I was sitting in the dentist’s chair and the dentist did the usual thing of filling my mouth full of dental implements and then asking me a question. It’s my habit to take all the gadgets the dentist has filled my mouth with and yank them back out to answer the question.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “How are you?”

I discovered she was fine, she returned the implements to my mouth and got on with business.

“This is difficult,” she said after awhile.

I pulled the implements out of my mouth again and asked her why.

“Because you’ve got such a small mouth,” she told me.

“Huh?” I said, wondering how it was that after forty some years of attending dentist’s offices this was the first time one of them had ever told me that particular bit of info.

“I mean, haven’t you ever looked at it? You’re oral cavity is freakishly small,” she said. “It’s a wonder you don’t have enormous jaw problems.”

Interesting, I thought, thinking of my sister, who does happen to have jaw problems.

A few years before an optometrist had told me that my eyes were freakishly shaped. Like footballs, which was why I was myopic, apparently. Most peoples eyeballs are round.

My mother has informed me that when I was born the doctor used forceps. Which is why (according to her) I have a conehead.

Fortunately all of these oddities are concealed by lips, eye sockets, and hair, in that order, so few people suspect what a freak I truly am.