March 2014: Letter from the Editor

March 2014

March is here, and for the first time since I can remember, I managed to make it through winter without a single bout of illness. Usually a pesky virus will keep me down for a couple days, but the fates were kind this year.

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Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Proofs editor Lauren Burns. Lauren and I were scheduled to go to the Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting in late February, but Lauren got knocked out by the flu bug. Lauren is resilient, so when she told me she couldn’t make the trip, I knew she was definitely down and out.

Instead of Lauren reflecting on the Midwinter Meeting (the planned subject of this editor’s note), I offered to help. So here goes nothing…

I took a plane to Chicago. As I looked outside my window over the snowfields below, I realized that some real time had passed since I’d seen the Windy City. After graduating from college in 2000, I interviewed with a handful of advertising agencies there in hopes of landing a copywriting job. To my dismay, and what I took as a great shock at the time, I came away with only a meager offer to do media planning for $24,000 a year. Unsure of what to do, I went looking for an internship, which sent me to an opportunity in Oklahoma City. Looking back, the decision to pursue that internship changed the course of my life. The advertising agency I worked for was a 700 miles from where I grew up, 90 miles from where I currently live, and, figuratively speaking, a million miles away from where I thought my life would take me.

When I landed at Chicago O’Hare I decided to forego a taxi for a ride on the CTA. I rode with my back to the direction we were going, so when I stepped off the train the skyline appeared with a certain abruptness before me. I felt like I had suddenly been dropped into a movie set as an extra, waiting for directions, unable to deny that I was a very small part of a much bigger production.

It is a strange thing to visit someplace you’ve been to years before. You suddenly realize just how much you’ve changed and just how much you’re still the same, being equally unsettled by both.

The theme of the Midwinter Meeting was “The Bridge: Past, Present, and Future,” which was a fitting title for my pensive mood. The show was fantastic — fun and overwhelming at the same time — and I came away amazed at the incredible changes happening in dentistry (see the new product article for evidence). To Proofs readers I would recommend going to Chicago next year for the 150th annual meeting. It might show you, too, that the past, present, and future are, and have always been, inside you.