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It's a big deal to start Grade 1. Riding a cresting wave of adrenalin-fuelled wonder and discovery – and what a beautiful and exhausting phenomenon this is to observe – five-year-olds are not able to remain still for long at the best of times. But the first day of school dials this hyperactivity up to 11.
My son David's enthusiasm was palpable – he was literally vibrating as he recounted, at breakneck speed, the many highlights of his day.
Naturally, then, David was quite beside himself with excitement when, the next day, he lost his very first tooth – an event that had been anticipated, imagined and much discussed throughout the second half of August.
The second day of school – auspicious timing, indeed! (It was morning snack time – one bite into a mini-Oreo did the trick.) Equally significant, as David quickly pointed out, was that he was the very first in his class to lose one.
When I retrieved him from the play yard, he proudly displayed a green plastic, tooth-shaped locket he had been given to bring the tooth home. He was shaking with excitement at the thought of telling my wife, Tara, when she arrived home. All good at this point, and once we were home, Tara, of course, exhibited a reaction appropriate to the momentous occasion.
But then … oh, but then. As bedtime loomed, with Tara having left for her weekly volunteer gig, I got a chilling call from upstairs: "Dad, I can't find my tooth!"
For reasons unknown, David had removed the precious enamel item from its easy-to-spot green container and now, quite predictably, the lost tooth was literally lost.
We commenced a full-scale search in his bedroom, where he claimed the tiny white tooth had been carefully placed on his (white) alphabet-patterned sheet – no doubt just before David did his usual energetic bounces on the bed. "It was on the letter Q," he added between sobs.
The bed was moved, mats and stuffies shaken, but there was no sign of the treasured tooth, and David was rolling on the floor, beside himself at the prospect of the long-awaited Tooth Fairy visit not happening.
After much reassurance – "The tooth fairy knows the tooth fell out, so she will definitely come," – poor David had calmed down, convinced that the best course of action was to go to sleep so as to hasten her arrival. (As I read with his eight-year-old sister, Elizabeth, he occasionally shouted a confirmation, from his dark room, that "I'm sleeping now!")
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was so moved by her brother’s predicament – she is seemingly a believer herself, though probably an ambivalent one – that she dashed off a letter of explanation for the fairy, requesting that she leave the money for David because he deserved it despite the lack of evidence that any tooth had fallen out:
Dear Toothfairy,
Toothfairy please my Brother lost his tooth please still give him money its so important to him please please please
if you are the good kind of toothfairy you would give him money without question
think about it
Sincently:
Elizabeth Alice Thomson
YOU better give him money or else
Hmmm. It started out so sincerely and sweetly, but then the sudden change of tone: threatening the fairy, actually demanding that she pay up!
Not surprisingly, the excitement made it a little difficult for David to go to sleep – at 8:55 he yelled down for me, and when I peeked up the stairs there he was, standing on the landing, naked from the waist down because (as he informed me with a serious face), “My pyjama pants fell off.”
“Maybe you could just put them back on, David, and go back to bed?”
“I can’t – they’re inside out.”
Up to help with the pants … boy back into bed … girl not-so-subtly whispering to me to remember to check David’s room in the morning before he woke up, just in case the fairy didn’t come, to be sure he wouldn’t be disappointed. Kindly (and I felt this balanced out the extortionate tone of her letter), she offered to donate her own money if the fairy didn’t come through.
In the end, however, the letter did the trick – or maybe it was the boy’s sincere panic. The generous fairy saw fit to leave not one but two shiny coins. This windfall thrilled David; he had soon squirrelled the loonies away for “safekeeping” in a metal box with a butterfly sticker, a garage-sale purchase he uses as his go-to container for carrying snacks to playgrounds. (An added security feature is the fact he cannot easily open the latch on his own.)
As I had left early for work, I missed the finding of the treasure, but Tara reported that when David awoke he brought the loot downstairs and, as he happily rubbed the coins together, informed her that they were for university so he could become a doctor. Oh, the adrenalin-fuelled wonder of discovery: sometimes exhibited most beautifully in the pure dreams and pronouncements of my curly haired little boy.
Jason Thomson lives in Ottawa.