Some things should not be done late in life. Having a wisdom tooth extracted, for example.

That is what I underwent on Tuesday of last week. Let me assure you – – there have to be many better ways of celebrating Mardi Gras.

Getting out an old tooth, impacted, close to the bone and cozying up to a nerve, amounts to a first-class ordeal, I discovered. Even my surgeon, highly skilled and experienced, had a hard time with my mouth. I could see it in his eyes, only a foot away from mine. Undoubtedly, he could see the terror in mine.

Heavily Novocained or not, you don’t feel comfortable when your gum is cut away and your subterranean tooth is grabbed by steel extraction instruments. Then, when this approach does not work and the dentist has to break up the tooth by drilling it apart, that, too, does not provide highly pleasing sensations.

We human beings are said to have some 65,000 ideas float through our minds in the course of a single day. During this surgery, all but two of mine remained on hold

The first was, “When will this operation ever end?” And the second, “Which of all the horrible injuries mentioned in the pre-operative consent form are going to happen to me?” At this point, I might have gladly settled for a broken jaw.

Please understand, my dental surgeon is one of the nicest guys in the whole world and I would recommend his services to anyone. I also care about him as a friend. So I attribute the travail detailed here to the nature of my mouth and none at all to my dentist.

He ranks as the most considerate and solicitous professional you could meet. But no one has ever accused me of being normal. He himself told me, “Your bone was like concrete.”

That tooth had been encased there for more than fifty years. And, until this past autumn, it found my mouth a comfortable lodging place. Then it suddenly announced its presence by ballooning up the left side of my face.

The signs immediately before the operation were not favorable. I ran into Eric, one of the many workers who are doing macrocosmic surgery on our neighborhood by implanting an 80-foot water tank 35 feet under the street next to ours. When I told him of my destination, he looked at me and said tactfully, “You should have had it out 30 years ago.” Some kind of encouragement!

And a husband and wife, the two of them considerably older than I, were preparing to leave when I arrived in the waiting room. The husband, with the kind of detachment that allows humor, told his wife who had just had two teeth removed and was looking peaked, “You must feel lighter.”

Then I heard from a reader in Georgetown who informed me: “Mr. Griffin, you have grown older but you have not yet grown up.”  He intended it as a condemnation of my views about Dubya but I take it as a pejorative explanation of why, at my advanced age, a wisdom tooth had to be removed.

My saga represents only the latest in a long and adventurous dental history. In keeping with a firmly held resolution never to regale readers with the family’s medications nor details of my own intestinal life, I will spare you a blow- by-blow account of my mouth.

It all started badly when I got hit with a baseball when playing in the street and broke off the centermost upper front tooth. That began an inexorable series of dental reverses that has brought me to this advanced age, wounded. Root canals, extractions, crowns, whatever –  – I have drawn on a wide selection of the dental repertoire.

In recent years I have often asked dentists, “Which is going to last longer, my teeth or me?” No one yet has hazarded an answer to that question, so vital to my prospects.

Two reflections about this whole experience continue to intrigue me. First, the name “wisdom” tooth. Reportedly, it derives from the idea that the late teenage years and the early twenties mark the onset of wisdom. If you can believe that, you have truly been out of touch lately with the younger generation.

Secondly, wisdom teeth are problematic because the normal four of them try to squeeze in to a space where only 28 can fit. Thus, they are a sign of evolution, the way human beings have changed through the millennia, losing some of the needs for fiercely chewing into uncooked meat. How intriguing to think of oneself as descended from creatures who exhibited almost as much ferocity as we do.

By the way, as of this writing, I am recovering nicely from the ravages of extraction. Friends and associates, better be warned: soon I will be able to open my mouth again, all the way.

Richard Griffin