The Real Meaning of Buck Tooth

My No. 5 son, who’s five years old, just lost his first tooth. That little hole in his smile marks a big moment in his life. And in mine too. My littlest baby isn’t one anymore.

But life goes on, and once I go from wistful to wistempty, I better stock up on loose change; it’s a buck-a-tooth these days in my house, and I gotta be ready for those Tooth Fairy duties.

Uh-oh! Hey, you five-year-olds out there, what I MEAN, of course, is that the extra change, is, uh, to set aside for the Tooth Fairy to use. I mean, of COURSE the Tooth Fairy really REALLY exists, but sometimes she just, uh, runs a little short on coins because she, uh, has no pockets in her little fairy frock!

Whew! That was close! But not as close as the pickle No. 4 son (age 9) put us in the other night. Right in front of little, impressionable No. 5, No. 4 says that a friend of his gets $20 for each chopper! (Geez, those are some big-buck teeth!) Then he asks why the Tooth Fairy gives different kids different amounts of money – why isn’t the payout standardized?

Questions like these open up a big can of worms, which, in my opinion, might be a really good place to hide extra Tooth Fairy coinage; who would look for it in there?

But I digress. My point is, once we start questioning the eternal mysteries of the Tooth Fairy – such as, is it a “she” or a “he”? – we invariably wind up discovering some website that takes a subject as delightful as a cuspid-craving Tinkerbell and makes it as deadly dull as a TV ad that begins with “I’m Senator Seabright Cooley, and I approved this message.”

For example, the Wikipedia entry for “Tooth Fairy” explains in detail that she’s “a fictional character in modern Western culture” and “an example of folklore mythology,” much like Paul Bunyan, or John Henry, or Martha Stewart.

Then, revealing a little too much about the author, perhaps, comes this: “The discovery that such stories are make-believe can cause significant emotional pain in some children. Many remember clearly for their whole lives when and how they discovered the truth.” Somehow, I don’t think this writer’s children will ever be told there’s a Tooth Fairy, do you?

You probably already know that the Tooth Fairy is not merely an American tradition. For example, kids in many countries that aren’t America receive their molar moolah from a mouse.

Man, how’d you like to be a kid waking to find a mouse skittering around your pillow with your tooth in his little paws? Talk about significant emotional pain.

In some homes, kids don’t stick their fallen fangs under the pillow. They put them in a glass of water. The theory is that it’s far easier for parents to grab the tooth from the water glass than rummaging through the bed.

We tried this once, and only learned that it was far easier for me to spill water all over the kid’s bed than to wait for him to do it. Plus one of the boys woke up thirsty one night before the Fairy had finished watching “The Tonight Show” (hey, it was “Headlines” night, give the Fairy a break!). So he guzzled his agua and the tooth suctioned itself right back in the space it had just vacated.

The Tooth Fairy has been characterized often in books, films and other forms of pop culture. There was once even a Tooth Fairy museum, in the home of Dr. Rosemary Wells, a professor at the Northwestern University Dental School.

Unfortunately the museum doesn’t exist anymore. After Dr. Wells passed away, her family carefully packed up all the exhibits and stored them in a couple spare bedrooms. Mystifyingly, when they checked on the stuff the next day, everything had disappeared.

But there was a buck under each pillow!

# # #

TakefiveT5@yahoo.com