Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The Tooth Fairy has been visiting our house lately, and the kids are laughing all the way to the piggy bank. Malika and Noah are all grown up now and they carved these two pumpkins.  But gosh, they do LOOK familiar! Their smiles have enough gaps to serve as models for pumpkin carvers, but they don’t care about that. They’re getting richer by the tooth. I heard one mother telling about her son a while back that he wanted to pretend to put a tooth under the pillow every night, so their family could have lots of money. She had to laugh and explain in child language that life isn’t that easy. At first Noah and Mollie looked at a loose tooth as a red badge of courage. They would work them for days, sometimes weeks, like they were playing an eight pound lake trout in the Boundary Waters. They would twist and wiggle, push and pull at the tooth, until nothing but a thread seemed to be holding it. Then Mom and Dad would be invited to try. That’s a rare pri...