David

My brother David is about one and half years older than me, give or take a few days. He always seemed larger than life to me as a child, far braver and daring, not to mention wiser, than I could ever hope to be. Of course he took advantage of my state of awe, and often bullied me into doing things I didn’t really want to do (apparently even back then I was a bit of a pushover).
One of my earliest memories of David is the time he convinced me that he could painlessly remove a loose tooth, thereby speeding up the “get money from tooth-fairy” process for me. I don’t really remember the conversation leading up to the event, and god knows I was probably overly eager to get my grubby mitts on that shiny quarter, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that David had talked me into giving him a cut of the tooth-fairy’s payoff. However the planning stages were accomplished, I have a crystal-clear memory of the attempted tooth extraction itself. We went downstairs, dental floss stealthily concealed in David’s pants pocket. He carefully tied one end around the loose tooth (one of my top front teeth) and after stretching what seemed like an eternity of floss out of the container, he attached to other end to the handle of the playroom door. What happened next has the power to make me cringe even now, nearly 27 years later. The draft of air created by the closing door wafted across my ankles. The force of that slam pulled me to my knees, and I hit my nose on the ground, good and hard. Needless to say, the tooth didn’t come out, at least not that day. I don’t remember getting into trouble over the whole affair, although as I’m pretty sure that my screams could be heard in the next solar system, my mother must have found out...
I have long since learned to take any pearls of wisdom from David with a grain of salt. Perhaps in the end it was merely a case of divine retribution. My mother tells me that I kicked out one of his front teeth when I was about three years old. Sadly, I don’t remember that stellar moment…
The picture I've included here is David, age six, criminal master mind of the "fleece the tooth fairy" scam.