Tooth

Birthday celebrated, birthday gone. Youth is so fleeting, a friend likes to chant.

As Dad picked me from our rendezvous point, he told me that something awful happened today, though with a small chuckle. Mum's tooth fell out, he told me. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about his missing tooth as well, lost in action.

I don't know why, but we always make fun of Dad and his bobbling tooth. Sometimes when I drive past him on the road, I can see him clearly in the windscreen, absentmindedly tugging at his loose tooth. It is indeed a rather comical scene. Now we have Mum to add into this comic.

Watching them lose their teeth isn't something in my idea of a joke. It means they are aging, fast. There is a certain Chinese proverb which says that when a horse grows older, the set of teeth grows as well. Ok, bad proverb to use, but I spotted the oral link.

My point is, my parents are declining and I am growing bigger and stronger. This doesn't seem right, the paradoxical situation. I watch them take lesser steps each day, and now they are losing their set of old companion, one at a time.

Is this life?

Childhood

I used to think that grown-up people chose

To have stiff backs and wrinkles around their nose,

And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,

On purpose to be grand.

Till through the banisters I watched one day
My great-aunt Etty's friend who was going away,

And how her onyx beads had come unstrung.

I saw her grope to find them as they rolled;

And then I knew that she was helplessly old,

And I was helplessly young.

Frances Cornford

The bold in the poem is my deed.