Chapter 2:
Baby Teeth
Have you ever walked the grounds of the playscape you grew up playing on in your youngest days? The place where some of your earliest memories occurred - your first friends, your first enemies, your first teammates, your first brawls, your first heartbreaks or, perhaps, your first injuries. My sister snapped her arm in 2 on the playground when she had someone give her a piggyback ride and they fell…but she was in high school. I still don’t understand that one. What high schools have playgrounds?
Anyway, clearly the early experiences shared with other like-minded and rambunctious little boys and girls were defining, intriguing and, more accurately, forgettable. I don’t know anybody who sits around and reminisces about their elementary days, recess or not. But, I think if we all took the time to look back at those formative years, we could agree that certain people, places and moments have stuck out for a reason throughout the lifetime that we grew up living.
One certainly does for me. Year 1. Pre-K. Wild as hell and willing to try anything at least once. Of course my only friend that year was another wild child named Matt. Matt was legitimately the worst friend I could have possibly had at that point in my life.
Aside from deeply confusing and disorienting me as a 4 year old when he pinned me down and forced me to make out with him in my own living room under a “tent” we had built while our mothers gossiped a room over, Matt left another intensely traumatic impact on me in that brief, terrible year he was in my life.
Oh my, how much went down in 1999…
I got taken to many little boys’ houses as a little boy myself. I don’t remember most of them. Or why we were there to begin with. Or how we knew any of them. But most of them either assaulted me or bullied me and our parents were somehow always invisible in a separate room. One kid even had his own little mini trailer as a separate property just full of snacks. Little Debbies, chips, crackers, soda, you name it. Honestly, that could have been pretty awesome if he didn’t spend the whole time punching and fighting me while I tried to defend myself and prayed we would leave soon.
Matt was a little different than those others, though, because we were in the same class and saw each other every day at school. So, he had a lot more time around me than any other kid at that age. Our mothers set up mall dates and play dates at each other’s houses quite often. One time at his place he showed me the second or third Austin Powers movie and then had to fast-forward through the sex scenes because “mom said we can’t watch this part, it’s inappropriate”.
All that said, the main moment I remember Matt for isn’t any of that. It was on the playground at recess. On top of the bridge. Kids running by, playing tag and hide and go seek and newer, freshly made up games, too. Teachers on the bench monitoring, supervising, but mainly just trying to breathe for the few minutes of the day outside of the classroom.
Matt jumped off the bridge of course. He casually landed on the ground below. And he didn’t move. He just looked up, in his crouched position from landing, and just…didn’t go anywhere.
“GOOO!”, he shouted from the rocks and sticks below.
“I will, but MOVE!,” I responded, not wanting him to get hurt when I made the plummet down like the coolest action hero who ever lived.
“Just GO! It’s fine!”, he insisted, not budging a bit.
“I don’t wanna fall on y-”
“HURRY UP!”
“Fine”
*YEET*
I lifted up and I dropped down and I landed directly on top of Matt, my chin pile driving hard onto the top of his skull causing my bottom jaw to slam into my top jaw and shoving all of my top teeth back up into my gums from where they once came.
Matt started crying immediately, a big bruise and bump on his head. I, too, started crying immediately, blood pouring from my entire mouth, tongue chomped and gums massacred.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember much about the next several moments. Or the rest of the day really. That’s probably a good thing. But I do remember being told that I’d “probably be fine” and that my adult teeth should eventually push down my baby teeth again and I’d lose them anyway. I was also told that I gained a slight overbite that day.
Somehow, it all worked out over the days, months and years that passed from that incident. I transferred schools that following year as I entered Kindergarten and I never saw Matt ever again. My step-mother mentioned years later how “that boy was a bad influence”.
My adult teeth did push down my baby teeth and I did eventually lose the little guys, as we all do. I never had braces and I think I turned out fairly well all things considered. All of my early school pictures are weird smiles with no teeth showing. Today I smile big and often. To this day, I’ve never broken a bone and only had one surgical procedure to repair a severely deviated septum when I was 24. I also never again got pinned down and forced to make out with anybody. I guess life does get better.
I’m grateful to be alive at all, but I get to be alive and I get to smile about it. That’s hard to complain about. I take nothing for granted.
This is just one story, the second story, in a series of stories that makes up what you read today. Rooted will never cease to intrigue and will always aim to inspire. I am deeply grateful for the experiences that I have had, the people who have pushed me to share them, and those who discover and receive my expressions today and tomorrow.
See you next week with a new tale from the depths of my past - bleached onto my eyes, deep rooted into my mind, refined and healed through my soul and articulated down to this page for all to hear.