Asheville, N. C., Feb. 10,1887.
|MY DEAR HENRY: Your last issue of the _Retina_, your new thought
vehicle, published at New Belony, this state, was received yesterday. I
like this number, I think, better than I did the first. While the news
in it seems fresher, the editorial assertions are not so fresh. You do
not state that you "have come to stay" this week, but I infer that you
occupy the same position you did last week with inference to that.
I was more especially interested in your piece about how to rear
children and the care of parents. I read it to your mother last night
while she was setting her bread. Nothing tickles me very often at my
time of life, and when I laugh a loud peal of laughter at anything
nowadays it's got to be a pretty blamed good thing, I can tell you that.
But your piece about bringing up children made me laugh real hard. I
enjoy a piece like that from the pen of a juicy young brain like yours.
It almost made me young again to read the words of my journalistic
gosling son.
You also say that "teething is the most trying time for parents." Do you
mean that parents are more fretful when they are teething than any other
time? Your mother and me reckoned that you must mean that. If so, it
shows your great research. How a mere child hardly out of knee-panties,
a young shoot like you, who was never a parent for a moment in his life,
can enter into and understand the woes that beset parents is more than
I can understand. If you had been through what I have while teething I
could see how you might understand and write about it, but at present
I do not see through it. The first teeth I cut as a parent made me very
restless. I was sick two years ago with a new disease that was just out
and the doctor gave me something for it that made my teeth fall like the
leaves of autumn. In six weeks after I began to convalesce my mouth was
perfectly bald-headed. For days I didn't bite into a Ben Davis apple
that I didn't leave a fang into it.
Well, after that I saw an advertisement in the _Rural Rustler_--a paper
I used to take then--of a place where you could get a set of teeth for
$6.
I didn't want to buy a high-priced and gaudy set of teeth at the tail
end of such a life as I had led, and I knew that teeth, no matter how
expensive they might be, would be of little avail to coming generations,
so I went over to the place named in the paper and got an impression of
my mouth taken.
There is really nothing in this life that will take the stiff-necked
pride out of a man like viewing a plaster cast of his tottering mouth.
The dentist fed me with a large ladle full of putty or plaster of paris,
I reckon, and told me to hold it in my mouth till it set.
I don't remember a time in all my life when the earth and transitory
things ever looked so undesirable and so trifling as they did while I
sat there in that big red barber-chair with my mouth full of cold putty.
I felt just as a man might when he is being taxidermied.
After awhile the dentist took out the cast. It was a cloudy day and so
it didn't look much like me after all. If it had I would have sent
you one. After I'd set again two or three times, we got a pretty fair
likeness, he said, and I went home, having paid $6 and left my address.
Three weeks after that a small boy came with my new teeth.
They were nice, white, shiny teeth, and did not look very ghastly after
I had become used to them. I wished at first that the gums had been a
duller red and that the teeth had not looked so new. I put them in my
mouth, but they felt cold and distant. I took them out and warmed them
in the sunlight. People going by no doubt thought that I did it to show
that I was able to have new teeth, but that was not the case.
I wore them all that forenoon while I butchered. There were times
during the forenoon when I wanted to take them out, but when a man is
butchering he hates to take his teeth out just because they hurt.
Neighbors told me that after my mouth got hardened on the inside it
would feel better.
But, oh, how it relieved me at night to take those teeth out and put
them on the top of a cool bureau, where the wind could blow through
their whiskers! How I hated to resume them in the morning and start
in on another long day, when the roof of my mouth felt like a big, red
bunion and my gums like a pale red stone-bruise.
A year ago, Henry, about two-thirty in the afternoon I think it was, I
left that set of teeth in the rare flank of a barbecue I was to in our
town.
Since then I have not been so pretty, perhaps, but I have no more
unicorns on the rafters of my mouth and my note is just as good at
thirty days as ever it was.
You are right, Henry, when you go on to state in your paper that
teething is the most trying time for parents.
Ta, ta, as the feller says.
Your father.