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_thoughts_
13 March 2014

teeth

the amazing thing about lee mellons teeth is their strange and constantly moving placement in the many and varied dentures those poor teeth briefly get to call home. i would meet him one day on market street and he would have just one upper left tooth in his face, and then i’d see him again, months later on grant avenue, and he’d have three lower right teeth and one upper right tooth.

i’d see him again just back from big sur, and he’d have four upper front teeth, and two lower left teeth, and then after a few weeks in san francisco, he’d be wearing the upper plate without any teeth in it at all, wearing the plate just so he’d have a head start on gristle, and so that his cheeks wouldn’t collapse in on his mouth.

lee mellon told me that once in modern times he’d had all of his teeth in his mouth at the same time for a whole day. he was driving a tractor in kansas, back and forth across a field of wheat, and his brand new lower plate felt a little funny in his mouth, so he took it out and put it into his shirt pocket. the teeth fell out of his pocket and he backed the tractor over them.

lee mellon told me rather sadly that after he had discovered that the teeth were gone from his shirt pocket, it took him almost an hour to find them, and when he found them, they weren’t worth finding at all.

– richard brautigan

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