When Tooth Fairies call ~ November 8, 1990

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 privilege, when you think about it: Would YOU let someone put his fingers in your mouth to wiggle a tooth?

Noah asked me for help on his first loose tooth a few months ago, while Cindy was napping in the bedroom. My approach had shades of the Dark Ages, or at least the depths of the 1950s. I took some thread from the junk drawer, intending to tie one end to the tooth, and the other to a doorknob. My brother Glenn worked this on me successfully when I was about six. I could never figure out why he laughed so gleefully as he slammed the door shut and my tooth came shooting out of my mouth. I didn’t laugh, but I did trust my big brother.

Luckily for Noah, I couldn’t get a good knot on his tooth. So I got the Vice Grips out of the tool drawer. “Are you SURE that will work?” Noah asked, a worried look on his face. His trust was wavering. “Sure,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound so sure. But Glenn had used pliers on me; surely a Vice Grips was a step forward.

Luckily again for Noah, Cindy heard this conversation, and sensed with mother instinct that Dad was in over his head. So she called him in to the bed, and after about 10 minutes of wiggling, had a tiny tooth to show for her patience.

Since then, both Noah and Mollie have learned how to pull a tooth out on their own. It’s no big deal any more. We’ll be sitting around the living room, and all of a sudden, Mollie will give a happy yell and, bloody but unbowed, show us a little tooth.

Then there’s question of payment. Some of you old-timers will no doubt remember when you got a penny for a lost tooth from the Tooth Fairy. But when Noah’s friend, Joey, informed Noah that he got a DOLLAR for his tooth, I couldn’t help but give his dad a dirty look.

I got a dime for my last lost tooth, way back when. I was thinking maybe a quarter now, what with cost-of-dental increases and all. But with Joey’s free-spending-liberal Tooth Fairy looming, ours had to come up at least another quarter. So we settled on 50 cents.

I shouldn’t complain, because once all the permanent teeth are in, you don’t get a second chance. The next time they come out, it’s against our will. They stay out. And we pay the Tooth Fairy back in spades with every trip to the dentist. Fifty cents seems like a real bargain in comparison.

And those four-bit sojourns on tip-toe to the bedroom aren’t so bad. You reach under the pillow, find a Kleenex folded carefully around a tiny bit of tooth, so small you almost lose it. Then you slip a couple coins in the Kleenex and put it back under the pillow. You can’t help but smile and gaze for a moment at the sleeping beauty, no-teeth-and-all, having complete trust in some one as ephemeral as the Tooth Fairy.

Yeah, it’s just the Tooth Fairy. But when was the last time you had complete trust in anything? Probably back about that age. And in the morning, to see their glee at finding the money, just like they knew they would...

Come to think of it, that Tooth Fairy is worth every penny.

~After David died, the little container of little teeth was in his top dresser drawer.~chg