RIP, Toothbrush

I will blog my thoughts on my three days in Kansas City soon, but I want to point something I did before I came back home that I planned on doing for a long time: I decided to throw away my toothbrush in the corporate suite bathroom and not bring it back with me.

Not a momentous occasion, I know.  I'm sentimental that weird way.  That toothbrush has been in my mouth for, oh, the past half-year, maybe longer.  I keep around my toothbrushes because I can't bear to let them go, even though everybody recommends you get them replaced every, what, three or four months?

This one was kind of special.  It was a shit toothbrush, not those Oral-B ones you get for free after your visit to the dentist.  This was one a hotel gave me.  Don't remember the year, but it was the year I visited New Orleans for the Professional Baseball Employment Opportunities Job Fair, that racket where moon-eyed college grads decide they're going to not only pay their dues by working for little to no money but also actually paying money to look for available positions at this fair, mostly internships or sales jobs.  I loved it because I was young and stupid.

Anyway, one evening I came back from sitting around and waiting to see if I was going to get interviews at the convention center to my hotel room and can't find my toothbrush.  Damn maid must've thrown it in the trash.  So I call down to the great front desk clerks (I'm not quite sure which hotel it was -- could've been either a Marriott or a Radisson -- but I know the customer service was excellent) and ask for a toothbrush, which they delivered.  But upon closer inspection of the bathroom I saw something rolled up in toilet paper and stuck in one of the spare toilet paper rolls.  That's where the maid put my toothbrush, and she was nice enough to roll it up so no dust got on it.

So I now had two toothbrushes.  I didn't want to throw away the one the hotel gave me, so I went back to my old toothbrush and stuck the new toothbrush for a later time.  That must have been, oh, about a decade ago.

I don't exactly remember where I kept the hotel toothbrush.  But after I had to dispose of my previous toothbrush, I came upon it and decided that it was time to use it.  Part of my hesitancy was that this was a very, very basic toothbrush.  It was really a bunch of bristles jammed into one end of a flat, white plastic stick.  The handle wasn't long and it wasn't curved, like many "advanced" toothbrushes are these days.  No colors, no bristles organized into a diamond shape that would make it easier to negotiate through the contours of your mouth or some bullshit.  And no kidding, literally after a few days the bristles already began to fray.  At the end of its life it sprayed like the shape of a clamshell.

I used that toothbrush well past its usefulness date.  But did it get the job done?  Could a longer, colored toothbrush with a bend in the middle do the job better?  Probably.  But it was good enough.  For many things in my life I'm perfectly happy with "good enough."  But even I knew I couldn't brush with bent bristles forever.  That, along with an admittedly bizarre mindset that I should lessen the load I carried in the bag I brought with me down to K.C. (even though I brought way more stuff back up to Minnesota, like a souvenir cup from Arthur Bryant's and that week's copies of the local alternative weekly, the Pitch), convinced me well before my trip last week that I would say farewell with this toothbrush, this humble little toothbrush I got from a hotel, the day I left for home.

And so I did.  Guess I should have brushed my teeth each night to properly say goodbye.  I think I did two of those nights ... well, definitely one of those nights, and I know that night wasn't Wednesday, the first night, and I know that because ... well, I just know.  But it was either Thursday and/or Friday nights I put that toothpaste on that old toothbrush and stuck it in my mouth in order to get all the food particles and plaque out of me.  I did not use toothpaste Saturday around noontime, when I had to check out of my room, because I simply did not have the time.  But, in what I hope was one last sign of respect, I wet the faded bristles and made a cursory, half-ass brush through my mouth.  One last time for the toothbrush to say goodbye to my teeth.

After I gave it a quick rinse I didn't toss it in the wastebasket. I laid the head in first, against the plastic bag whose sides weren't fully pulled apart so they were still stuck kind of in the middle of the plastic receptacle, and then I softly let go of the other end.  And I remember it sliding down one inch, two inches at the most, before resting alongside the not-completely-open plastic bag.  I think it slid just under of the pieces of toilet paper I used to wipe my ass.

And then I said goodbye.  The toothbrush that came into my life in New Orleans I laid to rest in Kansas City.  Its residence was in Minneapolis, but it's fitting that it "lived" and "died" away from the place it grew up, and in differing cities at that.

My heart's sinking just thinking about that humble toothbrush.  Don't laugh.