Occam’s Tooth Fairy

 

Occam’s Tooth Fairy
©2020  Ross Williams

 

 

My 8 year-old lost a tooth last week.  The Tooth Fairy’s house rules require it to be in a baggie.  Loose, and the way my son thrashes in the night, it would end up skidding down the heating vent never to be seen again.  Yet the smell of partially chewed gummi worms and strawberry yogurt drink would waft through the house forever.

 

Our local Fairy is fairly generous: $3 a tooth.

 

Then this evening we were all sitting in front of the television.  The boy was on his iPad engrossed in playing some stupid game or other, his mother was on her phone doing last minute Christmas shopping and I was flipping through DirecTV channels.  Normally, my son needs dynamite to tear him away from his games.  The second floor could crash down around him, and he wouldn’t notice unless it caused him to fall off the raft and get eaten by the shark − which is apparently a thing.  In my remote fiddling I paused briefly on Grown-Ups, which I’d never seen before and couldn’t tell you the plot of to save my life, just long enough to hear this conversation:
Child: Mommy, I lost a tooth!
Adult woman: [having a telephone conversation, and quite distracted] Just put it under your pillow and I’ll put a dollar there later.

Uh oh.  I changed channels quickly.  And wouldn’t you know it, that was the moment my son decided he could hear anything not associated with Roblock Wizards of Minecraft.

 

He looked up at me and asked, “Do you do that?”

“Do what?” I asked, trying to appear interested in the infomercial I’d landed on.

“Put money under my pillow when I lose teeth.”

 

His mother looked at me through her eyebrows but remained silent.  “No!” I replied.  And I did not lie.  I do not do that.  His mother does.  He has a lifetime to discover the wonderful world of technicality.

 

For now, though, he’s still a child.  The world is all magic and wonder, and the job of a parent is to maintain that fantasy for as long as possible without it affecting his education.  At some point he’s going to discover that the gifts of both Santa and the Easter Bunny seem to be the same brand as what’s in the local stores.  He’s already [thank god] getting bored with the Elf on a Shelf.  Some days he doesn’t even look for his new hiding spot and needs to be reminded, so as to inspire him to behave in at least one room of the house.

 

Until then, though, I will do my best to cultivate the wide-eyed awe as he discovers the early-winter treasure on the hearth that appeared out of nowhere overnight.  My cynicism, the one that he will eventually inherit, is a learned trait.  It was not natural.  I learned it from the institutional assholes that I encountered in my twenties and thirties, and sometimes in my forties.  Those who tried to convince me that events and conditions, as if by the same Tooth Fairy magic, just appear for no identifiable reason, instead of by a set of knowable and discernible principles.

 

Things like military readiness and national security being the result of immaculate haircuts, straight gig-lines and shiny shoes.  The Iraqi military reportedly looked amazing in parade.  On the battlefield they looked dead.  I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

Things like raising well-adjusted children after divorce being wholly dependent upon reducing a father to a walking wallet deprived of any meaningful interaction with his own offspring, while any man on the street is entitled to more influence on those kids as long as the kids’ mother likes him better.  I’m sure the 3-500% increase in social pathology among these children is another coincidence.

 

Things like what sex a person is, redefined to ‘gender’, being contingent upon the individual’s mutable feelings on any given day.  Biology is evil misidentified as science.

 

Things like the demise of the American manufacturing industry being a mystery, and having good American jobs being a quaint relic of times past.

 

Things like the election of Donnie Combover being the consequence of Russian rigging, a four-year claim made by those now desperately screeching that elections can’t be rigged.  God forbid Trump had anything to do with politically marginalized people participating in their governance under the noses of those who have demonized their existence and priorities.

 

And things like scary new diseases requiring the forcible impoverishment of a hundred million Americans and billions across the world, the expansion of political control of all peoples in ways that would have made Himmler blanch using methods that would have made Goebbels blush with envy, even [and especially] those governed by systems defined to prevent such controls.

 

These are for later.  The world, in my son’s eyes, is still young.  It will be decades before he needs to develop a protective crust of cynical defiance.  Until then, Merry Christmas, Scooter.  The elf still reports nightly to Santa.