‘Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”  — Jane Austen, Pride, and Prejudice.

I am happy to say I have all of my original body parts, but there have been some additions – some stents to keep my arteries open, some pins to keep my prostate flowing.

The past few months kicked off a restoration project for me and my body, so far, so good. It was inevitable; I suppose that my teeth would get into the act.

You may notice from this grubby photograph (I’ve been mostly unconscious for the past couple of days) that I am missing a tooth.

I had an abscess in my now-missing tooth, and it wasn’t until dinner time that I was able to move my jaw without pain. A tooth betrayed me, and we had such a long relationship.

Now, it’s time to consider my vanity. Contrary to what you might see, I do care about how I look, especially when I start looking at my age. I have a lot of pride, but a lot of vanities also, and I’m having trouble figuring out which is which.

When my tooth was taken out Monday, I told the dentist I needed to get an “insert,” a false tooth that I can slip in to cover the hole so that I might hide my age and any pretensions to homelessness. I especially wanted to cover up that gap for Maria.

As I told the dentist, I didn’t have sex for many years, and I don’t intend to give it up now.

Maria scoffed at this idea of the insert when I told her about it. You don’t need that tooth, she said, and it makes no difference to me that there’s a gap there.

In fact, she said, it gave me a kind of pirate tinge that she rather liked.

The idea of my showing myself with a missing tooth on my blog would, even a year ago, have been inconceivable to me. Who wants to see an old man get chipped away bit by bit? I could get a nice ivory-colored insert that would fill in that gap and hide it for a few hundred dollars.

I mean, I don’t want to scare the Bishop Maginn students when I visit them.

True, there is the taking it in and out, the fear of it slipping out at dinner somewhere, and the cleaning is required. I’ve used one, and it was never comfortable.

And if Maria didn’t care, why should anybody else care?

The dentist made a point of telling me this was not an important tooth, it wouldn’t affect my eating or anything else in my mouth. Well, I thought, it was important to me.

But the only reason for an insert was vanity. If I were 20, it would be different. But if my wife doesn’t care, there isn’t much an argument to be made for it.

And more to the point, why should I care? I’ve never been vain about how I look unless you consider wearing the same color shirt and jeans every day of my life. (Please note in this photo – by Maria Wulf – that I am wearing a red flannel shirt for the first time in my life.)

In the end, I decided to go with Tennesse Williams and toss off the shackles of vanity. I am who I am, take me or leave me, but don’t try to get me to be somebody else. And if I don’t want you to try and do that, why should I do it to myself?

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life,” wrote Williams.

“Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.”

I chose to burn through those layers of opacity, and so does Maria. We want to see one another through each other’s naked hearts.”

So here is mine. Sometimes decide what to write on my blog, sometimes it makes the decision for me.