The Tripod

I did not think that a slam-dunk would tear out my tooth. I can remember thinking that my mom was a possessive tyrant when she told me she would not allow me and my friends to lower my basketball hoop (the kind with water in the base). She claimed that to do so would be unsafe. Thankfully, my Dad played the benevolent interventionist. In an epic and clandestine maneuver, my Dad and I lowered the hoop. Fifteen minutes later my shirt was covered in blood and my saga of the missing tooth began.

Wait, back up, how could my seven-year-old self have lost a tooth on a lowered basketball hoop? Gather 'round for a brief and powerful story:

I approached the hoop from the side, gracefully leapt with my mouth open - a la Michael Jordan, or "MJ", as I called him - and hooked my tooth on the net. The tooth was torn out, I ran inside screaming. Eventually, we found my tooth and had it "re-installed." Three years later I knocked it out with a ski pole. I resigned to fate and now I have an easily removable fake tooth. I am one small maneuver removed from looking like a member of a farm league hockey team, except I am not a 280-pound man named Sergei.

The small maneuver required to remove my tooth is enough to ignite a conversation about a narrative of my life that has developed since I was seven. I do not use it as an introductory technique, because this would be strange in more ways than one: "Hi, I'm John," (removes tooth), "as you can see, I have a hideous gap in my front teeth, want to hang out sometime?" It is, however, a way to get people who think they know me to know me a little better.

There comes a point when a knowledge of the "universals" - those things that we use to "know" or "understand" people - falls short for me when I hope to really know someone. Universals include favorite TV shows, movies, music, and even race (gasp!); they constitute all of those things that are, to a degree, removed from the actual person we hope to know. This degree of removal can inhibit the act of really understanding or knowing. For example, knowing that a person loves Seinfeld eventually means very little to me with regards to knowing that person. All I know about that person is that they can fit into a clique of countless other Seinfelders, and that the person's propensity to make mildly funny jokes about "the silliness" of everyday life is not their sense of humor. It is Seinfeld's.

What I want to know, therefore, is the tooth. As I said, there's a point at which uncovering a universal to get to know someone becomes useless. I cringe when I hear, "We're all the same, so let's just get along!" The typical response is equally cringe-worthy, "No, we aren't all the same, so we just can't understand how to get along." The fact is that all of us have differences - "quirks" - some minor and stupid, some huge and important. Those are the only things that can offer any meaningful insight into others. Our differences are not barriers that we should break. They are access points to unpredictable personal narratives.

This is not an elementary school teacher's diatribe about "acceptance". I am not asking you to accept the gap in my front teeth because it is "beautifully different". On the contrary, I look like a buffoon. I will not be insulted if you, upon seeing the gap, exclaim something like, "What the hell!" And, after reinsertion: "Wait, show me that again!"

Every life has a story. Every life story has a quirk that offers some sort of reference point for a personal narrative. If we really want to start getting to know "the other" we should stop analyzing all of those things that put us under a warm and fuzzy bubble of mundane and forced homogeneity. All I want to hear is the tooth.

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