Loose-toothed Boys
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2006
Ned and I were walking home with the snap-together
model plane I'd just bought him when he said, "Thank you, dad. This
is a perfect gift for a loose-toothed boy." Ned is loose-toothed, or
was.
Maybe a week and a half later, he and Alex and our
babysitter came through the door and Ned began showing his gap. He
was bursting with pride. Jill wanted to cry. Ned's face was also
smeared with blue, but I don't know what was going on with that.
That night, Jill had Ned write a note to the tooth fairy. On the
note he also drew a picture of himself smiling and holding his
tooth. Soon after, he went to sleep.
"So five dollars?" I said to Jill. She wavered on
the amount, saying it was too high. Oh Christ. I happen to think you
should give a kid about the same amount for his first baby tooth as
a gallon of gasoline costs. I know when Jill reads this she'll think
I'm even further off my rocker; she's hatched the idea that I throw
money at Ned. Nonetheless, about 9:30 or so that night, Ned was
firmly asleep and Jill and I agreed on leaving him a $5 bill. Then
we both discovered that all we had was twenties.
Ned deserves a good gift from the tooth fairy.
First, it's his first baby tooth, which now we have in a tin up on
the bookshelf. It's tinged with blue; I asked him about it last
night, and he replied, "Oh, that's ink." It's a little bigger than a
BB. Plus, first grade has been a bitch for Ned, partially because he
had a fabulous kindergarten teacher, and partially because none of
us saw coming his whole days spent planted at a desk, writing,
writing, reading, writing. For some reason we never saw coming the
real beginning of Ned's training as an American worker.
Ned's makes the best of it. He sticks to his
homework, resisting what I think Richard Yates termed "the luxury of
collapse" whenever he incorrectly guesses that a word ends with C
instead of K, or when he puts the tail of the small G on the wrong
side.
It's also worth noting that in that drawing of Ned
smiling and drawing a tooth, Ned also drew Alex smiling and holding
a tooth. I think that was nice. Alex has been losing teeth for a
while; the last one was I didn't even notice until I looked over and
happened to see a smear of blood across Alex's cheek. Another was
gone, bottom front. God knows where it went (we've looked). We have
none of Alex's baby teeth, and like they say about prime real
estate, they aren't making any more.
We dug up five singles for Ned, and Jill wrote him
a note from the Tooth Fairy, telling him that the first tooth is
special. I remember the feeling: the wobble, the lean, the itchy
stretch of gum that's getting ready to push a tooth out and push the
owner of the mouth one step further down the road. Jill still feels
like crying.
With the passing of teeth, I like to tell myself,
the boys are growing into what I hope will be Prime Dad Years: blobs
no longer, using a toilet with about the same accuracy as dad. Years
when I can just plain do more stuff with my sons, like building
model airplanes, years after toddlerhood and before the they dive
deep for about a decade into the teenage years. When they
re-surface, who knows what they'll think of dad.
Ned's been asking about his grandparents, and to
see pictures of me as a baby. "Your dad died?" he will ask, and I'll
say oh yes, many years ago. "That's sad," Ned will say. There are
some pictures somewhere, black-and-whites of my dad in "the yard" in
a white T, hair combed back and a Raleigh stuck in his lips, beside
my shockingly young mother in her dotted dress, both of them looking
like members of the French Resistance. Of me there are fading color
snapshots with fat white borders, and in the borders, in fine black
letters, are the month and year of the printing. Remember those?
I e-mail my sister in Arizona, the only family
guardian left of these treasures, and tell her to find someone to
help her scan the photos in and e-mail them to me, so the photos
will never have to leave her house. That's best for those photos;
they're not making any more.
Copyright 2006 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
