ADAM

Robert E. Horseman, DDS                                                 

     The Tooth Fairy, dentistry's most cherished myth next to the spiritual belief held by some dentists that if you tell patients to floss, they will, is still alive and flourishing.  My authority for that statement is a retired hygienist from Deerfield, Illinois named Rosemary Wells, who bills herself as a Tooth Fairy Consultant.  Ms Wells is probably the nation's, if not the world's, primo collector of Tooth Fairy lore and memorabilia.  Her museum in Deerfield containing all of her Tooth Fairy references, exhibits and odds and ends is a Mecca for Tooth Fairy aficionados from all over.  Indeed, there is some speculation that Ms Wells, herself, is the Tooth Fairy reincarnated.  She modestly denies the charge, but the rumors refuse to die.

     In any event, the profession owes a debt to Rosemary for keeping the myth alive and serving as a constant reminder to parents of deciduous-exfoliating children to stay on their toes, because inflation is raising hob with traditional baby teeth values.  A recent survey across the country indicated that redemption of a beneath-the-pillow tooth is verging on $2 per unit, up from about ten cents twenty-five years ago.  A kid from an affluent only-child family can anticipate a minimum of $5 per tooth, thus accumulating a nest egg of one hundred bucks before he reaches puberty.       A really rich kid in Germany, where the Tooth Fairy is known as Die Pflugenweisermitodontogewesenheit, can reasonably expect the keys to a 911 Porsche Targa under his whatever the word for pillow is in German.

     That this is clearly getting out of hand is brought into sharp focus by some recent discoveries during the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in some dry caves in what is now Israeli-occupied West Bank where they had been preserved for almost two thousand years.  The translations have taken more than forty years, partly because the only people who knew what they said were dead or seriously mummified.

     An international team of scholars divided up the work and except for weekends, religious holidays and vacations, quickly in only half a century, caused a sensation when they published their findings. The most recent work has brought to light some fascinating insights into our own area of interest, the Tooth Fairy.  As nearly as I can understand it without reference to my Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek-to-English dictionary, the story goes like this:

     God created Adam from dust, which, because asphalt and concrete hadn't been invented yet, there was plenty of.  He breathed life into him in a sort of ecclesiastical CPR maneuver, placed him in the Garden of Eden and then fashioned a Significant Other for him out of one of Adam's ribs.  This doesn't exactly explain why spareribs are so popular today, but something may have been lost in the translation .

     Well, life went on.  There was some trouble with eating forbidden fruit and some kind of a hassle with a snake, but basically things were pretty much OK. One day (Tuesday) the original Tooth Fairy fluttered in for a set-to with Adam and Eve.  Seems she was puckered because she never got any tooth redemption business from the Garden of Eden.  Of course you and I know that because Adam was just suddenly there, you know, Poof! a full-grown adult, he never had any deciduous teeth to lose.  Bummer!  It is not recorded whether he had a navel or not, but I think we can assume he was short-changed there as well. Truth of the matter is that Adam never had a pillow either and because he had not been issued any kind of an operating or maintenance manual, he was accustomed to sleeping standing up or sort of leaning against a tree.  It wasn't until he saw a dog lying down asleep, that the concept of reclining at night with a pillow came into being.  "Well, hey!" he marveled.  "This changes everything!"  Even though his rock pillow wasn't on the Tooth Fairy's list of approved head supports, clearly a new era was launched.

     Eve, understandably, was in the same situation and they both resolved that if they ever had any children and assuming that instructions on how to go about this would be forthcoming, this business with the Tooth Fairy would be rectified so that civilization would get off to a proper start.

     In time, Cain came along, then Abel and Seth.  By the time the kids' sixty deciduous teeth were lost and redeemed, everybody seemed to get the hang of it, although we can be reasonably sure today that, although the Scrolls don't spell it out specifically, none of the boys got anywhere near $2 a tooth, let alone a Porsche.

     Children today, being much brighter than their counterparts of centuries ago, recognize the Tooth Fairy for what she is, a potential gold mine. Even though they run out of redeemable teeth at about age twelve, there are still plenty of young people from what I can observe, hanging around the house like members of the New Guinea Cargo Cult of World War II, waiting for the largess to resume.