Modest

Weird teeth, weird feet, and Teeny Weenie Stories - a little Sunday something

Teeth

Something was going around about how Gen Z never cuts their hair because of traumatic haircuts, so I was looking for this picture from St. Cecilia’s Picture Day in Ames, Iowa, and more than the hair with the weird part and barrette, I realized I hadn’t learned how to smile with my mouth closed yet.

This picture was taken a few months after my dad, in a game of wildly fun roughhouse on Clark Street, drove me fast to the team’s football dentist at Iowa State, who was deeply discounted for Cyclone football coaches and their families. He carried the shards of my broken teeth in his pocket.

I wrote about it in my first novel, “Offsides,” because after all the trauma and pain that evening, I asked my dad to read me “The Ugly Duckling” before I went to bed.

Dad, the defensive secondary coach for the Cyclones, wasn’t the type to read bedtime stories, but he sighed and read “The Ugly Duckling” that night, while I kept an icepack on my mouth.

A few days later, Mom said, “You had to just rub it in, didn’t you, Lady Jane? Making him read to you ‘The Ugly Duckling’ for goodness sake. Of all the things you could have asked him to read! He felt bad enough about knocking your teeth out, you know!”

That caught me off guard, and I learned early not to “rub it in,” although that had not been my intention at the age of eight. But later, when the nerve in the tooth died, and I’d spent way too many hours with football team dentists, I changed the lyrics of “The Hands of Time,” the theme song from the film “Brian’s Song,” to “My Tooth is Dead” (it cannot live no more)….and I sang it loudly, while playing it on the piano when I was home alone, mourning my tooth, but not “rubbing it in.”

Brian’s Song is a movie about Brian Piccolo, who died of cancer while playing for the Bears, and who was a senior in college when Dad got a job at Wake Forest, so they knew each other. I loved the film starring James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, about roommates in the NFL, because it was about so much more than football.

Teeny-Weenie

Dad didn’t read us stories, but he was the type to tell us stories, and our favorite were the “Teeny-Weenie” stories. He loved telling “Teeny Weenie” stories that he broke up with cereal commercials, usually while Mom was grocery shopping at “Ames Fruit and Grocery,” and he waited with us in the car.

He’d get started on a “Teeny Weenie” story like “Teeny Weenie and the Christmas Tree,” and then, he’d yell, “And now folks, time for a station break in our story, brought to you by ‘Stomp, Crackle and Boom! Teeny Weenie’s favorite cereal! The famous Crunchy, Poppy, and Snapply cereal that bonks you on the head and fills your belly.” And he’d bonk and thump us on our heads like he was playing the drums, all while singing the commercial - STOMP, CRACKLE, BOOM, BONK, BONK, BONK, off-key before getting back to the “Teeny-Weenie” story. Teeny-Weenie was a brave girl who lived with her little brother near a big woods, and they got into all kinds of trouble, but the commercial breaks were always a major and frequent part of the stories.

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Anyway, so where am I going with this?

I’m doing “Forty Days and Forty Writes,” developed by my former neighbor and brilliant editor, Robin Rauzi. The prompt yesterday was “Figleaf” about the need to cover up, and a memory popped into my head. I can’t recommend Robin’s “Forty Days and Forty Writes” highly enough, as it really helps you generate memories you didn’t even know were lurking.

Modest

I was a modest child. I didn’t undress in front of people. I grew into an even more modest adolescent. I was too tall, too “mature” for my age, too everything, so I tried to stay a little invisible, buttoned up, and covered up.

Around nine or ten, girls who caught on to my shyness would say, “We’re all just girls, right? What’s the big deal? Get undressed here,” if we were changing into swimsuits or something at somebody’s house or at the YMCA.

This horrified me, so I’d slip off to a bathroom or a bathroom stall.

Sometimes, I’d hear, “Are you from Mars? Jupiter? Are you an alien?” if I didn’t undress in front of them, which I never did unless plenty of towels were involved.

I was at the beach one summer, and some kid said, “You know, you have weird feet.”

I studied them, and yes, they were indeed weird in my nine-year-old eyes. They were bigger feet than most girls my age - not delicate or slender like my grandmother’s feet, or small and dainty like my mom’s feet. And there they were, my big feet, right there out in the open for all to see, so I tucked a beach towel around them and wondered how to keep them covered up at the beach. Nobody needed to see my “weird” and possibly even offensive nine-year-old feet.

My grandmother, Elizabeth, loved her feet and often said, “Don’t I have pretty feet?” after a pedicure.

And she did - slender ankles, high arches, narrow feet. Compared to hers, mine were paddles, and that day at the beach, I thought, well, I might as well cover them up, too, since. I kept everything else covered.

But I saw kids running into the water, kicking and splashing.

I looked down at my feet, and I thought, this is stupid - I can’t do it. How am I supposed to be modest about my feet? I keep my mouth closed when I smile because of my chipped teeth. I get dressed and undressed in private. I’m modest about everything else, but I don’t think I can handle being modest about my feet.

If they’re weird, so be it.

And I allowed my feet to be as immodest as they pleased.