the dental floss because somebody had taken it to their room because their yoyo string broke or out back to tie up the tomato plants, so I’d try to wedge the bristles in between my teeth because it felt like all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were jammed in there.
I even had an electric toothbrush when I was a kid. I used it to brush my coat’s fake fur collar that resembled a rain-soaked weasel, Barbie’s hair that resembled my coat collar, and the cat, but I didn’t use it to brush my teeth.
A couple of gray hairs ago, my son got a new toothbrush to take on his trip to Japan. It had a USB port. I don’t know what they do for teeth in Japan, but I know they are very particular about personal hygiene and technology, so I guess Son the Second fit in just fine. I don’t know exactly what you do with a USB toothbrush. Does it find your molars on Google Earth? Track the path of your last stick of Juicy Fruit? Count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? All I know is that electronic toothbrush logged more miles in one trip than I have since I’ve been old enough to say “First Class, please.” Just kidding, I don’t even go to the mailbox First Class.
When I saw the fancy advertisement for the
new manual toothbrush, I beat a path to my computer and ordered one from the
site that knows more about me than the doctor who carved into my stuffing to produce Giblet One and Giblet two three decades ago.
The toothbrush arrived faster than it takes to load Cool Whip onto pumpkin pie. It looked just like my last toothbrush. Except it didn’t fit in the hole in my ceramic toothbrush holder so I had to lay it across the part where the soap goes. When I tried to turn the water on, I accidentally knocked it with my elbow and it catapulted into the trashcan.
So the new toothbrush didn’t conform to standards, required a restructuring of equipment, and needed an upgrade to be functional. I assembled a Problem-Solving team to assess the feasibility of redesigning the toothbrush area of my bathroom to support the integrity of the new vision. Bill said forget it, he’ll buy me a toothbrush that fits.
So much for technology.
