Off The Cuff: The missing tooth shows the gap

With a stinging pang of conscience, I found myself suddenly insanely jealous of an 18-month-old baby boy.

Little Shehab has a sunny smile that melts the hearts of his parents, Ahmad and Eman, and my heart too, for that matter.

So why was I so jealous? It was that smile that did it. Or, more specifically, his perfectly formed row of tiny teeth.

It sent me scurrying once more to the mirror to check my own smile. And there it was again. The Gap. Glaring back at me. A yawning black hole where one of my front teeth used to be. It had all begun with a dentally-challenged 85-year-old lady sharing her box of chocolates with me.

"I can only eat the thoft ones," she lisped. "You can have the hard ones."

So I obligingly bit into a rock hard toffee and…

Keeeeeerak

I felt a fleeting stab of pain and immediately knew something was wrong. Further exploration by my tongue confirmed that a tooth second left from the centre on the top row was wobbly.

The dentist shook his head. "The root is split, it will have to come out," was his prognosis.

The only solution is an implant operation, during which they will implant a metal pin in the bone of my upper jaw, then screw a porcelain crown into it, restoring my ravishing smile but leaving me some Dh 7,000 poorer.

Alas, they need to wait two months or more for the bone density to restore itself. Two months with The Gap.

"Don't worry," said the dentist trying to be reassuring. "The gap's not too prominent."

I checked in the mirror. Not too prominent! It was about as unprominent as the Gulf of Mexico.

I harked back to the family snaps of myself aged about five, smiling happily with two or three teeth missing. In the words of that famous baseball-playing malapropist Yogi Berra, it was just like déjà vu all over again. But while toothless grins are cute at five, they don't possess the same charm a lifetime later.

I looked like being condemned to two months of unsmiling moroseness a difficult feat when you have such insane friends as I do. Especially when they insist on pulling gags and trying to make me laugh just so they can have a giggle at my expense.

Ever resourceful, I tried concealing the gap with what I thought was an engaging, laconic lopsided smile, a bit like Clark Gable. Until somebody told me I looked like I'd had a stroke.

So it's back to being Mr Misery, a grim-faced Scrooge with a repressed smile that makes Mona Lisa look like a hysterical party animal.

Little Shehab will eventually lose all those endearing little teeth. But Nature, in her infinite wisdom, will make sure they are replaced in the fullness of time with stronger ones that should last a lifetime, notwithstanding attacks by killer toffees. Hopefully he will be spared the trauma of facing the toothless challenge in adult life.

I've got about six more weeks to go. Six more weeks of living under the spectre of The Gap. But I've become quite resigned to it, there is nothing I can do. I guess I'll just have to bear it and not grin.