A Toothless C Sharp

It was a momentous evening in the Long household. The Youngest Sister lost her first tooth just before dinner and now lies sleeping with visions of a tooth fairy about to leave big bucks under the pillow.

The visions she has were put in her head by the Brother at the dinner table, where he described having once seen the tooth fairy. He used hand gestures and a very imaginative description to paint the picture.

Apparently, the tooth fairy is about 18-24 inches tall, wears a blue dress, and antes up three bucks per dentum. At least that’s the going rate in Texas, he says, which is higher than the measly two dollars he collected for each tooth when they were falling out of his head back in his former life in Virginia. Only nine years old, he made it sound like he was hammering out license plates “back in Virginia.”

I tried to argue with him that the blue was actually Carolina Blue, but neither of them was buying. With his chain-gang wisdom he clarified flatly, “No Dad, it’s a much darker blue than that.”

What he really meant was, “You’ve obviously never seen the tooth fairy. Not in person, not in a book. Not in Virginia, and definitely not in Texas. Now choke up a smoke, old man and let me finish my story.”

The Youngest Sister had already decided that Dad had never seen the tooth fairy and the Brother was clearly the authority in the room. She let us all know that she’d bought his description with a single sentence, “That’s how tall I was when I was a baby in a blue dress.”

After dinner the Youngest Sister had violin practice. She’s learning to play violin by the Suzuki method which means, for the initiate, that I as parent am also learning to play the violin. Tonight it was my job to pluck the notes to “Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star” and let her tell me their names.

She watched my hands fumble on her 1/10th size violin and correctly called out most of the notes while the rosin dust flew. I thought she sounded a little funny, so I watched her mouth and noticed that she was pushing her tongue through the new gap in her bottom teeth. She was clearly enjoying the new sounds her mouth could now make.

“Shee Shhhtharrp” = “C Sharp”
“Ohthpen A” = “Open A”

I don’t know much about Tooth Fairies or whether or not three bucks is a fair rate for peg of a tooth, but I do know my little violinist in the blue Scooby-Doo nightgown has a little finger big enough for my heart and the buzz-cut, blue eyed Brother who can eat everything in sight may have already beat her to the punch.

This dad thing, sometimes trying and tiring, still beats pretty much anything I’ve tried.