The older I get, the more I realize there are two kinds of people in dentist waiting rooms. There are the people who sit quietly and read their books, and there are the people who want to tell you their entire life story before your name gets called.
That particular morning, I was hoping very strongly for the first kind.
Eventually the remaining lower front teeth decided to migrate backward like retirees heading south for the winter. The roots became exposed and sensitive. Brushing my teeth hurt. Rinsing my mouth hurt. Even breathing cold air started to feel like somebody applying jumper cables directly to my gums. Now, the brushing and rinsing part I probably could have tolerated, but when ice cream became painful, negotiations officially ended. Some sacrifices are noble. Giving up ice cream is not one of them. So out the teeth came.
This was my second of four appointments for impressions for dentures, and I was not particularly looking forward to it taking the time away from the many projects on my to-do list. I wanted to get in, get out, and get home to finish painting a room. I had mentally scheduled the entire day already, and nowhere in that schedule had I allotted time for unexpected social interaction.
When I walked into the waiting room, I spotted a woman quietly reading a book. Perfect. I silently blessed her. Readers are usually safe. Readers understand boundaries. Readers understand the sacred social agreement of public silence. She looked up briefly and smiled.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I answered politely.
Then she returned to her book.
Excellent. This was going exactly according to plan. For approximately thirty seconds.
“Beautiful day, huh?”
Well, technically, yes. It was a gorgeous day. After a solid week of rain, the sun had finally decided to make an appearance, and apparently I was foolish enough to answer honestly.
“Yes,” I said. “Nice to finally see the sun.”
That was all it took. Like accidentally pulling the pin from a conversational hand grenade, I had opened the door.
She began making small talk. Now, I’m not proud of this, but internally I had already placed her into a category. We all do it. In my mind she became One Of Those People. The people who can begin with the weather and somehow arrive forty-five minutes later at their cousin’s gallbladder surgery in 1987. Fortunately, my name got called pretty quickly, and I escaped into the dental chair before learning the full family history.
The appointment itself involved molds, measurements, adjustments, and several minutes of trying to answer questions while another human being had both hands inside my mouth. Dentists somehow expect coherent responses from people who currently resemble a trout pulled onto shore. I answered as best I could with a series of muffled sounds that could have meant anything from “yes” to “please alert my next of kin.”
When I finished, I walked back into the waiting room expecting blessed silence. Unfortunately, the woman was still there. Her son was still in with the dentist. Jim had dropped me off, gone to run an errand, and hadn’t returned yet. In other words, I was trapped.
There’s a particular kind of resignation that settles over a person when they realize their ride home has not yet returned and the conversationalist has made direct eye contact.
I sat down and she put her book down, which should have been my warning. She began telling me about her husband, who had been a pilot, and her daughter who flies helicopters. She talked about how, when they all get together, the conversations go on for hours because pilots apparently speak a language entirely made up of airplanes, weather patterns, and near-disasters that somehow become funnier with age. It turns out aviation families are a lot like farm families. Once they get started, there’s no such thing as a short story.
Trying to contribute something to the conversation, I mentioned that years ago I had actually taxied a 747 at Logan Airport in Boston. That little detail deserves a story of its own someday, but for now let’s just say it drove less like a giant aircraft and more like a very expensive luxury car that happened to weigh several hundred tons. She thought that was fascinating, which surprised me because I was fairly certain most people would respond to that story with concern and several follow-up questions about airport security.
Then she smiled and said, “I mostly just sit quietly and let them talk. Some people just talk and talk and talk.”
I nodded sympathetically, feeling completely validated in my earlier assessment of the situation. Well, they’re not the only ones, I thought.
Funny how quickly the Lord can humble a person.
Because somewhere between the pilot and helicopter stories, she stopped being “that talkative woman in the waiting room” and became genuinely fascinating. Her father had run a large department store in New York. She told stories about growing up there and about her older brother, who never wanted his pesky little sister tagging along. Apparently she solved that problem through strategic blackmail.
“If you don’t let me come,” she’d tell him, “I’ll tell Mom what you did.”
Honestly, that level of negotiation skill probably should have led to a career in government.
She talked about childhood adventures, family dynamics, and little fragments of life that would have disappeared forever if nobody took the time to listen. And suddenly I realized something uncomfortable. I had assumed she was merely filling silence, but she wasn’t. She was sharing herself. There’s a difference.
The truth is, older people carry entire worlds around inside them. Histories. Stories. Adventures. Regrets. Funny moments. Hard moments. Lives fully lived. Give them ten minutes and a willing listener, and suddenly you’re hearing about 1957, somebody’s cousin Earl, and a pie recipe nobody bothered to write down before Aunt Martha passed away. But most of the time nobody slows down long enough to hear any of it.
We glance at each other in waiting rooms and think we’ve seen the whole person in thirty seconds. Woman reading book. Talkative. Older. Friendly. Category assigned. Case closed.
Meanwhile she had lived a life involving pilots, helicopters, department stores, childhood schemes, and enough stories to fill several books.
By the time Jim arrived, I found myself genuinely disappointed to leave. What had started out as a dentist appointment I wanted to rush through turned into the most interesting part of my morning, which frankly is not a sentence anybody usually says about a denture fitting.
I still went home and finished painting the room that afternoon. The project got completed exactly as planned.
But somewhere between the dental impressions and a stranger’s stories about pilots, helicopters, department stores, and childhood blackmail schemes, my day had quietly become something more than productive. I got my room painted, and my life was enriched by the stories of a stranger I almost dismissed as just somebody who talked too much in a dentist’s waiting room.
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