1988

In third grade I had a retainer. This made me a little bit of a celebrity. Crowds of 8-year-olds would gather under the lava hot metal slide on the lower playground at Upland Terrace Elementary and I would stand proudly and triumphantly pull out that molded piece of pink plastic and the multitudes would ooh and ahh. It was a harbinger of good things to come.

One day as I sat in the lunchroom eating my friend's tuna fish sandwich, a skinny kid with brown hair approached and asked to see my retainer. I warned him that I was eating lunch and it would probably look gross. He insisted, and as I pulled it out of my mouth, gobs of masticated tuna and relish stuck to the mold, to the wires, to my lips. I proudly displayed the half-digested-food decorated dental appliance.

It was gross.

That boy was Alonzo Tyler Howe. We got married a short 14 years later.

(After he got a perm, but that's another story.)