“Do I have anything between my teeth?” Allison asks.
She is preparing to go to the gym and has just eaten a poppy seed bagel for breakfast. I am sitting at the kitchen counter, also eating a poppy seed bagel. As I munch on my own bagel, she stands before me and gives me a radiant smile that allows me a good view of all her teeth.
I glance inside her mouth, looking for a dark speck or two.
“Nope, no poppy seeds.”
“That’s good,” Allison says.
She grabs her car keys and water bottle off the counter, wishes me a nice morning and heads out.
The children are asleep, so I am left alone with my poppy seed bagel. I take several bites, then wonder what the inside of my mouth looks like. I head to the dining room, where there’s a mirror. I flash a radiant smile and see reflected back at me three poppy seeds stuck between my teeth. I can feel them with my tongue.
Though I am usually oblivious as to where the food that enters my mouth actually ends up, my wife and children have taken it upon themselves to point out remnants stuck between my teeth or cemented above or below my lips.
Their preferred notification method is not words but staring at me and moving a finger to a spot on their own face that approximates where the offender is conspicuously hiding.
Once, after eating a peanut butter-and-marshmallow sandwich, I walked by my daughter Molly, who was sitting in a chair reading a book. As I passed, she looked up at me and then moved her index finger to her lip and dabbed it twice.
“I just ate a fluffernutter sandwich,” I said.
“It looks like you have been eating white paint,” she said.
When people quietly signal to me that there are small bits of food still on my face or stuck in my teeth, the expectation is that I should immediately halt whatever I am doing and instead find some dental floss or a napkin or a wet washcloth and scrub, scrub, scrub.
But why the urgency? Why the revulsion? If the poppy seed looks good on a bagel, why not in between my teeth? If the slice of blueberry pie looks scrumptious on a plate, why don’t the morsels of blueberry residue and crust residing underneath my chin also look delicious?
Let’s compromise. What if instead of rushing to wipe away the marshmallow fluff or the glistening crumb of a tuna sandwich, I don’t do anything but promise to take care of it by tomorrow?
Alas, “tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow” is not an acceptable response. My children would be extremely embarrassed if their friends saw me with flecks of tuna on my eyebrows or three poppy seeds prominently enmeshed in my mouth.
And I don’t want to hear my wife say to me, “You’re not the man I married! The man I married never impersonated a dinner plate.”
I ponder some more and have no answers for why the poppy seeds are allowed to live on my bagel but not on my teeth. It’s not like they are harming anyone.
Above me I hear my children moving around. They will soon be down for breakfast. If I do not remove the trapped poppy seeds, in a few moments they will be looking at me and pointing at their own front teeth. I decide to choose the path of least resistance.
I go back to the kitchen and finish my bagel, then drink some water and slosh it inside my mouth. I walk back to the mirror and offer it another radiant smile.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, do I have anything between my teeth?”
