In time you will understand where I am going with this, but yesterday I spent three hours in a dentist’s chair and spent the equivalent of the national debt in two crowns. Precise placement of these things serves no better purpose than to allow me to say “spittoon” instead of “thptoon”. Holy cow, when did my mouth get so expensive?
Above my open, cavernous mouth, my dentist and his assistant are having a lively conversation about the assistant’s new dog, a Plott Hound. Unable to use my lips but feeling left out, I say, “I have awgs,” “Really?” the assistant asks, “What kind?” “Ulik,” I reply. “Hmmm,” says the dentist, “I’m not familiar with that breed.” They ask me what they look like when the attendant laughs and says of course I can’t tell you, I have 17 ounces of jaw-dropping oral cement. That’s when the assistant enthusiastically offers a suggestion: “Make shadow puppets, we’ll guess your dog.”
Captivated in the dentist’s chair and with nothing else to do, I take my fingers off the armrests, place them above my head, and wiggle my fingers to suggest Puli strings.
“A snake??” ask the dentist. “JELLYFISH!” the assistant yells. No, no, I shake my head. Then he started snapping his fingers to each side as if he was following the beat of reggae music. Know. Rastafarians. Dred locks. Brilliant, I think of myself.
The assistant guesses some kind of Spanish breed since she clearly thinks I’m imitating castanets. No, no, I shake my head. My next strategy is to suggest the role of race. “Aahhh Aahhhh”, balo (making what I think are sheep sounds since the Puli is, after all, a sheepdog). Suddenly sure I’m choking on my own saliva, the assistant aggressively attacks the deepest corners of my mouth with the hated suction contraption. He’s so thorough that after several moments, I’m sure he’s sucking the frontal lobe of my brain through the hose. Needing my hands to suggest, STOP! I renounce dog charades.
If he’d had a Pointer, it would have been easy: The universal Pointer sign is the classic raised-finger pointing hand gesture. Had I had a Papillion, he would have covered my ears with his hands and spread them open to suggest large ears (even though THIS vet was just as likely to guess a moose); As I thought about this in the third hour of sitting in that chair, enough gestures occurred to me in my head to suggest a variety of races other than my own.
How would you gesture to YOUR breed of dog?
