Miscellany

That not-quite-puppy-breath smell

I’m fascinated by dental hygiene. It’s a good idea for people and a great idea for their pets. Stanky breath is the bane of all personal exchanges. How do actors working in close proximity deal with it? Did Jack Nicholson’s breath reek when he was groping and seducing Jessica Lange in The Postman Always Rings Twice? If so, how did she manage to so successfully pretend that she wanted his manhood, right now, on the kitchen table?

Me, I cringe at the prospect of bad breath, whether its mine or yours. A great dentist I had in Chicago told me that, barring non-oral causes, most bad breath is simply a matter of flossing and germ-control. Sure, that sounds militant, like an OCD regimen. But its empirically correct. When we remove the food from between our teeth and swish one Scope-like fluid or another around our mouth twice a day, we generally have neutral breath. Not good enough to elicit that puppy-breath swoon, but not bad enough to cause you to think of Elysian Fields during an otherwise ordinary conversation.

One of my beagles, Woody, has weak saliva. This means that he doesn’t produce the sort of plaque-battling enzymes that then help stave off tartar. Plaque and tartar smell. They smell because they are beds for bacteria. Warm mouth, moist mouth, like a trough for stinklicious bacteria. When Woody’s teeth are dirty, it’s as if he’s eaten month-old corpse chunklets, burped, and then threw up in his snout.

But no more. Woody has returned just this week from a prophylaxis procedure that dwarfs any applied to my mouth in the last few years. His breath, while not as sweet and inviting as that puppies enjoy, is now beautifully, indescribably neutral. That’s a beautiful thing.

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