Tooth Bonanza

Last night, Ian was wiggling that little tooth on the right side, between the front tooth and the first pre-molar, and was at once complaining about it and fascinated by it. He told me that it hurt him, and, in the tradition of my no-nonsense Scottish-Nova-Scotian grandfather, I offered to help get him to a point where it would never hurt him again, if he would only bring me a string, a chair, and find a sturdy doorknob... It turned out that Ian wasn't interested in surgery.

Everything was fine, until lights out, and literally, as soon as I turned the lights out, Ian jumped up and announced that his tooth needed to come out tonight. I begged him not to pursue that goal - partly because it was bedtime, and partly because the whole tooth-wiggling-and-removal process give me the heeby-jeebies, but to no avail... Ian kept working on the site, and requested a few Kleenexes for the purpose, which I foolishly provided. Withing a couple of minutes, he had cheerfully declared success, and was walking around with Kleenexes plugging up the socket - more heeby-jeebies. As a matter of course, he went over to the blue index-card box that he keeps on the bottom shelf of his little bedstand, which is actually across the room from the boys' beds, and set the new acquisition into a plastic sandwich-bag with a companion that looked like it could have been this tooth's twin, and snapped the box shut.

But then he had a second thought. He found a small brown paper bag - also intended for sandwiches, and took his tooth out of the archives, put it in the bottom of its new home, and started folding the bag over and over again, a bit like the used portion of a toothpaste tube, to wrap the tooth ever-more-securely in the bottom section of it. He then placed the bag beneath his pillow, and asked me whether the tooth fairy takes the tooth or merely leaves the money - which happens to be a dollar. [Amy gets credit for this tooth-fairy-inflation, or irrational exuberance...] I told him that in my youth, the tooth fairy tended to take the tooth, but perhaps in our present age, the child might have more of a choice. As if Ian somehow thought I might have some direct influence on the tooth fairy's course of action, he made it clear that he would prefer that "it" - yes, the tooth fairy is beyond gender - that it leave the tooth under his pillow.

He then took the tooth-bag out one more time, in a panic, to make sure that the tooth hadn't somehow escaped its enclosure, and discovered, to his great relief, that it was still there.

I almost had the impression that part of the point of late-night auto-extraction was to ensure that the tooth fairy would come sooner rather than later, in a controlled situation where the whereabouts of the tooth was well established, and where it would know that it should come that same evening... Of course, relief of the discomfort must also have been a factor, not to mention the overall sense of achievement a boy feels as he goes to bed, having just pulled out his own loose tooth...

The tooth fairy arrived in the morning, and found that Ian's pillow was at the other end of the bed from his head, and was being pressed against the wall by his foot. Nevertheless, it somehow liberated the pillow from its tight spot, set the pillow symbolically next to Ian's head, and left a wallet-sized, greenish-blackish-white portrait of George Washington, adorned with masonic symbols on the back, and tiptoed out of the chamber.

(July 17-18, 2011)