| A Psychedelic Tribute |
| My dentist died a couple of weeks ago. |
| Actually, he wasn’t my current dentist. He was the dentist I had when I was a child, and he was a magnificent man. His name was Dr. Edward Guggemos and he specialized in pediatric dentistry. |
| I could have been the poster child for the pediatric dentistry association. While I think my sister just went through normal tooth requirements in her childhood, I had teeth coming in through my forehead. |
| A large number of my baby teeth decided never to come out, so I was introduced to the intricacies of oral surgery at a very early age when Dr. Guggemos quite adeptly kept me calm while he ripped them all out. |
| Dr. Guggemos was a great guy, and he could handle any problem you had with ease. |
| He is, I believe, entirely responsible for me having no fear when it comes to seeing a doctor or a dentist as an adult. |
| He was smart enough to have gone through some sort of formal training in hypnotism, of all things, so he knew how to distract young children from the sometimes complicated and painful tasks he had to perform. |
| There was never a time when I was afraid of what Dr. Guggemos was about to do. I could trust him completely. |
| And, he always had a liberal supply of laughing gas on hand, which I found helpful. |
| Some of the most profound psychedelic experiences of my life happened before I was 10, doped up on laughing gas in Dr. Guggemos’s exam room watching little rubber creatures or tiny silver airplanes hanging from the ceiling take on lives of their own. |
| I remember his waiting room was a tiny little corner of the office that was absolutely packed with toys, children’s magazines for the older children to read, and a few more adult publications so the parents didn’t get too bored. |
| Dr. Guggemos’s waiting room had the coolest metal construction set with cranes and pulleys and little plastic hooks that you could operate by turning little knobs. Even until I was about 13 years old I treasured those trips to the dentist so I could play with that thing again. |
| I can remember so vividly that the waiting room had wood paneling on the walls, and it seemed like a completely different universe from the noise and commotion of the Arlington office world outside. |
| On the wall was a large map of a fairy tale land where all the famous story characters, like the old man in the crooked house, Humpty Dumpty, and everybody else, lived in this great kingdom. |
| The map was huge, and a child had to spend several visits studying the map to take it all in. The length of the waits never seemed to be long enough. |
| I remember finally growing tall enough to be able to see find the little oval-shaped picture of Dr. Guggemos in the large photo of his graduating class from dentistry school. |
| At the end of each appointment you got, as a reward, your selection of gifts. Plastic jewelry, pencils with monsters on the eraser end; there was no end to the trinkets Dr. Guggemos had on hand. |
| All of them made a difference to a child and almost all of them ended up lost and forgotten underneath the seats in the car on the way home. |
| It’s odd that someone would have such a connection to a dentist. How many people know their dentists at all? I certainly don’t in adulthood. |
| But Dr. Guggemos knew me, and he knew my family. |
| He was a kind man, and I will always remember him well. |
