That’s not a Cocoa Puff dummy!!!

So I’m sure there are lots of really amazing stories about how people lost their teeth, and probably even great stories about how people lost their teeth while losing their teeth, but this is my story about that and while I’m sure there are other extremely awesome examples this is mine and I remember it very vividly. In fact, I can’t recall any other tooth I’ve lost except for this one, at least not right now, and I think the time I would most likely remember such a  thing is while I’m actually thinking about losing my teeth.

So I’m sitting at our kitchen table one morning, and I feel like it was a weekend morning, or at least a morning in which we didn’t have anything going on. I was eating breakfast and I think it was kind of late in the day for breakfast. So I’m sitting there eating a bowl of amazing Cocoa Puffs. My family’s number one breakfast meal without a doubt was cereal. It’s funny because while I recall not being outstandingly wealthy while growing up I do recall that we had a smorgasbord of high end breakfast cereal options. We didn’t have any eggs or bacon or sausage, but we had copious cereal options and cinnamon sugar toast, the breakfast of white trash champions.

My kids get sausage links almost every morning and I’m like, what the hell, this is messed up, gonna spoil these kids giving them sausage links every single morning. Here’s the other thing that was confusing to me, we didn’t have that generic shit either, I mean, we might’ve had some here and there (there was some generic version of a cereal or two in which we decided the generic version actually tasted better), but we had the full on real deal shit, I’m talking pure Trix, Lucky Charms, Cap’n Crunch, Crunch Berries, Honey Comb, Golden Grahams, Apple Jacks, Sugar Smacks (seriously they were called sugar smacks, try getting away with that these days), Super Sugar Crisp (the Sugar Crisp folks were definitely pissed off at the Sugar Smacks folks and they were like, I don’t know, just add the word Super, which today would make things worse, but then…genius), Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Count Chocula, S’mores Crunch (this one is more rare I know, but it was fantastic) and, occasionally, Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles (the licensing costs of the fucking Flintstones drove the price of that grade A shit up I think and so it wasn’t always on the menu).

When I say we had it, I mean we also had all of it, at once, we didn’t just have one or two boxes to choose from we had like 8 or 10 at a time to pick from. To this day I’m not sure why that was, we were not chintzy on cereal, maybe there were excessive coupons for premium cereal, I don’t know, but I can’t complain about the cereal choices of my childhood. I was wearing Payless shoes but I was eating uncut high premium breakfast cereal.

As noted, one of those top brands was Cocoa Puffs and on this particular morning I was chowing down on an overflowing bowl of Cocoa Puffs. That shit turned your milk into chocolate milk, I wasn’t much of a “drink the milk after you’re done eating the cereal” type of dude, something about that just made me gag a little. Doesn’t make much sense why, I mean you just ate an entire bowl of cereal that was sitting in that milk, but something about it made it unappetizing to me, I mean the milk has served it’s purpose in giving the cereal a wonderful moisture and bed to lay in while getting eaten, it’s served it’s purpose, it’s time to let it go. This was true almost all of the time, unless the milk was serving as the custodian for Cocoa Puffs and the milk had turned to chocolate milk. In that occassion I would make an exception and drink that milk down when the eating was over.

This particular incident, however, happened before I had gotten to that point. So I must’ve been six or seven years old while I was chomping down on this heaping bowl by myself at the kitchen table, though I recall my Mom being close by, when all of a sudden I came across what I assumed must’ve been a really stale Cocoa Puff. You know how sometimes when you’re eating something and all of a sudden you bite into something really hard, like hard as a rock and you think to yourself, well, there’s a bunch of stuff that might be, but I’d almost rather not know which one it is, and so you just gingerly chew a little more and then swallow the contents of your mouth down assuming your stomach will do what it needs to do to take care of that. I’m sitting here realizing that what I just explained may only be relevant to me. I might be the only weirdo that thinks that way. Don’t get me wrong either, if I’m in a restaurant and there is a foreign crunch in my food I’ll fish that shit out to see if I have a law suit. In this instance I think I assumed that’s an extra hard Puff. So I swallowed it down and didn’t think much more about it. That is until I realized I had a tooth missing, and then the devastation kicked in. I also recall that I didn’t even really have a tooth loose.  How in thee hell was the tooth fairy going to know I had lost a tooth if I lost the tooth?!?!?! Also, what was I possibly going to put under my pillow!?!?!? I was reassured that the Tooth Fairy (is that a proper name that requires capitalization) would know by my Mom, the liar that she was. So instead of a tooth I think we put a note, it probably said something like, “Sorry Tooth Fairy, I ate my tooth by accident. Cocoa Puffs, you know. Please give me money still.” Sure enough the Tooth Fairy knew and dropped me a shiny quarter I’m sure, it might’ve even been two quarters given the harrowing circumstances.

So this week’s engrained recollection was again inspired by current life activities as my oldest son has a tooth that’s so loose I can’t believe it’s still in his head. He came to me starting to break down about it and how it hurt him, I don’t think that it hurt him so much as it is something that is “out of order” and as a result not right in his world (I wish he felt the same way about the order required related to his Legos). He got to asking me what would happen if his tooth came out while he was sleeping and he was wondering what would result if it got lost. That triggered my Cocoa Puff recollection and so I told him this story, to which my daughter, whom was in the room and has copious amounts of experience in the tooth losing department, said, “Dad, we know, you thought it was a hard Cocoa Puff, you’ve told this story 100 times.”, which I think is hilarious because it’s the first time one of the kids has said something like that to me and so clearly won’t be the last. It also continues to exemplify the fact that I’m aging hard. I feel sorry for the poor suckers that have to care for me in my old age. There’s gonna be a lot of repeated inappropriate jokes being batted around.

So what the hell? As I’ve told myself I would explore these things I wonder why I remember this firework memory so vividly? I’m sure it has something to do with the rush of disappointment that must have flooded my brain with some sort of adrenaline chemicals, but also, and this is not entirely trying to suggest some sort of crazy mystical thing, maybe it’s just providing me with the experiences and information I need to be empathetic and understanding of my kids. I think I’ve probably said this over and over again but just in different ways, but maybe these things are there and we just have to know to pay attention to them and provide them respect. It’s that second part that’s tough. I could say, suck it up Junior, it’s just a tooth falling out of your head, it’s not worth crying about or thinking that it’s going to hurt, which would be easy, and for all intents and purposes, true. I guess I need to take a step back and think about what it was that shocked that firework memory into my brain and approach it from there, such that I understand that it was scary and weird and the concern related to losing your lost tooth is a real one. Maybe the outcome is roughly the same, but maybe having my kids understand that I understand will be helpful and maybe drawing more directly on that understanding will be helpful in creating a more well rounded human being. I don’t know for sure and I guess we’ll only really know if we all check back in here in about 20 something years and see where my kid is headed. It’s also a tough choice between coddling and having him man up against this tooth loss, while also knowing that one of your kids would rip the tooth out with any device she could find and the other kid would try to glue it back in. I did tell him it was just a tooth and might hurt for a second but then it goes away, then we gave him the business about it and my daughter was saying all sorts of gruesome things like, “Dude, I can totally see your other tooth growing in beneath it, oh yuck, that’s amazing.” So we are ensuring that he will be messed up in the head a bit. Also, do they still make Cocoa Puffs? I need a box of those things for this kid to eat. Cut to shot of my Mom as a child eating Cocoa Puffs with a surprised look on her face.