The Chip in My Front Tooth

There’s a chip in my front left tooth. It’s been there for ten years, the result of my brother’s sporadic running headbutt into my mouth while I sat and watched tv.

This is the same brother who totaled the car the night he got his license, the same brother who smoked pot behind our house assuming that the pasta our mother was cooking in the kitchen would counteract the smell of smoke wafting through the window.

His recklessness has never been met with rationale.

I’ve had the chip filled a few times, first after it happened and then a few years later. Both have fallen out while eating an apple, I think. It doesn’t really bother me and no one ever seems to notice until I point it out, so getting it filled again hasn’t seemed necessary. It reminds me of him and of growing up together.

And so as I sit in my dorm room in California, my parents in Illinois, and my brother in a house with ten others in South Africa volunteering at an elementary school, I think of my chipped tooth and how it got there. I think of my brother and his red hair and his impulsive disposition, and how such an attitude has led him into as much unsuspecting joy as it has issues with authority.

He’s maintained a charismatic innocence, one that has now carried him across the world to care for others in the way only an eighteen-year-old craving the chance to make a difference can do. And one that can get you out of chipping your sister’s tooth.