Living in a Jewish household, with no Santa ever sliding down the chimney, our one magical home invasion did not involve presents under a tree but cash under a pillow. And the Tooth Fairy had a distinct advantage in making me feel special. No Christmas gifts showering the whole family indiscriminately. No, sir, that Fairy made a beeline to my bedroom, my pillow alone, rewarding me for being a Big Boy in the face of a harrowing dental amputation.
The magic of the experience might be dampened today with the availability of the Delta Dental Tooth Fairy Poll website, which informs us that the average going rate today for a baby tooth under a pillow is $5.84, “with rates often higher in the West and Northeast.” Nothing dissipates the magic of fairy dust quicker than online polls.
Those six years between age 6 and 12, when normally all of our twenty baby teeth fall out, felt like a goldmine to me. I remember the first time I awoke and discovered under my pillow a big, beautiful, heavy, silver 50-cent piece with Ben Franklin as heads and Lady Liberty as tails. In case you’re wondering, that is almost exactly $5.84 in our money today. Even when my 19th and 20th tooth fell out, long after I knew that the Tooth Fairy was as real as that “farm” where all old dogs went to spend their last days gleefully chasing rabbits, I was still in awe of the cash I was hoarding from my tiny enamel body parts. Every time my tongue noticed a new “wiggler” in my mouth, I knew my comic book budget was about to get an infusion.
I remember as an enthusiastic six-year-old trying to work out the mechanics of how the Tooth Fairy could possibly conduct her rounds, dragging around enough 50-cent pieces to distribute in one hand and a large enough gunny sack to collect all those germy baby teeth in the other.
Gloria, my older sister, could always be counted on for help with such metaphysical speculations. “How can that one little fairy do it all?” I inquired one evening when we were brushing our teeth. “Oh, just GROW UP, you big baby!” she helpfully explained.
By the time of my next big dental challenge, I was in college. This episode had a much bigger impact on me than my baby teeth. Actually, what this episode had on me was a much bigger “impacted”. Yep, it concerned my wisdom teeth. My molars had no space to properly emerge, and they became trapped in my gums. YIKES!
So nice that older sisters don’t change. When I told Gloria that there was no room for my wisdom teeth, she couldn’t resist: “YOU? Suddenly with too small a mouth? Call The National Enquirer!”
I had all four removed at once, emerging discombobulated from my first experience with anesthesia, jabbering on about how happy I was that my tonsils were finally out and woozily asking if the oral surgeon kept chocolate ice cream in an office freezer as a recovery aid. He did not. Granted, it probably wouldn’t have tasted quite as delicious as at the ice cream parlor, given all those bloody gauze pads wallpapering my mouth.
I had always thought some clever advertising exec must have come up with the term “wisdom teeth” as a nod to the fact that they emerge in our earliest adulthood, long after we have lost our baby teeth and childish ways. Imagine my shock when I learned the phrase was first coined by Aristotle around 350 BC.
The Japanese have a much better name for these molars: oyashirazu, or “unknown to parents teeth”, since they appear after their older children are on their own and living away from home. These days, though, with tiny studio apartment rentals in Tokyo now being some of the most expensive in the world, Japanese parents joke that their children will probably still be living at home when they are being fitted for their ireba— dentures.
I should have known I was destined to teach English, since I was the weird kid who got excited when I realized that “tooth” was one of only two body parts that did not become plural by adding an “s”. “Tooth-teeth! Tooth-teeth!” I would chant endlessly as a toddler, until grumpy Gloria threatened to knock mine all out.
It wasn’t much later that I was in pre-kindergarten, and we did a lesson on yardsticks. That night at the dinner table (also known as “Elliot’s Forum”) I announced that I knew everything there was to know about this wondrous wooden object. “You can measure anything with it! You can use it as a pretend sword! Do you know how long a yard is? (this was purely a rhetorical question; I wasn’t about to yield the floor to a family member). One yard is thirty-six inches!” And then I delivered my coup de grâce: “ And that is three FEETH!”
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here