Summer is magical, and magic reminds me of elves, fairies, and mermaids. Speaking of enchanted beings, my granddaughter recently lost her first tooth and required a Tooth Fairy visit. Seeing the pictures of her with a gap in her smile made me remember when our daughters and I lost ours. Losing those pearly whites was so special that I kept our girls’ first tiny choppers in my jewelry box to remind me of those precious days. While these treasures gross out our grown children, seeing them lying in that velvet tray transports me back in time.
Like many kids, I was five when I first noticed a wiggly bottom front tooth. Older cousins explained to me about the Tooth Fairy exchanging that no longer useful dentin for silver embossed with a presidential bust. In our family, we mixed water with salt in a jelly glass and dropped in our freshly pulled tooth. We watched it sink before we left it on the kitchen table overnight. At first light, my brother or I’d find a bright coin an unseen TF left in its place, launching dreams of tootsie rolls, gum, and rolls of caps for our toy pistols.
This was heady business in a simpler world where kids rarely possessed loose change. Few youngsters had means to spend hours deciding how to unload silver burning a hole in their pocket at the local dime store. As a result, I adored this fairy, ranking her alongside Santa in importance. Oddly, I never questioned why our magic visitor liked to swim in salt water.
Imagine my distress when I accidentally dropped a freshly yanked baby tooth down the bathroom drain. There went the shopping trip I’d imagined as I spent weeks flicking it forward and backward with my tongue. I was visiting my aunt and uncle, and dad’s brother saved that spending spree. As I stood behind his shoulder; snaggle- toothed, teary-eyed, and hiccupping, he uncoupled pipes below the sink to retrieve my escaped trophy.
Our little granddaughter wasn’t quite so lucky. She apparently didn’t get the message I did from older relatives and didn’t know her tooth possessed cash value. When she showed her surprised mom the fresh hole in her gum, my daughter asked where the tooth went. “I swallowed it,” this kindergartner replied.
Fortunately, her inventive mother recollected her own good times finding quarters at the bottom of a glass. She checked with other moms to learn the going rate for lost teeth and arranged a Tooth Fairy visit to their house. This will surely motivate our grandson to check the sturdiness of his choppers. However, he’s got a wait since he’s only three.
In some families, the Tooth Fairy retrieves lost teeth from beneath sleeping children’s pillows and leaves cash behind. I’ve seen special pillows with pockets to hold the tooth and coins. How our family ended up with a salt-water diving Tooth Fairy, I’ll never know. Maybe she’s related to mermaids, another favorite creature. On a different note, my girls’ teeth got clean before they ended up in my box of treasures. Oddly, no one has ever asked how they got there.