PAGE 13
Cobb’s Anatomy
by
It was a tooth that you had been prizing for years, but now you wouldn’t have it as a gracious gift. You are through with that tooth forever. You never want to see it again.
As for the dentist, he collects the fixed charge for stumpage and corkage and one thing and another and you come away with a feeling in the side of your jaw like a vacant lot. Your tongue keeps going over there to see if it can recognize the old place by the hole where the foundations used to be. You never realized before what a basement there was to a tooth.
As you come out you pass a fresh victim going in and you see the dentist welcome him and then turn to crank up his motor and you hear the canary tuning up with a new line of v-shaped twitters. And you are glad that he is the one who is going in and that you are the one who is coming out.
Science tells us that the teeth are the hardest things in the human composition, which is all very well as far as it goes, but what science should do is to go on and finish the sentence. It means the hardest to keep.
HAIR
As I remarked in the preceding chapter of this work, one of the pleasantest features about being born is that we are born without teeth and other responsibilities. Teeth, like debts and installment payments, come along later on. It is the same way with hair.
Born, we are, hairless or comparatively so. We are in a highly incomplete state at that period of our lives. It takes a fond and doting parent to detect evidences of an actual human aspect in us. Only the ears and the mouth appear to be up to the plans and specifications. There is a mouth which when opened, as it generally is, makes the rest of the face look like a tire, and there is a pair of ears of such generous size that only a third one is needed, round at the back somewhere, to give us the appearance of a loving cup. And we are smocked and hem-stitched with a million wrinkles apiece, more or less, which partly accounts for the fact that every newborn infant looks to be about two hundred years old. And uniformly we have the nice red complexion of a restaurant lobster. You know that live-broiled look?
As for our other features, they are more or less rudimentary. Of a nose there is only what a chemist would call a trace. It seems hard to imagine that a dinky little nubbin like that, a dimple turned inside out, as it were, will ever develop into a regular nose, with a capacity for freckling in the summer and catching cold in the winter–a nose that you can sneeze through and blow with. There are no eyebrows to speak of either, and the skull runs up to a sharp point like a pineapple cheese. Just back of the peak is a kind of soft, dented-in place like a Parker House roll, and if you touch it we die. In some cases this spot remains soft throughout life, and these persons grow up and go through railroad trains in presidential years taking straw votes.
And, as I said before, there isn’t any hair; only on the slopes of the cheese are some very pale, faint, downy lines, which look as though they had been sketched on lightly with a very soft drawing pencil and would wipe off readily. That, however is the inception and beginning of what afterward becomes, among our race, hair. To look at it you could hardly believe it, but it is. Barring accidents or backwardness, it continues to grow from that time on through our childhood, but its behavior is always a profound disappointment. If the child is a girl and, therefore, entitled to curly hair, her hair is sure to come in stiff and straight. If it’s a boy, to whom curls will be a curse and a cross of affliction, he is morally certain to be as curly as a frizzly chicken, and until he gets old enough to rebel he will wear long ringlets and boys of his acquaintance will insert cockle-burs and chewing gum into his tresses, and he will be known popularly as Sissie and otherwise his life with be made joyous and carefree for him. If a reddish tone of hair is desired it is certain to grow out yellow or brown or black; and if brown is your favorite shade you are absolutely sure to be nice and red-headed, with eyebrows and lashes to match, and so many cowlicks that when you remove your hat people will think you’re wearing two or three halos at once. Hair rarely or never acts up to its advance notices.