The One With the Dog and the Dental Floss

This past weekend, I was visiting my sister in Chicago and met the two greyhounds she has adopted. The presence of the dogs reminded us of the hijinks of the old family dog, and when we remember her, we always eventually get back to one story; the consummate stupid dog story. It's the best dog story I have, and I've actually had it copywrighted so that nobody in the film industry will steal this brilliant gem of a true story.

When I was growing up, our family had a yellow labrador mix named Sandi. She was mostly a gentle and stupid animal, but when it came to filching food, this dog was a pro. There used to be a picture in the guest room of my grandparents' house of myself and my cousins, aged about 2-4, sitting by the lakeshore with our lunches on paper plates in our laps. Sandi is in front of us, eating my sandwich off of my plate. On another occasion, my father famously left two apple pies to cool on the kitchen counter while we went out to dinner, only to find two empty pie pans on the floor with nary a crumb when we returned.

But this is just to set up my hilarious dog story. Allow me to digress gently and work my way back to it in due time.

At our elementary school, we had a yearly event called Career Day. I can't actually remember any of the presenters, save for one. One girl in my class had a father who was a dentist, and he came every year. The first and second grade presentations were gentle exhortations to brush and floss and I always thought it was pretty entertaining, but when we got to third grade, the man got serious. I can't remember his real name, but I think it was Woodman or something, because we called him Dr. Woody. I awaited the presentation happily because I knew I was going to get a free toothbrush, but soon Dr. Woody started showing slides of teeth with cavities. The images of rotting teeth grew increasingly gruesome as he explained how cavities are formed, and what happens if they're allowed to get worse and worse. He drew diagrams on the board illustrating tooth decay. Dr. Woody identified the common culprits of tooth damage- sugary beverages. I was scared straight and didn't have so much as a sip of soda for the next two years. But we did get gift bags from Dr. Woody with the usual toothbrush, stickers, and mini container of dental floss.

Either my sister or I must have left Dr. Woody's goody bag on top of a small, child-height table when we got home from school that day. We forgot about it. I could think of nothing else except grotesque images of cavity-ravaged teeth at the time.

After dinner that night, we were all in the sun room when Sandi entered, attempting to hack something up. My mother went over to the wheezing dog and saw something hanging from her mouth that looked like a thread. She started to pull. And pull. The dog had her hackles up and made a kind of peanut-butter-stuck-to-the-roof-of-the-mouth movement with her jaws. My mother kept on pulling at it, as the extracted thread began to accumulate on the floor. She was still pulling, and it was ridiculous. The whole family was rolling with laughter. I wish we had had the video camera rolling at the time so I could watch it again. I know we would have won America's Funniest Home Videos. Unfortunately, those were the days when operating a home video camera still required a good twenty minutes of set-up.

There were at least ten minutes of pulling before the end of the string came up. The dog ran out of the room, relieved. We just looked at the pile of thread on the floor and laughed till we cried. It was an entire mini-roll of dental floss unspooled before us. What became of its container, we never found out.