Letter from The Tooth Fairy

When our 7-year old son was born, my husband and I asked the Tooth Fairy a special favor. Instead of having her give money, we asked her to deliver small crystals or interesting stones to replace lost teeth. Since then, losing a tooth has been a much looked-forward-to tradition in our house. A few weeks ago a lovely family friend sent an unexpected envelope ‘TO THE TOOTH FAIRY’ with some gems and stones gathered over years of traveling. Today, he received the following reply:

Dear Supplier:

Please find following, your feedback rating from ToothFairy Inc. on this morning’s receipt by a child of your gem via ToothFairyExpress (because it absolutely, positively, had to get there).

We are very pleased to inform you that ToothFairy Inc. chose from your selection the little cut garnet, which, on receipt, was awarded an A+ rating. The rationale for this rating is as follows:

1. Presentation
   All crystals and stones were received by ToothFairy Inc. in excellent condition. Extra credit was awarded for the accompanying information, such as: "I found this one in a high Himalayan valley called Valley Of The Flowers" and "This is from a tiny island beach in Barbados".  Descriptions such as "gleaming gold drop" were also worthy of distinction.
2. Child Response
   The Extraction/Expectation equation states that the harder it is to extract the tooth, the higher the expectation of reward. In this case, difficulty of extraction was well above average. Parents were requested to gaze at, wriggle and comment on various stages of the tooth’s extraction, every hour, for a week. In addition, they were expected to grimace at every tasting of blood and description of how many “strings” the tooth was hanging by. The father was requested to pull the tooth out using the thread-to-door-handle method and when he chickened out (Dad, that is) there were tears. The child cried too. Upon the father trying to manually extract the tooth with large sausage-fingers, slippage and banging of the child’s mouth occurred, with more tears. Thus, expectation of reward was correspondingly high.

We are therefore pleased to inform you that your garnet well exceeded expectation. For an A+ rating there must be at least 2 positive comments. These were:

• “This is really precious! (No kidding, this one actually is).  It's beautiful!”
• “Cool! I was wondering if I’d be disappointed like last time* but I wasn’t!”

(* ToothFairy Inc. has since switched suppliers from Mum&Dad Co.)

Accordingly, we award you ‘Supplier of the Year’. We have included front row tickets to the next extraction. Please allow yourself two weeks as it will be the right eye-tooth and half-hourly inspections will be required. Please also plan to stay in the house as the parents will be assisting ToothFairy Inc. in their search for the next stone, on a tiny island beach in Barbados.

Yours faithfully,

Gem Dispatch, ToothFairy Inc.