How I Lost My Baby Teeth

See that adorable little girl on the tricycle? Looking so trusting and innocent? She is the spitting image of me at five years old, except I had buck teeth and was skinnier. I was trusting and very innocent though, which made me comic fodder for the older, bigger kids in the neighborhood.

My parent's house was situated on the side of a very steep hill. My father, being a bit of a hothead, could never seem to maneuver up that darned hill during the frequent snow storms in our area. My mother loved to pass his car, stuck in a ditch, as she slowly trundled her old car, which we called, the 'painted garbage can' past his fresh off the lot Oldsmobile, with the three of us kids in the back, hanging onto our seats for dear life.

My baby brother was perched in one of those 'safety seats' which was hung over the front seat back. He helped my mother steer by using the plastic wheel mounted onto the razor sharp, metal shank in the front of his little baby seat.

Anyway, in the Summer, when the older kids were off from school, they enjoyed teaching me the finer things in neighborhood fun. Because I believed every word anyone told me, I must have been a hoot. When everyone else at five years old was riding two wheelers with training wheels, I was still riding a baby tricycle. Of course, being politically correct they never teased me about this...

Whoops, wrong millennium. They never stopped teasing me about it. One day they had me convinced that I could ride my tricycle down the steep hill just like they did on their fancy two-wheelers. All I had to do was back peddle when I wanted to stop. Wanting desperately to fit in with the big kids I gullibly accepted the challenge. It was my chance to prove I was not the scaredy-cat everyone knew I was.

Scared of the dark. Scared of bugs. Scared of snakes. Scared of grown-ups I didn't know. Scared of thunderstorms. You name it. I was afraid of it. In those days, however, you were not allowed to 'express your feelings'. Good grief, it was still the fifties. Expressing your feelings could get you spanked. "You want to cry? I'll give you something to cry about."

The neighborhood kids were not totally without mercy to me. After they got me sitting on my little red tricycle on the road next to our driveway they gave me a push to get me started down that steep, gravel covered hill. Then they watched, and waited, snickering at the flight of the dummy. They may have been eating popcorn. I'm not certain.

I have no idea how fast my little trike was going. I had stopped peddling before it had even gotten past our driveway and the hard plastic peddles were flying around so fast they were beating my skinny, little shins to shreds. Fortunately, or not, there was a little hillock about a quarter of a mile down from my house, which I took at thirty miles an hour. It stopped my forward trajectory- suddenly.

It also gave me road rash up and down my arms and legs, bloodied my nose and took my two baby front teeth, leaving me with a fat lip and a bit tongue. My older sister had to stop laughing long enough to see what kind of damage their trick had wrought, so she could fabricate a tale to my mother about how she had tried to talk me out of the stunt.

She helped me limp back up the hill and delivered me, with my two baby teeth, to my mother, who was a nurse and didn't put up with pretend injuries. After checking for broken bones and finding none that required immediate medical care, she gave me a spanking for doing a foolish stunt to get attention. She also bathed me in mercurochrome solution. Now the neighborhood kids had a new name for me, 'The Toothless Orange Kid'.