Art of the Odd

My friend Lindsay has two little girls, one of whom lost a tooth over the weekend. Before the tooth fairy could come, the tooth… went missing. Fortunately, it had been found by morning.

Mine never was.

As far as I know, I only lost one tooth at school, and I’m not quite sure what happened to it. I can’t remember now if it came out, I put it in a pocket and dropped it, or if it came out on the playground and I didn’t notice that it had happened. I do remember, though, that I spent what felt like hours looking for it. I combed the playground methodically, walking slowly across the width of it, then turning at the end and walking back a few inches to the right. When my mother came to get me, I tried to convince her that I had to find my tooth before we could go home. She made me get in the car.

I was half-hysterical and sobbing. I’m sure I had plans for that tooth money. (I got a dollar. Eventually, it occurred to me that most of my friends got considerably less, and I began to question whether a real tooth fairy would pay differing ransoms for different children’s teeth.) We had some elk teeth, though, and a human tooth with a gold filling in it (which I believe had been my grandfather’s). “I’ll put one of these under the pillow!” I thought. “She’ll never know the difference!”

Mom didn’t think that was such a great idea.

Eventually, I settled for putting a note under my pillow, explaining the lost tooth.

In the morning, I got a dollar.

And I thought, “Hey, maybe I could just put a note like that under my pillow every night.”

Mom didn’t think that was a great idea, either.

Damn her, always being right.

A Unique Alias told a story yesterday about something stupid he did with a pellet gun when he was 17. I told him my husband has a similar story, but I’d let him tell it. (Novy, would you like to tell the story here, or over at Direct Current?) After saying that, though, I realized that I have my own story to tell…

From the time I was maybe 12 or 13, all the way through high school, I made some extra money in the summers shooting gophers in the horse pasture. Mom would pay me $1 a head for killing the squeaky little menaces, and never asked to see the corpses. One lovely, sunny morning, I was out in the eastern half of the pasture, near the road, when I spotted a gopher to the west of me. I fired. My aim was a bit low, and the bullet skipped off the hard-packed ground and ricocheted through the double pane of plate glass in the bow-fronted window of the house.

I didn’t realize it had happened until I came in and my father offered me the bullet. It was only a .22, so it hadn’t gotten far after punching through both panes of glass. He’d found it on the window seat. “Lucky for you that didn’t keep going and hit your mother’s china cabinet,” he said. “And that you hit the house, instead of one of your mother’s yearling foals.”

“Dad,” I said. “I would never aim toward the horses.”

Guess I shouldn’t have aimed toward the house, either…

I still have that bullet somewhere. Someday, I’m going to make a navel jewel out of it, like the dancer in The Man with the Golden Gun.