A reminder to floss daily.

 

For this scribe, writing the bulletin is about finding that little thread from the speaker’s presentation, a tiny nugget of intrigue, that makes the bulletin fairly fly from the fingertips.  Today’s meeting was the veritable mother lode of inspiration.  Not so much the usual opening stuff; more our guest speaker’s presentation.

 

But first the openers:

Guests were Karen Lambshead, Jeff Johnson, Barbara Rusnak, Eva Quijano, Andrea Jackson, Richard Jackson and Pauline Hanson, the last three all guests of Richard Pass.  Nice to have guests and visiting Rotarians.

 

 

 

Eva Quijano, a member of RC Burlington Lakeshore came to offer us a seat on the bus and three days in NYC including participation in Rotary day at the UN.  Interested? Learn more by emailing Eva at equijano@bell.net

 

Lakeside a la Carte is on August 9^th – just a reminder, the first of many, to support the event in one of several ways: volunteer to help on the day, buy tickets, sponsor a table.

A Group farewell to our in-bound exchange students will be on June 24 at Glenn Warnica’s house.

Now, the guest speaker.  Richard Pass presented his second ever classification talk.  I remember his first; it was the better part of twenty-five years ago.  The thing is, his profession has changed a lot in that time.  You should be reassured, because now many of those intrusive and excruciating procedures of yore have been replaced by smooth, you’d-hardly-know-it’s-happening techniques.

 

 

Your scribe’s genes have set him up with a pretty good set of choppers.  A little sideways slide at closure, one or two premature extractions and well, quite a few of those black amalgam fillings at the back; but generally okay. I didn’t realize how blessed I was until Richard showed us what can and does go wrong.

We saw diagrams of a juvenile jaw with teeth crowded down or pushed sideways to positions and places where you wouldn’t have thought there was room. We learned a bit about impacted molars and cross bites, about devices to stop snoring and worst of all, just what happens to your cherished face as you age.

Did you know that as you move through your four score years and ten: your lips get thinner and longer, they lose of elasticity and the vermillion border, that your eyes, nose and lips all fall, that there’s a decreased vertical height and you develop a dished in face. Of course you knew it; you’re living it.  You probably didn’t want to have it explained quite so matter-of-factly though.

 

Perhaps the highlight, for some, of Richard’s presentation was when he passed around some upper and lower sets of teeth.  I don’t remember quite what they were used to demonstrate, but they certainly amused the crowd.

 

 

As a sort of foil to this engaging presentation, I couldn’t help thinking about Rita, a friend of mine, who specializes in oral photography. It’s really very tricky because you can’t just jam a Nikon SLR between a patient’s aching jaws and snap away at the back of a bicuspid. But her challenges are nothing compared to the sort of skills required of Richard to fill little gaps, straighten teeth, rescue impacted wisdoms, realign jaws and even fit in little clips that will stop you snoring. Sleep well.

 

P. Scribe