The True Vyne

Here's where I start to sound like an old grandma. Not you mom, grandmother of all my beautiful children, but a "I remember back in the day when there were dinosaur footprints in my back yard" type old grandma. My own mother is far to hip and graceful to use old timey words like me.

Back in my day of braces, I'm sure my mom forked over huge bucks for me to walk to Dr. Ricco's office after school for horrid mouth torture. Every single tooth of mine got a lovely, jagged, cemented band wrapped 'round it. Next thing I knew, our family moved about 25 minutes of driving away from the orthodontist office, and here's where my mother owes me money for a therapist. As if clunky braces, huge glasses, pimples, and a gangly body weren't enough to ruin a perfectly nice jr. high girl, my working mom called my school as asked if any teachers lived close to Dr. Ricco's office and wouldn't mind dropping me off for appointments after school. Can't ask rides from teachers in 2007 unless the teacher doesn't mind a few felony charges brought against them. Not so in 1979. Of course, Miss Hamel, the teacher with a bun the size of a loaf of bread atop her no-make up, no-nonsense head, was the teacher available and willing to humiliate me. She drove a cream colored VW Beetle, and I found it very difficult to scrunch down far enough out of sight of the thousands of cruel twelve year olds pointing and laughing at me seated in the English teacher's vehicle. Pay up, Mom.

Fast forward to modern times. Children of working moms must still have the same dilemma of needing a ride from school to the orthodontist. However, Tater's new orthodontist has resolved this problem in another far more stylish way. He sends a driver in a Hummer to the local public schools to chaffeur his patients to his office. Yes, a Hummer. No doubt the speakers inside that vehicle blare rap and dance music as the metal-mouthed children merrily sing along. Tator is perfectly green with envy that the Hummer won't drive from Knoxville to Loudon to pick him up from homeschool on the farm for his orthodontic appointments. I suppose I'll be the one chucking money in the therapy jar as I drive a beater of an old white speckled van to his appointments. The poor boys' self esteem is likely to suffer from always being seen in cars not made in this century.