Here’s the thing about bones. I’ve always thought of them as sort of settled. Your bones could remain unscathed for hundreds of years post-your-personal-mortem. Your bones are a freaking institution. Sure, they can grow, they’re just another form of tissue after all, but I tend to think of them as sort of a done deal once they’ve finished making you as big as you’re going to get. They were done with me early. They can send in the cellular troops for remodeling if one of them breaks or something, but otherwise—or so I thought—they don’t have much to do in the way of upkeep. They’re just a nice rigid scaffolding to hang all the meat and pudding from, so we can maintain a predictable shape and not be mistaken for squids.

But I was wrong. Just like our other body parts, our bones are constantly being torn down and reconstructed. Lots of gentrification going on in the old corpus. There are cells that work to disintegrate and absorb the bone (osteoclasts) and other cells that form new bone just in time (osteoblasts). Unless you have osteoporosis, that is, during which your bone-disintegrating cells are still laboring away like cogs in the capitalist machine but your bone-building cells have retired. Your bone-building cells have had it, and they’re parked in front of the TV in assisted living, and they don’t care how much you have to pay for it.

All of which interests me now because I am in the process of having my teeth shoved around in my jaw. Which seems weird. Because it seems like they’re solidly in place. I mean, we’ve all seen skulls. The teeth are in there. They didn’t just molder away like our gooey bits. But, of course, teeth do move around, if not fast enough to keep you up at night. After all, mine did a bunch of unauthorized moving on their own, which is why we’re trying to shove them back into place. Evidently, teeth move in response to pressure from chewing. I only chew with my back two teeth on the left side because none of the others match up. It’s a wonder all my teeth haven’t moved over to the right side of my face just to get away from all the violence of mastication.

Anyway, although my jawbone already has sockets in it for my teeth to sit in, those sockets can be remodeled. Push a tooth against one side of the socket and the bone-disintegrating cells go to work at demolition to make room, and the bone-building cells shore things up on the other side. Before you know it, your socket has moved a little bit, and maybe installed a new backsplash and added a breakfast nook. As long as they don’t put in a skylight you’re okay. The orthodontist sent me home with 54 sets of plastic tooth-shovers, numbered in order, and I am to swap them out every week. The process is incremental. And extraordinary. After only one week, I noticed I could floss more easily. There was more room. What the hell.

So I am persuaded that my teeth are going to line up and be functional in a year or two. I still won’t be gorgeous because there are way too many other factors militating against that at my age. But I’m beginning to have some confidence the molars on the right side of the aisle are going to start sucking it up and getting something done.