Man of Steel Mondays
Me and Superman, Superman and Me Part 2
“Orthodontics”
or
“How My Jacked Up Grill Led To Me Collecting Superman”
In our last installment I related the story of “the one that got away”. We’re going to jump ahead a little bit in time to the spring or so of 1987.
By this point my family had made the move from Mountain Top to Wescosville and we were settled into the house on Promise Lane. It was me, my Mom, my previously mentioned Dad and the three older sisters, Mary, Ginny and Jane.
Yes, I was the youngest of four and the only boy. Some might think that this would be a terrible way to grow up and if I wanted to get the sitcom type laugh I would riff on how terribly oppressive my upbringing was but frankly I can’t. In retrospect and through the 20/20 of hindsight I can’t think of a better way to grow up. We were all two years apart, so it may not have been the tightest knit of families but we got by. My sister Jane and I fought like cats and dogs, but she was closest to me in age so that seemed natural.
We all had varying degrees of jacked up grills as well. I am not one to point fingers but considering my mother had to have braces when I was a wee lad I think it is pretty safe to say that it was probably her side of the genetics that caused this. Mary, the eldest, didn’t have too much of a problem and Ginny had a very limited time in braces and from there it was a sliding scale of dental horror. Jane had an overbite best described as unfortunate and my teeth stuck out like God was daring people to hit me in the face. Oddly enough I was never punched in the face as a child or had a soccer ball hit me square in the jaw as my mother was perpetually afraid of, though I did go over my handle bars when I was about eight or so and chipped the hell out of my two front teeth.
Basically Jane and I had teeth that your average orthodontist would look at and immediately hear the “cha ching” of a cash register.
Shortly after moving into the house on Promise Lane we, as a family basically, started going to Dr. Tighe’s office. Dr. Tighe was the orthodontist that saw my mother through braces the first time we lived in Allentown back in the late seventies and so it makes sense that he would be the one to be entrusted with the oral modification of her children. I did not enter braces right away. They wanted to wait another year or so to make sure that my teeth had settled into “adulthood” so my time in iron would wait. That didn’t mean I didn’t go to the orthodontist’s office, though. There would be many a time where I would join my mother and sisters as they went to their appointments, which may sound boring and if memory serves it pretty much was.
Well, it mostly was and if life has taught me anything mostly boring is slightly exciting.
See, Dr. Tighe’s office was LOUSY with comics. Continue reading MAN OF STEEL MONDAYS ON TUESDAY…IN COLOR!
