The Dirt Field

When I was a little girl, I developed a love for sugar-free Bubble Yum bubble gum. I would buy a ten-piece pack and excitedly chew one piece (sometimes two!) each day. I can even remember one day in particular that I chewed the same piece for so long that it turned into a gooey liquid in my mouth that I ultimately had to pick out of my teeth. In my mind, I was not only enjoying a delicious brand of gum, but I was also strengthening my jaw. For what, I don’t know. Building a dam? Winning dogfighting matches with my steel death jaws? Who knows? I just remember flexing my jaw and thinking of how strong it must be.

Things didn’t work out as planned. Instead of becoming somebody with the mandibular fortitude to eat shopping carts, I ended up with TMJ and strong warnings from my dentist and my TMJ specialist to avoid gum at all costs.

The problem is that my cycling coach wants me to avoid sodas, excessive caffeine, processed foods, chemicals, sugar, and other dietary garbage. This means that I can’t occupy my time and my mouth with diet sodas, coffee, hard candy, sugar-free candy, or any of the other hundreds of devices that I formerly used to curtail boredom. As a result, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with having brief, passionate affairs with gum. I buy a pack, chew a single piece for 3-5 minutes, open another piece, discard the old piece in the new wrapper, and pop in a new piece. In under an hour, the pack is gone.

I don’t see this as being wasteful. It works in my favor to chew a piece of gum for only a few minutes, as it minimizes the pain in my jaw and (hopefully) avoids long-term damage. By sticking a piece in and only chewing lightly while the flavor is strong, and then discarding the tired, tasteless blob before the real gnawing begins, I come out a winner.

If you think about it, I’m actually being quite sensible. You wouldn’t chew on stale bread or old paper, so why would you continue to nibble on a rubbery piece of bland crap? Gum is cheap. If you are in the mood for zingy flavor, all you need to do is spit out the old piece and pop in a new one. It’s not like you need to ration out the pack to fend off starvation.

Bobby does not agree with my gum-chewing affliction. He started by arguing that I was ingesting too many chemicals from my rapid chew/discard/repeat cycle. Then he tried the “it’s a waste of money” rationale, which held up for as long as it took me to say, “This entire pack of gum cost $1. A DOLLAR.” Most recently, he tried telling me that he found my habit to be wasteful, as I am generating environmentally-unfriendly waste. Forget global warming, forget the demolition of the rainforest. The planet will be done in by my need to rapidly consume chewing gum.

I know this habit isn’t normal, and I’m sure there is some ill effect from all the gum I eat. But right now, at this point in my life, nothing brings me greater satisfaction than a fresh pack of gum ready to be devoured. Actually, that’s my second favorite thing. My true favorite is when Bobby and I are together and he asks me for a piece of the twenty-piece pack of gum I bought an hour before, and I get to say, “So sorry, but it’s all gone.”