All I Want for Christmas for My Two Front Teeth

 “Where is it!? I will f-ing die if I don’t get it! I mean it,” she turns to me. “It’s like a f-ing fix, you know?

I look over at her, startled, wondering if this girl is trying to shock me with all of those f-words. I decide she doesn’t even seem aware of them. She is a tall, thin, pretty girl maybe in her late twenties, with braces and glasses, edgy-intellectual looking. In a movie, I would cast her as the cool-quirky girl. We are alone in a Target aisle, almost alone in the store late on a Saturday night with the first snow of the season coming down in wet, lazy flakes in the dark parking lot. The “fix” she is talking about is, of all things, dental floss.

“No sh-t, I mean it. This stuff is so good, I’d buy up every last one the store had if they ever discontinued it. And not just because I have braces, but because I almost need my dental floss to, you know….”

“…gouge that stuff out of there,” I finish for her, nodding. I’ve been standing in front of the floss display, lamenting the fact that my last good brand has apparently been discontinued (again!), willing another good one to appear. And by “good,” I mean serious floss. None of this namby-pamby stuff. No cutesy little spools of thread. Not the gentle kind. I don’t want my floss to hurt the food particles’ feelings a little. I want it to decimate them with what appears in the pictorial blow-ups on the label as miniature medieval weaponry.

She explodes with the shock of finding a commiserative sister-in-dental-floss-obsession. “YES! I mean, I don’t care how hard I have to dig into those f-ing teeth, I need that f-ing sh-t out of there. People don’t realize you can smell it if they don’t get it out. Their f-ing breath smells!” She is clearly appalled by those filthy mouths. “But this sh-t”—she locates her brand, and I feel the briefest disappointment that her brand is different from mine—“this is the bomb.”

I study the one she is offering. Unconventional packaging. I like that, but I’m wary. I’ve been fooled before. “It isn’t the kind that’s like tiny pipe cleaners that poke between your teeth, is it? Or the kind that’s like a long rubber band that flings food particles across the room like a slingshot?” I ask. I’ve tried them all by now and I especially hate that kind. Who wants to catapult masticated food across the room with a little band of elastic? Eww.

“NO!” She explodes again. Is she drunk? On drugs? Or merely that excited about dental floss? I honestly can’t tell. “Oh, f-k, I can open it, I’m buying it anyway. No sh-t, it’s the f-ing bomb.” She opens it to show me.

I admire the dental floss, thank her, and take some to try. She strolls away, this patron saint of dental floss, this paragon of clean mouths.

And—go figure—the girl knew her floss. It really is the f-ing floss bomb.

This drives me crazy, that God seems to have no taste, no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope. ~Anne Lamott, Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith