When I was a kid, I didn’t have a fear of the dark per se. What I was really scared about were the things that go bump in the night. And my imagination and I, with a little bit of help from our friend The Dark, could conjure up a million and one things that could not only go bump, but also burp, scream, hide, lurk or just be plain creepy. I never knew what lingered in the shadows waiting for me to fall asleep, so I had to take precautionary measures.
All that practice of learning how to keep aliens away might have been all for naught, because I’m starting to realize that there are other bedtime things to worry about, things that I never even thought to be worried about.
One of which has to do with my new night guard. It is a small piece of hard acrylic shaped to fit over my 4 front teeth (sorta like what you see in the picture, just on my lower teeth). This was prescribed to me after the dentist noticed I had a bit of excess wear on my teeth.
“Do you grind your teeth at night?” she asked.
I told her that I thought I might, but I wasn’t entirely sure, what with my habit of being knocked into unconsciousness at night and all.
So, taking her advice, I started wearing a night guard while sleeping. It could have been just in my head, but my jaw did feel looser and less tense the following days after wearing it, so maybe I did grind my teeth. When I made this comment to Alan, he piped in, “Yeah! It’s so much better listening to your chomping thing on that plastic than it was when it was teeth on teeth.”
I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. “What do you mean ‘chomping thing’? What ‘chomping thing’?”
“That chomping thing you do. Man, it sounds terrible,” he replied, all casual like. As if he were saying, “I wish we still used that brand of toothpaste we got last time. Man, that stuff was minty.”
A “chomping thing” sounds like a frightening thing to be doing while you’re sleeping, so I asked him to demonstrate. And sure enough what he did was a big chomp, like the kind of bite a half-starved person would do if you were to give him a large drumstick to eat.
Now, why a person wouldn’t wake the person they are sleeping next to (who also happens to be the same person he is supposed to care deeply about) to get her to stop doing this terrible chomping thing is beyond me. Just imagine if I’d never listened to my dentist and never brought home a night guard and never commented about how much better my jaw felt afterward. One day I would wake up with smashed up teeth remains in my mouth and I bet Alan would feel sorry then that he never bothered to tell me about my bad habit because he was “too sleepy.”
hahaha oh that left a great mental image…