Long in the tooth

The title of today’s post is actually an old expression originally associated with horses. It seems that one of the best ways to get a sense of a horse’s age is to look in its mouth. As a horse gets older its gums recede, exposing more and more of the root… thus making its teeth appear longer. This is also the origin of the phrase ‘looking a gift horse in the mouth’… since it would seem rude to check the age of a horse one has just received as a gift.

So what, you are probably wondering, is today’s fascination with teeth… and age?

My 10-year-old daughter Ariella - our first baby - lost her last baby tooth. This is yet another sign in a ling line of signs I’ve been ignoring that my baby is growing up.

As the resident tooth fairy, I am now in possession of the last tangible remnant of her childhood… bought and paid for like all the ones that came before. As I turn the tooth over in my hand, I can’t help feeling that I should have seen this coming. Like a predictable plot twist in a movie, there was plenty of foreshadowing and hinting… yet I didn’t notice.

I’m the guy in the theater who is always surprised into spilling his soda, no matter how obvious and telegraphed the bombshell. I could watch ‘The Sixth Sense’ again today and still be surprised at the end. And don’t even get me started about the trauma that was waiting for me one hour, 12 minutes and 37 seconds into ‘The Crying Game’!

Men in general seem to resist looking ahead, apparently preferring to revel in the comfortable present. I suspect that many fathers share this willful lack of foresight when it comes to their daughters. We smugly presume that they will always remain our little girls… and then spill our sodas when we catch sight of the young women they inevitably become.

This past summer our extended family spent a week in a huge old house on a private island on the southern coast of Cape cod. The setting among the dunes and beaches was magical, and the kids loved being so close to the ocean.

Late one afternoon after the rest of the family had returned from the beach, Ariella and I set off down the sandy path to have our own dip in the Atlantic. While I watched this child wade confidently into the surf, I was reminded of the afternoon, almost exactly nine years before when I carried this squalling baby into the ocean a few miles south of where we stood (on Martha’s Vineyard) to give her first taste of the sea. These two unremarkable events only a few miles apart, yet separated by most of her young life, triggered that special sense that parents seem to have… one I’ve always thought of as ‘the cinematographer’s view’.

As if holding up long strips of movie film to view individual frames, a parent sometimes has the ability to look at separate moments in time, and to superimpose them momentarily over each other… comparing, contrasting, and bursting with pride and astonishment at the graceful miracle we helped create.

As I stood on the beach drying off… enjoying that tight-skinned feeling that comes from that secret mixture of salt and sand and sun… I watched Ariella go through her ritual of drying herself. My heart skipped a beat as she instinctively made a wrap-around dress out of one towel, and then a turban of another… precisely as I’ve watched her mother do a thousand times.

When did this womanchild learn to do this?

I noticed with a fatherly combination of pride and alarm that she no longer looked anything like a little girl. She unknowingly carried herself across the sand with a swaying feminine gait, and the angles and lines of her athletic physique whispered barely audible hints of evening gowns and perfume in her future. But the hug she gave when she reached me, burying her face against my salt-tightened skin, still had that fierce, almost panicky power that it had nine years before as she clung to me in her sea-sodden diaper.

As we walked hand-in-hand up the path from the beach to have dinner with the rest of the family, I had no idea that a small tooth in her mouth - the last of its kind - was beginning to work itself loose. If I had, I doubt I would have given it much thought. After all, from the first time I sprinkled a trail of purple glitter from her windowsill to her pillow, the tooth fairy had become such an old pro at handling teeth that one more would be all in a night’s work.

In typical fatherly fashion… I didn’t anticipate the significance of this tooth until I had removed it from under her pillow.

Ariella often (but not always), leaves notes for the tooth fairy. At first they were earnestly scrawled notes asking what the tooth fairy did with all the teeth (“…do you build castles out of them?”). Then they became slightly more sophisticated messages, with veiled hints at the knowledge that the tooth fairy might have a secret identity… known only to certain wise little girls.

Truth be told, the tooth fairy is a wonderful example of the willing suspension of disbelief. There would be nothing to be gained by any of the participants ruining the little charade… so we all continued to play our roles.

But this last tooth was wrapped in a note that was a bit different. Like the contrast between the adolescent girl on the beach and the earnest little girl hugs, the note was a study in contradictions. On the one hand it was written in a beautifully mature hand on a piece of paper towel she had dyed to look like some kind of cloth. But the note broke my heart with its innocent statement that could only have come from someone still partly entrenched in childhood:

I am heartbroken that Ariella and I will no longer be able to continue this little sham. No, she and I are now on the same side of the pillow, and for her there is no longer a reason to suspend her disbelief. For Ariella, the tooth fairy went away yesterday… never to return. So why am I the one who’s sad?

When I started this post, I was working under the assumption that the title ‘long in the tooth’ would be a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ariella’s march into adolescence… but I see now it was a subconscious (and all too accurate) reference to her father.

Why didn’t I see that coming?