Dentists and Naming
Before beginning this particular essay I knew that in order to be sufficiently entertaining, I would need to look up various oral pathologies that will disgust and amuse. In fact, this is how I came to the topic. Both Jeff and Rachael—cochairs and only living members of the Naming Committee—had dentists as fathers. In fact, most of Jeff’s family appears to be dentists. He had one peculiar variety of cavity that he was waiting for an older brother to reach just the right point in his dental education in order to fix. Anyway, in researching diseases of the mouth I uncovered a lovely photograph of a person with so much iron in his system it was ruining his teeth. They had become black and were apparently chunking apart. It was very unpleasant. And it reminded me of my mother.
My mother has shockingly low iron. She went to give blood once and they said, nope, sorry, your blood’s no good. Not enough iron. So on her way home she purchased some iron supplements and raisins. She took so many supplements that when she went back to the bloodbank a month later, she was sick from all the iron coursing through her. She was suffering from symptoms of an iron overdose. The folks at the bloodbank said, nope, sorry, your blood’s no good. Not enough iron.
So she gave up.
She has always wanted to get one of those license plate rings that say Houchins’s 5 Gallon Club (or 10 or 15 or 20 or as high as you personally may have reached), so my dad, out of sympathy and that pure sort of love that comes after twenty-five years of marriage, had a special, custom license plate ring made that read “5 Gallon Club Wannabe”. Or something along those lines.
My mom has never put it on her car.
Maybe I should take it, next time I’m home. No one will take my blood either. They’ve never even taken a sample to check my iron levels! It’s that bad!
The Red Cross was collecting blood at the ward building and I thought, “Now’s the time to start.” I’ve always wanted to donate blood. But I couldn’t when I was younger, then I was on my mission, but now that I’m home I’d best start giving, I figured, so I wrote my name next to 3:30 and dropped by on my way home from school.
They had me read through the list of bad things and make sure I was clean. I figured I was going to be clean as a Mormon boy can be. After all, no heroin habit, no promiscuous sex—not even any Mad Cow burgers. But I was not quite as clean as expected.
You see, I’ve been jaundiced with the Epstein-Barr virus.
When I came home from my mission, all seemed well enough. Until I vomited while demonstrating how to eat kalbi to my relations. The next day was my homecoming, and I was so grey and deathly looking that for about nine months afterwards, people would come up to me and say, “Wow. You are looking a lot better!”
After church that day I came home and went to bed for a month. (You know, as a missionary, I had always joked that what I wanted to do when I got home was just sleep for a month. Be careful what you wish for, people say. People are, it ends up, sometimes right.
I was down with mono. Mono! The kissing disease! And me! Recently returned! Disgusting.
Looking back at the last month of my mission, I did have all sorts of symptoms—lack of appetite, overtiredness, et cetera, but I wasn’t concerned then. Being on the Lord’s errand I had much more important things to think about my last month than my appetite. Perhaps the greatest blessing of my time as a missionary was that I was healthy enough my last month to make it my best and most productive month. Whenever I think about it, I fill with gratitude.
And rightly so, because on my return, I came down with mononucleosis so bad, that every doctor I saw was wonderfully impressed. They kept running tests on me because they could not believe that mono alone was doing this to me. “I’ve heard this can happen with mono,” they would tell my mother and the inanimate object called Me, “but I’ve never seen it!”
But I have a knack with coming down with bizarre conditions when I actually decide to get sick. My senior year of high school I had an eye cold and woke up every morning with my eyes sealed shut. The pus would leak out as I slept and dry up in my eyelashes. When I woke up, I would have to stumble to the bathroom and bury my face in warm water in order to soften the dried pus, clean my eyelashes, and open my eyes for the first time of the day.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the eyedrops they gave me tasted like tar. Why was I drinking my eyedrops? I wasn’t. But the stuff leaked from my eyes, back into my sinuses and down the back of my throat. It was awful.
Then, the year between high school and my mission I got the mumps. The mumps! I was the first person in two years to get the mumps in Kern County! The doctors were delighted.1
After I recovered, they kindly gave me a second MMR. So kind.
Anyway, back to my mono. I had a full body rash and had to soak in this awful oatmeal bath in order to be able to stand my skin. I could drink only purified water, and Pedialyte was my only form of nutrition. I was so dehydrated, one Sunday morning my mother took me to the emergency room and they filled me up with about a dozen gallons of fluid via IV, and ran a half thousand more tests trying to find Hepatitis X or something that would offer an explanation for my suddenly yellow skin. But no luck. The mono was so bad that it was shutting down my liver was all. It was very exciting. Ask anyone.
But the point of this story is they won’t take my blood anymore. So I too won’t ever get a hip license plate ring. And really, bloodbank rings are all the rage in Kern County. But I guess me and Mom are just gonna get left out.
Back to dentists. The reason I brought up pathology in the first place is because Rachael and Jeff would occasionally sit around and reminisce. Rachael was working as a dental hygienist or some such thing where she would be subjected first hand to the glorious blessings found inside people’s mouths. Bill Bryson has stated he does not understand why any one in a free country would ever become a dentist, and after listening to Jeff and Rachael’s stories, I am forced to agree. Stories of a man coming in for his first dental appointment ever after 55 years of life, bringing with him his last three teeth and an impressive collection of stinking holes filled with rotting food. Stories of people coming in for their yearly dental appointment who didn’t so much as scratch the plaque off their teeth with a fingernail during the interim. Disgusting stories, mostly. And the fact that Jeff’s dad told him not to bother brushing until his permanents came in. Which makes sense I suppose—baby teeth are just going to fall out anyway—but to me, it seems like the money wasted on kids’ toothpaste is worth the money saved through a good brushing habit. Although, I guess, when you have a dentist chair in the basement, like some sort of horror movie, and Dad coming down the stairs after work one night to see about that root canal you’ve been needing, son, such things as the price of kids’ toothpaste may not be a consideration.
But they should be—at least according to “John Sayre Marshall, M.D., Sc. D. Syracuse University, Captain U.S. Army Retired Formerly Examining and Supervising Dental Surgeon U.S. Army; President of the Board of Examiners” in his 1912 volume, Mouth Hygiene and Mouth Sepsis. Dr. Marshall was a great believer in dental hygiene for children. May 18, 1910 an experiment was begun which took a group of children, taught them proper mastication, insalivation and toothbrushing. Tests were given before and after regarding their mental acuity; comparisons were also made between their grades and class behavior before and after the year of the experiment. The children made an astonishing gain in the psychological tests of 99.8%. Their parents were pleased. For instance: “Issie Grey’s father says that since Issie has entered the dental class he has improved so that he would not give him now for all his other children put together, and we have some very nice children from the Grey family” (259). Dr. Marshall does not mention if Issie began the experiment already “very nice”, or if he was one of the “most disobedient, reckless, and troublesome ones” (254) who had decided to participate instead of continuing down the road to juvenile court. But either way, there you have it—Issie’s worth more than all his brothers and sisters because of proper chewing and brushing. Hooray for hygiene!2
I’m happy to report that while I was fighting disease, I never died from dental problems or anything else, but survived and am now happily married and hope to someday become a productive member of society.
Anyhow, if you remember the purpose of this essay, you may wonder if it was really wise to put people whose lives have been shaped through youthful experiences with abnormal mouths in charge of naming a building as beautiful as the JSA. For the JSA truly is beautiful. I hope it remains so for dozens of future generations.
The original St. Mary’s Academy was a stately looking building complete with towers and whatnot, but it was smallish and eventually became oldish and rundownish as well. So they built a new St. Mary’s Academy around it. Literally. There was about a foot of space between the old Academy and the new. When the new was ready to be used, the old was torn down and now there is a courtyard where the school once was.
No doubt you are now trying to imagine just what the Academy building must look like. This is surely a case where one picture is worth several thousand words, and so here is what it currently looks like from the air:
[ill of academy bldg]
That round area in the middle is where the old building once was. And we should all thank our lucky stars for my intervention, preventing of the Naming Committee from calling that spot the Orifice. That would have been awful. Wait. Instead of some silly orbs a zillion miles away, why don’t you thank me? I don’t mean to boast or unduly puff myself up, but I was their liaison with the Presidency. Yes, I was the one in charge of keeping the dentists’ kids in line. And it wasn’t easy, let me tell you. Their verse from the NSA song should give you some idea of what I was up against:
I think Jeff and Rachael must have little else to do
Because when all the rest of us simply had no clue
Where we were or where we’d been in this big old building
They went around with spraypaint and gave names to everything
You may recall how confusing the building is on first visit from earlier mention, and naturally, having places named should be helpful. But the real reason we wanted a Naming Committee was to leave our mark as the first JSA group. If we called it the Parlor, then darn it, it was the Parlor!!! And no one had better ever deign to call it anything else!
In my imagination, I imagined fancy plaques in each room displaying the name I deemed most appropriate. I naturally assumed that everyone else (and especially the Naming Committee) would cow to my declarations of preferability, and that would be that. But nothing quite worked out that way. The only name I invented that gained any popular support was the Bubble Cave, and that only after abandoning all other hopes, and proselyting for it like a crazyhead. But the plaques never caught on. You would think a couple dentists’ kids would really dig it, but no.
Part of the problem with the actual naming process was the simple fact that it feels almost desecratory to name mere pieces of something so wonderful and foreign as the JSA. Wonderful because it was, and foreign because it was very Catholic and very much of a different era. I suppose the building is of an International Style, but because it is round rather than square and tied in knots rather than being very orderly, it doesn’t feel as boring or look as ugly as your average awful building in the International Style. And the inside is beautiful.
I hope they never change it much. Yes, it may be a Mormon building now, but the history of the building is eight-fifths its charm. Besides, taking down the Parlor’s cross for instance would require new wallpaper. (Shudder.) YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE WALLPAPER!!! I LOVE THE WALLPAPER!!! It’s green with textured circles that each catch the light differently and give the impression of being covered in lightly luminescent bubbles. You would love it. It may sound goofy, but it’s lovely. And perhaps as you read more about me, you many be tempted to reject my opinions on such things, but consider that the wallpaper was loved by all. It’s shockingly wonderful stuff.
Some beautiful paintings by David Lindsley of Joseph, Hyrum and Emma are either bound for or already in the JSA. I understand they were to be placed in the parlor. I don’t know exactly how they could have fit in there, but okay. Wherever they are, I’m sure they add. And I hope they didn’t rip out any of the past to fit them in. Really, there’s only a little genuinely and undeniably Catholic stuff in there. The rest is just cool stuff from a bygone era. St. Mary’s must’ve been quite the hip joint when it was originally decorated. The lamps have five-foot shades, for example. Just really stylish, and so intact and still so new-feeling it’s absolutely incredible. Of course, the Benedictines believe in respecting the physical world. And it shows. If the place had been completely devoid of people, except for a cyborg duster-man, for the same amount of time St Mary’s was lived in and full of adolescent girls, I doubt it could look better today.3 It’s absolutely amazing.
You’ll hear more about this when I tell you about the part of St Mary’s that was still monastery when I was there and the Surfing Jesus, but know that I love the JSA and hope it’s preserved. I can see it being a great memorial to the Sisters and to inter-religious relations, a symbol of the natural love of the LDS people for all peoples and cultures. A tour of what was once St Mary’s would inspire tourists as they observe how much we respect other peoples’ beliefs, without compromising any of our own. Because there is no more orthodox sect than Mormonism. We believe what we believe and that’s all there is to it. Yet somehow we manage to preach and practice a love for everyone else in every other belief system. I think that’s a remarkable accomplishment. And I think it could only be true if, in fact, Jesus Christ leads us. And I think he does.
Post script: There I go, getting distracted again when the whole point was we wanted to leave our mark on the JSA. Was that such a difficult topic to stick to, Jepson? So, briefly, the Naming Committee was supposed to name things. They did. But sometimes they got carried away (suddenly the Parlor was the Parley P. Pratt Parlor). But other times they were brilliant. For instance, they named our small library after Brother Backman, the Famous Historian, who not only began the BYU Semester in Nauvoo, but, as you will recall, also donated most of the books in library—perhaps all of them—from his personal collection. There! Diseased mouths notwithstanding, dentists’ kids are quite great anyway. Even when they say strangely contradictory things. As when Jeff told me that “All toothpastes are exactly the same and [in the same breath] the only toothpaste anyone in my family would ever use is Colgate Total although [still the same breath] that’s just because my dad got a bunch of free samples.” This leads me to believe that dentistry is about as exact a science as phrenology. Which could send me off on a trail of a thousand more tangents (some of which even have Nauvoo connections—interested in phrenology in old Nauvoo?), but all trails lead back to where we ended last time, so just go read the last few sentences of the last paragraph and we’ll call it good.
return to the table of contents
Thanks for revisiting Nauvoo with me. I would love to hear your thoughts.