September 17, 2025
-by Frank Macdonald
I once spent three months on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Most of the memories have become vague, but I do recall the music and the crowds. What I seem to recall best, though, is my almost steady diet of corn-on-the-cob. There was a street vendor who sold cobs for 25 cents, boiled, with a holding stick, and when purchased, was lifted from the boiling water, deep dunked into a vat of melted butter and glazed with more salt than a Cape Breton winter road. For both its cost and its quality, it became part of my daily diet.
Thoughts of it have been brought up from the depths of memory by thoughts about the history of teeth.
There must be an evolutionary reason why most babies are born without teeth. Oh, there are exceptions, I know, new-borns who can’t wait to sink their ivories into a pizza, but generally speaking, most of us were born toothless.
Eventually the teeth do come. We call it “teething,” and while the process seems to be agonizing for the child, it appears to be even more agonizing for the parents. I don’t recall my own teeth as they came in, although I suspect that, as a first born, I gave my parents second thoughts about the wisdom of becoming my parents.
Yet, despite all the suffering inflicted on an entire family because a child was acquiring teeth, the child is forgiven. Unfortunately for parents, those hard-earned teeth begin to take another toll on the family.
The teething process is not finished with us.
These painfully acquired bits of personal porcelain don’t mark the end of Nature’s birthing rites. These teeth, a child soon learns, are just his or her baby teeth. They begin to loosen in your mouth like a badly put together Lego set.
It is at this point that children are introduced to an unskilled labour practice called home dentistry. “Loose tooth? Here, kid, bite into this apple.” Or a parent ties a string around the tooth that is trying to escape and attaches it to a door knob. “Sit there until we have a visitor.”
Losing teeth wasn’t a losing proposition, however. A lost tooth placed under your pillow was a bribe to the tooth fairy who collects baby teeth for some reason. In exchange for the tooth, it would leave a dime or a quarter which you could take to the store to buy some fudge candy to accelerate your tooth loss.
The loss of one’s baby teeth does not mean eating porridge for the rest of your life.
Soon a second set of teeth begins to appear, restoring your school photograph smile, and allowing you to chew gum again. This second set of teeth, however, were of no commercial value. The tooth fairy did not come to boys who lost a tooth in a fist fight, in a hockey game, or in a rot from eating too much candy.
The point of the second set, according to the school’s health book, was to teach you responsibility. The endurance of your second teeth depended on how well you cared for them all by yourself. Unfortunately, those teeth grew in at an age when tooth care was not a priority compared to all the things you could eat that didn’t take the future of those teeth into consideration. Young people became aware of words such as ‘cavity.’
In our town that did not have a dentist at the time, such cavities had a way of turning your front teeth into “at risk” teeth. Before they actually rotted away, though, parents were forced to send you away to a dentist. Dentistry, in my adolescence, was not a pain-free practice. They used drills that could have dug hard rock mines to grind away the decay and allow for the cavities to be filled with…well, something.
One’s fillings again restored the school photograph smile, but they didn’t always endure. After a couple of years of neglect, a guy matured enough to warrant a “partial,” four glossy new teeth that were a billion times whiter than the other teeth in your head.
What happened afterwards was generally up to the individual. Some people got the message and began brushing and flossing compulsively. Others didn’t, and somewhere over the next twenty years, opted for a complete rack of upper teeth.
As my own teeth left home one by one, I worked hard, paid high, to try to hang onto a half dozen bottom teeth which, I explained, were my steak and corn-on-the-cob teeth. But it was losing war, one now completely lost. All my original teeth belong to the fairies.
This week, Co-op shopping, I came across a vegetable bin filled with corn on the cob. Between nostalgia and outright desire, I decided to take a chance.
I bought two cobs, brought them home and boiled them, slathered them with butter, and salted them enough to make my cardiologist faint. This was a big moment in my dietary life – could my recently acquired lowers handle the challenge and transport me back to the wonder of Bourbon Street corn on the cob?
I timidly bit in. First bite, a success. Then a second bite, my teeth were holding and my mouth filled with tasty nibs. I was overcome by a rush of confidence and began biting along that cob like it was a typewriter, back and forth until it was nothing but cob. All through the process I swear I could hear Al Hirt and Pete Fontaine as a soundtrack. And a second cob waiting.
The manufactured teeth held their own.
My only regret was that there was no pig with whom I could share my good fortune by offering it the still juicy cob.
