We do not have just this moment.

At the end of Season 6 of "Mad Men," Don Draper paints a beautiful scene for the executives of Hershey. Draper pitches them on the meaning of a Hershey bar to a little boy, accompanied by his father, knowing that the wrapper would not misrepresent the contents within. The wrapper looks just like the bar. The promise of what would be enjoyed was almost as good as enjoying it.

Moments later, Draper crumbles and reveals this was an invented story. Draper was an orphan, raised in a whorehouse. It's a false nostalgia. He then shares the real sense-memory of consuming a Hershey bar in one of the rooms of his fractured past.

The Hershey Bar pitch is one of the most powerful in Season 6 and echoes "The Carousel"--arguably the best season finale in all of Mad Men stock.

***

Our tenant asked to borrow our can opener. We hadn't moved the electric one yet so all we could lend was our all-in-one corkscrew can opener Boy Scoutish gadget. He said he'd Google how to use it. I reminded him this was his Camp, Part II. This would be his first summer in a few where he would not be working at his beloved camp. "Don't remind me," he said, "Been having those 'no camp this summer' heartaches." He was having heartache over what was his Summers Past, over what was his Not This Summer.

***

We do not have just this moment. We do not register in our minds every time we see a tree: Look at that tall structure with its strong totem and its many arms and its fluttering green dangling appendages. What is that? Is it alive? Are there others like it? We have all the moments that inform this moment and we know: that is a tree with a thick trunk and abundant leaves.

***

They, the sages and the poets and the YOLO campaign are wrong about how we only have this moment.

***

We get to have this precious moment that is transposed by all the moments before in memory--some more foggy than others--and we get all the moments of the future that we can imagine in our mind's eye.

I am starting to lose memories that I once kept like aged photos tucked into a locket, strung around my neck. I am losing the crisp lines around faces and the context and the details are slipping through the holes of my pockets. Even though my recall is becoming poorer, somehow I am wealthier because I still get to live in the body with the feet that have run across these bridges, with heart that has beat for these loves.

Is that not a rich, rich life? What Creator crafted our consciousnesses so, that we have the capacity to reflect back on and project forward and to experience the presence as in a hall of mirrors?

*** And yet none of us are guaranteed another moment. So we live, trying not to rush through this one or to squander the next, because each one is as a hundred soft kisses, a thousand words, a million guesses as to how stupid blessed we are just to be.

Freakodontics

As if sixth grade were not awkward enough, I spent mine as an orthodontic freak show. I was eleven years-old when I went under the knife for an impacted incisor tooth. Basically, one of my eye teeth was trying to shoot through the roof of my mouth. The oral surgeon exposed the tooth (ouch), attached a bracket to the exposed tooth (mommy!) and tied the bracket to the wire of my braces (ouch to your mother!).

Yeah, I was into heavy metal in the 6th grade.

It was very Looney Toons dentist with a string pulled taut between two teeth. The goal was to drag the one tooth into place, but I kept waiting for the string to break and some dental work to go flying.

The string that was supposedly guiding my tooth into place was knotted off in a big heap. It resembled a soggy piece of popcorn. I’d be giving my oral presentation on cumulus clouds at the front of the classroom and watch as the furrowed brows of my classmates tried to tell me: Kendra, you have a piece of--

I know. A piece of popcorn stuck in my braces.

The process of relocating my rogue tooth took three months, which translates to a biblical eternity of stale popcorn smiles in the social minefield that is sixth grade.

The good news is that it worked. The even better news is that I get to regale every dental professional with my history of freakodontics.

The Stanton children were an orthodontic powerhouse. I also rocked the mushroom cut long after the age it was okay to do so.

***

When I was 22, I went to a dentist whose office was near the community center where I worked in Boston. While the dental hygienist scraped and picked, I noticed a list on the office wall. The list included the names of all the patients who would be seen by the dentist that day, and next to the names were the patients’ phone numbers.

I considered the at-risk youth that I would be working with that afternoon, whom I saw every day but whom I made sure never got a hold of my phone number.

When the dentist entered, I asked him about the policy of placing patient names with contact information in such a public place. He said it convenienced the staff, having all the information so handy. But couldn’t the list be placed where no patient could read it? I asked.

I watched as the dentist took a ballpoint pen and crossed off my name and phone number. “That all right?” he asked. “No one can read it now.”

Feeling violated, I called the HIPAA hotline to see if I might have a case against this dentist for what seemed to me a sloppy management of personal information. The hotline attendant said my case was weak, especially as the list had been posted in a room with a limited viewership. It wasn’t as if the whole waiting room was privy to our digits.

I staged a silent protest of the dentist’s policies, like spitting into the wind. I never went to see him again.

***

Within four minutes of being seated in the chair at my dentist's office in the south, the dental hygienist, whom I had only just met that day, asked me about my plans to add more children into my life. She scraped and picked and gave me the sucking implement for when it was time to spit.

My mouth ajar, the only reflex I could control was my urge to spit. This is, as I have learned since sixth grade, sometimes all any of us can control.

Until we open our mouths, we can conceal so much. Our fears about invasion of privacy. Our feelings about having a(nother) baby. Our pieces of stale popcorn, real or facsimile, wedged conspicuously between our braces.

They told me to put my chin down because my glasses were causing a glare here. I thought it was my pearly white teeth!

My relationships with dental professionals have been numerous and frequent. In many ways, I can thank them for exposing not only my teeth, but my deeply-lodged fears and anxieties.

But I also find that our fears and chagrins have a way of fighting their way out. Every sixth grader eventually finds reason to speak. Just as every dental patient will eventually find reason to cry, “ouch” or “stop.” When the moment of truth finally arrives, we cannot reverse history. The laws of motion seem to make no exemption for spit.

It doesn’t take an oral surgeon to expose our most hidden deposits. Sometimes all any of us has to do is open up and say, “Ah.”

Here's the dentist - dr-averbuch.co.il.

Fresh hell in the fifth grade

Fifth grade was a year on the fringes. Everyone got nicknames that year (Mine was 'Dra, what an unfortunate nickname). The inside jokes ran rampant. We had sex ed. Our skin was starting to freak out, our moods swung back and forth like erratic pendulums. We memorized Color Me Badd lyrics as we danced around stocking footed in our Umbro shorts. Confusing times. That was the same year the boys in my class stashed a girlie magazine in the boys' bathroom. Catholic school bore down on this discovery. The boys from the 3 fifth grade classes were hauled off to--we were not told where. I thought maybe to do some kind of chore, like picking up trash in the baseball fields as punishment for being smart alecs.

Instead they were taken to the church rectory where Father Tony lived. I learned later that Fr. Tony had a heart-to-heart session with 45 boys about the matter of the birds and bees.

At the time, I had thought. Oh, good. Man-talk. Holy confession without the penance. That's nice. The girls got to play Mum's the Word with a koosh ball and ate Sweet Tarts that Miss Mather had stashed in her desk drawer.

But some twenty years later, all I can think is: Fr. Tony should have gotten Sweet Tarts for life.

Where is the justice? That poor priestman! He took vows of poverty and chastity and has to wear an unattractive collar all day and live right next to his workplace and what does this man with huge hands and very large glasses get in return?

What, I ask you??

He gets 45 hormonal rageballs over at his home in the middle of the week asking questions about the mechanics of boom-chicka-bow-wow. And nobody slipped him a tip or sent in any reinforcements.

There is a special place in Heaven for Fr. Tony. I don't think they allow fifth graders to visit. Not for all of eternity.