Well, Senior Danes, we’re finally here. Homecoming? Heavens, no. Graduation? Who cares. I’m talking about a true milestone — the one that really defines this moment in our lives. It’s TOOTH EXTRACTION time!
That’s right. Whip out your parents’ insurance cards and get ready for the thrillingest vicissitude you’ve lucked upon yet. You might’ve just done it over the summer — you might be planning to do it come closer to (GULP!) fall of your upcoming freshman year. Regardless, chances are that you have already or will soon find yourself in the same boat as me: that shipwrecked canoe, cradling a gooey-gummed invalid.
Maybe it’s the Tylenol talking, but I find that this refrain from life’s usual non-mouth-bleeding fare is a mighty fine meaningful encore to an adolescence near spent, if not an allegorical treatment on these final tentative days of grade-school age. Assuming that you are me, which many of you nearly are in this situation, you may find yourself in the following nostalgically newborn positions: spooning spinach-carrot-chicken puree past dribbling lips; struggling to produce more than lisped babble, settling for mute pointing and grunting; being piteously pet by attendant mother; so on and so forth. It’s muffled under the ice pack strapped around my head, but the classical music lullabying in the background only serves to accentuate the ironic imposed regression cast upon me in my post-operation days. Mix, as I have, that Baroque composition with 1940s adventures of the aptly powered toggling boy-man that is Billy Batson/Captain Marvel, and the suddenly acute puerility of it all is laughable to bear. It’s back to infancy for our lot, and it’s appropriately come at the foot of this road leading swiftly to alleged uncontested maturity. Here is a reminder, before we get too big in our conceptions of ourselves, that despite the incoming caps, gowns, downtown living spaces and/or trade schools… We are still children.
Wisdom ripped right from our mouths when we’re expected to feel more wise than ever. It’s a rite of passage, my friends, and while you can’t enjoy solid foods or rigorous exercise, do some thinking on where you stand. We’re all at an infinitely forked path and trying to rush our merry ways along. How about sitting down, unlacing the running shoes, dropping those ten-ton SAT study books (lest you pop a dry socket), and letting yourself stop for a moment — enjoying these quiet, late-teenhood hours and reflecting on a youth seeming near spent, yet, obviously now, still going?
Doctor’s orders. Then, again: this could all be the product of some trace anaesthetic.
