When people ask me where I grew up, I tell them I haven’t — at least not yet.

But then I tell them I was born here, have spent all but 10 years of my life here, and if I have any say in the matter, I’m gonna shuffle off this mortal coil here.

Looking back, I’d say I lived a charmed life. If I were to put my youth in metaphoric terms, they’d be the sun always shone, the sky was always bright blue, and if there were a breeze, it was a gentle one from the south.

In fact, there was only one dark cloud on my childhood horizon: My visits to the dentist.

First, a historical note: 1950s and ’60s dentistry resemble current dentistry as much as ’50s and ’60s fashions, cars and prices do. Almost nothing is even remotely the same, and when it comes to dentistry, thank Gawd.

For one thing, there’s the equipment. The first electric dental drill was patented in 1875 and by 1914 they could reach 3,000 RPM. To put that in human terms, it got the job done faster than ever before, but slow enough to extend drilling times. heat and misery to Spanish Inquisition extremes.

Something else — hypodermic needles. Unlike today, they weren’t disposable. This meant that compared to today’s, which you can barely feel, the old ones felt like getting a ten-penny nail jammed into your brain pan.

But beyond the equipment, something else vital was missing — dentists’ techniques and attitudes, both of which were medieval. Clearly, the words empathy, sympathy and alleviation of pain were missing from both their vocabularies and their ken. I never checked the diplomas on their walls, but I’ve no doubt a bunch, if not most of them, had studied under the masters of Lubyanka prison.

All of that left me with a lifelong poop-sick fear of dental procedures, and of the dentists themselves.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, dentistry underwent a sea change. Equipment improved immensely. For example, the air-powered drills (as opposed to those old belt-driven ones) could spin up to 800,000 RPM. Needles are so tiny, they can barely be felt. All sorts of new analgesics and anesthetics were invented, rendering previously tortuous procedures painless. No doubt new knowledge improved dentists’ skills. But perhaps most important, the Old Guard Stone Age sadists were replaced by practitioners whose hearts pumped equal measures of blood and The Milk of Human Kindness.

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The Snap! heard ’round MY world

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My weapon of choice, so to speak, is Roger Neill, who’s ministered to my dental — and sometimes emotional — needs for somewhere near the past 35 years. And he’s done it consistently, competently, compassionately, and at least as important — painlessly.

Things dentalistically have been routine and A-OK for years, till three Thusdays nights ago. Then, while doing my nightly flossing, I heard a sudden “Snap,” and something solid hit my tongue.

“The hell!” I shouted at my reflection.

I reached in my mouth and pulled out a tooth. Or at least it looked like one. In reality it was a resin cap with two tiny screws sticking out the top. It was three-quarters of a root canal. I ran my tongue over the gap it left behind and found the remaining quarter: The remains of the tooth’s roots, broken off at the gum line.

What to do?

It sounds worse than it was, because due to the root canal, the tooth had no nerve, so the whole bit, while mildly grotesque, was painless. But, still, it had to be dealt with.

Being the philosophic lad I am, and realizing nothing could be done till the morrow, I took a bunch of deep, meditative breaths to calm myself down. When that didn’t work very well, I went to my default calming technique — a big bowl of ice cream. Once sufficiently pigged out (and calm), I read for a while, then went to bed, prepping myself to get up at dawn’s early light and call Roger’s office, which I did.

I told the office manager my plight; she said she’d see if Roger could fit me in, even though the schedule was full. A short while later I got a call back, telling me the dear lad would see me in a couple of hours.

I’ll spare you the details of the visit, just the result, which was the tooth was as far gone as Major Tom and the roots had to be taken out. That procedure would be done by Roger’s cohort in crime, Dr. Small. I thanked Roger profusely for giving me the appointment and then booked my appointment for the extraction.

Now some vital background …

I’ve always tried to take scrupulous care of my teeth and prided myself on never having lost one. That root canal was 50 years old, so I was philosophic about its demise. What I wasn’t philosophic about was the extraction. All I could envision was Dr. Small standing next to the chair on one foot, the other firmly planted on my chest as he clamped a pair of Vise Grips on my poor beleaguered roots and gave a mighty yank.

All right, so my image of the procedure was a wee bit exaggerated, but my nervousness wasn’t.

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D-Day

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On appointment day I strode into the office, calm on the outside, anything but calm on the inSeide. I got in the chair, Dr. Small came in and gave an overview of the procedure and asked if I had any questions. I asked what I assume were the standard ones and then he got to work.

First, he shot me up with anesthetic and did such a fine job of it that I felt nothing from my scalp to my knees. Once that was established, he started the extraction itself.

I just lay back, breathing deeply, reaching a trance state only one step short of levitation. I could hear background sounds, like from an old Rice Krispies commercial — Snap, Crackle and Pop! — but had no urge to pay any close attention to them. But then, suddenly, something did get my attention. It was Dr. Small asking Mary for the elevator.

The elevator? To the basement? To the roof? What elevator?

My curiosity piqued, I had to find out what the elevator was.

“Whuhz uh ehrruvatdor?” I babbled.

He stopped and explained it was an instrument that separated the root from the periodontal ligament, so the tooth could be removed.

“But why’s it called an elevator?” I asked, this time more clearly, since I didn’t have a bunch of hardware and fingers in my mouth.

“Because it lifts the tooth out of the socket,” he said.

Honestly, that made no sense to me. See, the tooth being removed was a top molar. “Lifting,” to me, always meant something being raised, but in this case it’d be lowered. I pondered this semantic dilemma for a bit, while he went back to work. Then, like the diligent student I am, I raised my hand.

Again he stopped.

“I still don’t get how something can be elevated down,” I said.

With the patience of Job, he told me lifting, in this sense, didn’t me up or down — it meant out. Satisfied with that explanation, I went back to my deep breathing and he went back to his scraping, scratching, twisting and tugging, probing and prying.

A while later he asked Mary for the forceps. And after he did, he said to me, “I don’t know where the term ‘forceps’ comes from.”

I’ll tell you, right then and there, I declared to myself that man was my kind of dentist! Not only did he explain the procedure perfectly, and not only did he make sure I felt no pain, but he actually read my mind, because he knew, as sure as loggers wear suspenders, I was about to ask him that very question. A dentist and a psychic — who ever knew?

As for the extraction itself? As far as I was concerned, everything proceeded on course. It didn’t hurt at all, he’d explained the entire procedure, and he went over aftercare with me. And even better, I left with not only a appreciation for Dr. Small’s skills — both technical and interpersonal — but with a new word to look up.

And lest you wonder, the English word “forceps” comes from the Latin word “forceps,” which means a pair of tongs. Further, its roots are “formus” which means hot, and “ceps,” which means taker or holder. So it’s surmised the word was originally applied to a tool used with metalworking and a forge.

As for the word “elevate”?

I don’t have an etymological note to end on, but do have an historical one:

It’s a quote attributed to Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans that I’ve always got a kick out of. It is: “Elevate those guns a little lower.”

My military “career,” while memorable to me, was undetectable to me. So that’s why it’s reassuring to know I have at least one thing in common with a war hero like Old Hickory.