The Lost World

"I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen."
Authur Conan Doyle - The Lost World

Spoiler alert!

The Tooth Fairy is dead, gone from the imaginings of both of my sons forever. With her loss, can Santa and the Easter Bunny’s last full measure be far behind? The most recent dislodged tooth from my youngest boy was still on his nightstand the following morning; cold and forgotten, a dried spot of blood on its roots. His mother and father, possessed by job-hunting, bill-paying, and the stress of moving for the seventh time since their marriage, had done something they had managed not to do before. While the boy drifted off with the excitement of knowing that a magical being would enter his room while he was asleep and trade a dollar for that tooth, his parents just drifted off.

The next morning it was the first thing out of his mouth since the tooth, “The Tooth Fairy forgot me.” The first thing out of dad’s mouth was, “Oops.”

We used to take a dollar and fold it into an origami square (Something else the Internet is good for). Somehow that seemed more magic than just leaving a bill there. But we had forgotten and that was simply that. Later I took a dollar to him in his room and when he asked, “There is no tooth fairy, is there?” I told him yes. He took the dollar, the final one, and I took the tooth. The king is dead there will be no more kings.

Every person has to face losing innocence and every parent has to face their child losing innocence. It’s not the end of the world for either of them, just the end of a world. It’s the end of world without the stresses and pressure of relationships, jobs, money, health, or death. It’s a world where you’re always taken care of, where fairies and jolly old elves are real and there are no consequences, only rewards. And those rewards often come in the form of chocolate.

The loss of anything is always painful, but the loss of an entire world can be impossible to get over. We are tempted to long for that world. Sometimes it’s where we leapt from bed on cold winter mornings and made a made dash to the living room to check under the tree, or a mad dash to the yard to hunt for colored eggs or chocolate leporids, or just rolled over and checked our nightstand. Sometimes it’s where we never had to lock our doors or we trusted strangers. The former world was imaginary and probably, so was the latter.

This longing probably contributed to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Author Conan Doyle, being taken in by a fairy discovery hoax, pictured above.

This Sunday will be the first Easter for my youngest since the revelation that the Tooth Fairy was his mom and dad. We don’t plan on a visit from the Easter Bunny. I hope he isn't planning on one either. But to sooth the way, there will be chocolate.