Getting crowned

My wife was recently crowned.

No, she didn’t receive the type of crown that’s worn on the head, although she is certainly the queen of my heart and our home. Sadly, her new crown is the kind that sits atop a tooth, which means hardly anyone will ever get to see it.

And that’s a shame, because her little tooth-type crown set us back about as much as the gold-based, jewel-encrusted headgear often seen at royal coronations.

My wife is somewhat unusual in that she is the only person I know who could literally make her own crown. When my wife and I first met, she was employed as a dental lab technician and built crowns, bridges and dentures.

I enticed her away from her glamorous, fast-paced dental technician career with stories of an enchanting and profitable life as a dairy farm wife. Luckily for me, by the time she perceived that my dairy farm was neither enchanting nor profitable, she had given birth to our two sons and felt obliged to stay. I believe the way she describes it is, “By the time I figured it out, I had two babies and was stuck with the dunderhead.”

When I learned that my wife needed a costly dental crown, I asked, “Couldn’t you, theoretically speaking, take a hunk of wood or ivory and carve yourself a new tooth?”

She said she could, but that the result wouldn’t be very pretty. She told me she could do a much better job with a few rudimentary tools.

Those tools would include a quantity of modeling wax, some stone plaster powder (she was one of the few people who could get plastered at work and not be fired), an industrial oven, an oxyacetylene torch, a small but high-quality crucible and a centrifugal casting machine.

Oh, and a hand piece. Surprisingly, this does not refer to a pistol; it instead means a small, air-powered doohickey that emits a high-pitched whine that causes your skin to crawl and your toes to curl. In other words, it looks and sounds exactly like a dentist’s drill.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied. “It might take some digging, but I think I’ve got all that stuff somewhere down in the basement.”

An interesting perk of my wife’s previous life as a molar manufacturer is her ability to understand dentist-speak and to “talk shop” with dentists. Such a conversation might go something like this:

“Once,” confesses the dentist, “I ran into a sagittal bruxism on an interproximal bicuspid. What a mess.”

“I hear you,” my wife might reply. “That can be a real problem. I liked using the infarction spanner method to correct that and maybe install a frenum abductor on the mesial to keep it from recurring.”

“A frenum abductor on the mesial? Hunh. I would have never thought of that.”

My wife is trained in the use of the “lost wax” method of metal casting, a process that is used to make everything from teeth to turbochargers. It’s comforting to know that, should we find ourselves cast away on a desert island with a boat that has a broken engine — an island where all the appropriate casting materials just happen to be handy — my wife would be capable of manufacturing a brand-new intake manifold.

It’s not like she hasn’t done such a thing before. Back when we were newlyweds, she worked for a local dentist’s practice, making plaster models, creating night guards (for the nocturnal teeth-grinders) and crafting custom trays.

A custom tray is a small, crescent-shaped tray that holds dental impression gunk and is used to make a superior model of the mouth. It’s used when your dentist wants you to leave a good impression.

Custom trays are made by mixing a mysterious chemical powder with a mysterious and extremely aromatic fluid. The resulting putty is sticky, can be formed into any shape and is rock-hard once it cures.

We owned a ratty little yellow Chevette at the time. The Chevette was beginning to shed some of its exterior body molding, a process no glue could halt.

One day, my wife found herself in possession of a small amount of leftover custom tray material. Thinking quickly, she rolled it into a snake, ran out, and squeezed it under the loose molding. She then pressed the molding against the car and waited for the stuff to cure.

While she was thus occupied, one of the dentists from the practice walked by. Asked what she was doing, my wife replied, “I’m just using custom tray material to reattach the transverse spacer onto the exterior labial interface.”

“Hunh,” said the dentist. “I never would have thought of that.”

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.