The Dentist and the Nurse.

It isn’t easy to find good things about growing older, but I just thought of one: you don’t have to be deferential to dentists any more. They’re intimidating figures when you’re a kid, hovering over you with instruments poised and your future prospects with the fairer sex held in the balance of their hands. But when you no longer have much future, and no prospects at all with the fairer sex, they come to seem very young and don’t matter quite so much. You can treat them like the kid next door, and so I do.

Not so my current dentist’s nurse. I treat her with the greatest respect. She has so much personality you could eat it with a spoon, and it’s an honest, open sort of personality (I know the difference, believe me.) Maybe she gets it from her Greek ancestry, I wouldn’t know. Such a quality gives a woman great power – a soft, gently insistent sort of power that would be pointless to contest. You just revel in it, especially if you’re growing older. Unfortunately, she had no wool or darning needles handy.