Fortunate

Tonight I am incredibly aware of how fortunate I am.  I am the oldest of five children, and we never had much money growing up.  All of us have crooked teeth, mine had a big gap in the middle and a huge overbite.  Most of my siblings refer to their teeth with the term 'snaggletooth'.  My grandparents paid for me to have orthodontics when I was in 6th grade, but not any of my siblings.  I don't know why they paid for me and not the others.  I don't know if the fact that my orthodontist was an ass and after 3 years said it was taking longer than originally estimated and he would need more $ played a part, since my grandparents paid cash up front and we didn't have the money to keep paying, he took the braces off before I was totally 'done' and gave me a retainer with a spacer tooth in it to fill the gap he had just created a couple months earlier by having an impacted tooth extracted.  It is possible my grandparents got disillusioned by that experience, I really have no idea.  

Later, when I was an adult, I got braces again.  I think I was 24 at the time, and paid $100 a month for a couple years while working full time and attending grad school at night.  It was a lot of money from my budget, but would have been much worse if I hadn't already had 3 years of orthodontics when I was younger.  Now I've got straight teeth and a great smile that I take for granted most days.  But I am very lucky.  My siblings almost certainly wish they had been given the opportunity to get orthodontics when they were in 6th grade.  I know how horribly self conscious I was of my teeth and smile when I was younger.  If I won the lottery I think offering to get them braces would be on my list of things to do.  Unfortunately when I was in grad school I studied statistics and probability so I don't play the lottery though.  Maybe I can strike oil like the Beverly Hillbillies...