The Tooth and the Nail

I was described as a rambunctious kid. I had a surplus of energy at a young age, and I tried to find ways to put that excess energy to use.

Sometimes, this manifested itself in novel and creative ways. I focused on drawing, where I was hypnotized by forming new shapes on the page that would ultimately resemble Spiderman or The Hulk. I played lots of outdoor sports, both organized and disorganized. I learned a little bit about how computers work.

Other times, though, I was so rambunctious that I would injure myself. Now, all kids are prone to injuries, but maybe not every kid breaks 5 bones by the age of 12. If you beat this record, let me know in the comments.

In spite of being such a wild child, I still had all my baby teeth by elementary school. Most of the first graders were sporting gaps in their teeth, but I still had all of mine. I just wasn’t that cool. Being at the younger end for my grade (September birthday meant I was five at the start of first grade and sixteen at the start of my senior year), I felt the desire to lose teeth, too.

Making things worse, one of my teeth was grayed out - essentially, the nutrients had stopped reaching the tooth when I had struck it against the side of something hard. This wasn’t much of an obstacle in first grade, though—if there was social ostracism, I was too naive to recognize it.

I recall playing on a tire swing, or something really similar. The tire (or whatever I was pulling on) was stuck, and I needed to have the tire pulled on while my hands were free. At the ripe age of 6, I concluded that a good way to free up my hand was to bite onto the rope.

Almost immediately, the pulling tension from the rope ripped at my tooth, and I felt something horrifying—something I had never experienced up until that point, at least as far back as I could remember. The root of the tooth made some kind of crunching sound. I now had my first loose tooth.

People say that you have nightmares about teeth coming out for symbolic reasons, but I’m pretty sure all the tooth-related nightmares I’ve ever had have been related to this event.

It took some time before I eventually got the tooth to come out. I’m sure I was frightened by the idea of pulling something away from my body that had been with me for so long, but I got there eventually.

Around that same time, I was able to play with lots of kids in my neighborhood. We could play in the streets with little worry of traffic, and it was a somewhat idealized suburban location in many ways. It felt safe to play, and there were plenty of kids my age.

One day, some of the more industrious kids had put together a bike ramp. This was something hastily assembled with a couple of two-by-fours and a couple of pieces of plywood, so certainly nothing fancy and nothing built to last terribly long… but it absolutely did the job for the kids. Bikes (and maybe skateboards) were making rad jumps, and I naturally wanted in on the action.

At some point, I wanted to move the ramp to a different location. Maybe it was in the middle of the road and there were cars coming, but memories are malleable, and I’m not 100% sure.

At any rate, I reached between the two-by-fours to lift the ramp up, and as I tried to lift the ramp off the ground (or drag it somewhere, maybe), I noticed that the ramp was now attached to me in a way it wasn’t previously. That’s because someone had affixed the plywood top of the ramp to one of the structural pieces of wood underneath, but the nail had gone right through to the other side.

As horrified as I was in that situation, I completely froze and couldn’t bring myself to pull my finger free. Or, maybe, some of the older kids encouraged me to wait for an adult to show up. Maybe they reasoned that I could only make things way worse if I tried pulling my finger free of the nail, kind of ripping extra flesh up in the process.

As fate would have it, there was a nurse who lived across the street—the mother of a neighboring child I no doubt played with. She graciously helped me to get my finger free, and I don’t remember whether we ended up in the hospital that night (I would guess not, since I had probably just had a tetanus booster).

As you can see, I lived to fight another day, but both of these incidents changed me forever. Unlike the bad hop a few years later, where I watched someone else get hurt, I experienced these things for myself.

Both of them involved pulling something away from my body. In the case of my tooth, it came from me, but it needed to go. With the nail, it was an invader from the outside, but it paralyzed me as surely as my tooth had previously.

Yikes! Ever experience anything like this during your childhood? How do you think it affected the way you see the world today?