toofless

today i want to write about teeth. because teeth are what is on my radar.

my youngest son, who is 7, finally lost one of his two front teeth. it has been dangling precariously for weeks. i did not know a tooth could hang on that long. it survived hamburgers. apples. twice-daily toothbrushing. that tooth had no plans to go anywhere.

and finally, i think he just got sick of it and pulled it out. so now he has a tiny gap in an otherwise adorable row of baby teeth. it is, how shall we say, not the cutest thing you've ever seen.

yesterday he spent quite awhile drawing battle scenes with his brother. there were ships, pirates, aliens, bombs, guns and the like. he brought his picture to show me when he was done and pointed out, that, "look, mom. all the bad guys have only one tooth." and sure enough, there were tiny teeth flying all over this war zone.

a couple days ago, a friend of mine got a frantic call that her 4-year-old son had knocked another child's teeth out on a trampoline. three teeth, knocked out. it was an accident, they were only baby teeth, but still. the guilt. the blood. the gaps.

which brings me to the story of how my teeth were knocked out. my young son loves this story, asks for it all the time, because there are villains and motorcycles and drama involved. i was playing in the front yard when i was about 7 with a girl down the street. fiona. we were roller skating. and for reasons which are very blurry to me now, she takes her roller-skated foot and kicks me in the mouth. there is blood. there are teeth flying. there is fiona running -- or skating -- home as fast as her feet can carry her.

it was my two front teeth. it's all fine. but i vow revenge. or at the very least, i vow to never play with fiona again. so as the ringleader of the girls on my block, i rally them to ignore fiona. fiona does not take this well, so fiona rallies her brothers with motorcycles. they chase us down the street (and really, thinking back, what kind of freaks with licenses are going to chase little kids?) and we run into someone's backyard and just start jumping fences until we are waaaay down the street. and they have no idea where we have gone to.

and that's as much as i remember. but my young son will ask, "and did they find you?"

"did you see them again?"

"did you report them to the police?"

and really, after telling the story to him a dozen times, he should know the ending is not going to suddenly change. but he holds out hope that it will turn into a big shoot-out scene on a ship with pirates and aliens.

which reminds me. my husband has a dentist appointment tomorrow.