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Memorial Day was going just beautifully until Cool Hand Luke stopped a short-hop baseball with his mouth.
I was up to bat and serenading him at the time. “Dead Thing, you make my heart sing. You make everything . . . stinky. Dead Thing.”
The dead thing in my song was a rotting groundhog carcass 15 feet behind home plate that the dogs must have dragged in. It was stinking up our yard pretty bad, and nobody – least of all me – was about to get close enough to move it.
Cool Hand Luke was smiling when he took the throw from the catcher. It short-hopped and broke off an upper front tooth an eighth-inch below the gums.
“I broke my tooth!” he yelled, spitting blood and holding the broken-off tooth like a little white rock in his outstretched hand.
I felt awful, but not as awful as Luke’s dad, who was playing first base. He threw down his glove and loped toward his son with a look on his face that said, “Please tell me that what I heard just happen, didn’t happen.”
But it had, and no amount of feeling bad by me or him or Luke or anybody else was going to make it unhappen.
“Is this the end of the game?” asked JimBob, who probably didn’t mean to be insensitive but whose inflection implied that something as small as a tooth shouldn’t interrupt one heck of a good ballgame.
Our side was winning, 16-9.
“The game’s over,” I said, my eyes on Luke as he and his dad walked back toward our house. I walked back, too, hanging my head. The ballgame was definitely over.
The kid was stoic. He never shed a tear. I understood perfectly, because I was a 12-year-old boy once, and because I’ve got a 12-year-old son.
A 12-year-old boy can be as tough as nails. Although he may still do childish things, he is physically on the verge of manhood. It’s a time of self-testing, of seeing how you measure up. I remember when Kenny Stackpole and I – the best of friends – used to trade shoulder punches in seventh grade until neither one of us could move our arms.
Seventh grade for boys is a time when pain tolerance and stupidity can both go off the charts.
I understood how Luke felt about his tooth, because I broke a permanent upper front tooth as a boy. I slipped off the diving board at Tomlinson Run State Park swimming pool and hit the board with my chin on the way down. I came up dazed and climbed out of the pool, wiggling the damaged tooth with my tongue and spitting blood all the way back to the concession stand, where my mother was working. She was distraught.
At our house there was general anguish among the women, especially Luke’s mother, over his broken tooth. But she didn’t cry either, which somewhat surprised her and which she attributed wholly to Luke’s stoicism. It was a different story, she recalled, when Luke broke off his sister's front tooth with a careless swing of a croquet mallet. Hurt and angry and frightened and thinking about going through the rest of her life with a broken front tooth, the girl cried like a banshee and so did her mom, I was told.
It occurred to me that there was a small measure of poetic justice in what had happened to Luke. But I didn’t say it.
Discussion immediately centered upon two questions: 1) What happened? and 2) Can the dentist put the tooth back on?
I was extremely interested in what happened because it was my son Seed who threw the ball. Had he thrown when Luke wasn’t looking? I was relieved when Luke said he simply missed the catch. The mishap therefore fell into the blameless category of “just one of those things.”
Cool Hand Luke’s broken tooth was put in a glass of milk in hopes the dentist could reattach it, which I thought unlikely. After leaving messages on the answering machines of every dentist we knew, we caught Dr. Lee Swearingen at home. He was kind enough to interrupt his Memorial Day holiday to tend a boy’s dental crisis. He told Luke reattachment was a good possibility.
The next day Luke’s regular dentist did a root canal on the tooth and bonded it back together. I had underestimated the dental adhesives industry.
Parents wish they could protect their children from disasters like broken front teeth. But then, you can’t keep them in a box, can you?