It was a tooth-popping weekend when the grandkids came to visit, and one more chance to learn how far out of the loop I have fallen.
“Do you want to pull it?” I asked Olivia as she sat at the dinner table, wiggling that little bicuspid in her lower jaw. She had three teeth in her head that were ready to jump ship, but this one was likely to be the first to weigh anchor.
“No,” she said. “I’ll wait for it to fall out.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll have to wait long,” I said. “I think it’ll be out before the weekend is over.”
It turns out I underestimated by a couple of days. Fifteen minutes later it was in her hand, thanks to a sticky Jolly Rancher — the answer to (and cause of) so many childhood woes.
“When I was a kid, the Tooth Fairy paid about a quarter for a tooth,” I said. “What’s the going rate these days?”
I learned that five bucks is the standard, along with an occasional plush toy, and maybe even a bit of candy. Just one more evidence of our booming economy, I guess.
I told her that when I was her age, I lost a tooth on the same day that my brother did. He was three years older, and when we looked under our pillows the next morning, I found a quarter, but he found a quarter and a dime.
“What the heck?” I whined at the breakfast table. Or words to that effect.
My parents explained that sometimes the Tooth Fairy might pay more for one tooth than for another one. The Tooth Fairy used kids’ teeth to build her house — a gleaming white enamel-coated mansion — and some teeth were more valuable because they could be used for the foundation. Others were only good for the walkway leading up to the house.
“But we lost the same exact tooth,” I whined, pointing to the gap in my grimace.
Mom faltered, but she soldiered on. “Well,” she said, “I guess the Tooth Fairy feels that older kids need a bit more money for their toys. She’ll give you more money for your teeth when you’re that age, I’m sure.”
I accepted her logic, but two could play at that game, I thought.
The next time I lost a tooth, I put it in an empty aspirin bottle and stashed it in my underwear drawer.
“Um…what are you doing?” Mom asked.
“I’m saving my teeth to cash them in later, when I’m older and the market goes up,” I said. Or words to that effect.
Mom tried her best to convince me to cash them in immediately, rather than trying to outguess a fickle tooth market. But I held firm as tooth after tooth lost its grip. And when it was all over, I had an aspirin bottle rattling with teeth.
My grandkids stared at me when I finished the tale.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s just say it was an unwise investment strategy. I never cashed them in. It turns out that the Tooth Fairy is a bit picky. She only wants teeth whose freshness date hasn’t expired.”
Olivia nodded.
But her sister Natalie said, “Have we established that the Tooth Fairy is a girl?”
Good point. It would never have occurred to me as a child that the Tooth Fairy would be anything but a girl. But it made sense. After all, we always talk about waiting for “the mailman.” My “mailman” today is a woman.
And for that matter, why assume there’s only one Tooth Fairy? We all go to “the dentist,” but that doesn’t mean that there’s only one dentist to service all our needs.
“Cloning,” their brother Jack said, out of the blue.
We stared at him.
“There’s DNA in all those teeth,” he said. “Maybe the Tooth Fairy doesn’t use the teeth as building materials. Maybe he’s cloning us.”
That, too, never occurred to me when I was his age. But then, it’s a different world out there today, isn’t it? I don’t think DNA had been invented when I was a kid.
The Tooth Fairy didn’t come that night, because Olivia didn’t put her tooth under her pillow. I don’t know if she forgot, or if she thought she’d get a better deal by bundling it with the next one or two that would fall out over the next few days. After all, they’d still be fresh enough for the Tooth Fairy to want them. At least she now knows from my aspirin-bottle tale not to sign up for some long-term investment rate plan.
But I that night when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep.
What if Jack was right? What if, long ago, the Tooth Fairy made a clone of me from my first baby tooth? Maybe my clone became my own personal Tooth Fairy. I’m sure he loved having the job, because he knew that he never had to get up in the middle of the night to deposit any spare coins under my pillow, because my teeth never ended up under the pillow. And a slacker like my clone would never report the situation to management, would he?
And because he’s the only clone-fairy who knew that I kept a treasure-trove of teeth in my underwear drawer, what if he came one night and stole the little aspirin bottle with plans to clone his own little army of TR’s?
As appealing as it might be to imagine a whole crowd of me’s, I lay awake staring at the ceiling.
After all, if he is a true clone of me, he probably has all kinds of wacky ideas squirming around in his head, and his judgment is not to be trusted.
Trust me, I know.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
