“I’m getting a new tooth!”
She wasn’t mine, obviously, I have no children of my own. She
was there with her mother, eating lunch in my section that day, at work, five
or maybe six years old, I can never tell with other people’s kids, and
obviously excessively proud of the gap in her mouth where once a tooth had
been.
“Oh, are you?” I asked, my head cocked to one side, smiling
politely, and she nodded her head with the kind of enthusiasm only children are
capable of.
By adulthood that enthusiasm, that wonder, has been beaten
out of us, however much we might try to hold it tight.
“I am!” She said, still nodding, “I’m going to lose all my
baby teeth and get all new ones, and they will be my grown-up teeth, AND I’m
going to leave my baby teeth under my pillow so that the tooth fairy can take
them and leave me money!”
She beamed with pride, and even I had to admit that minus
the tooth the grin was pretty adorable. I like kids well enough, after all. I
could never have one of my own, I can barely hold my own self together and don’t
by any means have it together well enough to have another life depend on me,
but I like other people’s just fine, and adorable is adorable, regardless of
your position on children in general.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, genuine amusement in my voice, “Well good
for you! You must be very pleased!”
She nodded, again, and I could have left it at that, if I’d
wanted to, gotten back to work and never again thought about the conversation.
It would have been the safe thing to do, and arguably the kind thing, but it
was a slow day and on slow days you have to make your own fun, so instead I
beckoned her forward, as though to offer her some sly secret the world had
heretofore kept from her.
She leaned in, eyes wide, as I knew she would.
“Just remember,” I told her with a conspiratorial smile,
“once you get your new teeth, they’re the last ones you’ll ever have. Ever. You
do NOT want to screw these ones up.”
Her eyes went even wider then, wider than I would have
thought them capable of going, and her mouth dropped open as though she’d never
given this matter any significant thought. Behind her, in her own seat, her mom
let the laugh explode out of her almost against her will, before biting it back
as best she could, keeping it to a muffled giggle.
It was a high risk, high yield joke, I admit, but a funny
one, as long as Mom laughs and the kid doesn’t actually cry at her first
realization that her body would some day inevitably fail her. And, looked at
from a certain point of view, it could even be considered educational, in its
way.
She didn’t beg for dessert, after all, when the time came
for me to present the cheque, and she’d no doubt brush her teeth without
needing to be told for a good long while. A thing a child can always stand to
learn.
And, although this is a smaller, meaner justification, I
assure you: The look on her face was priceless…
