For the past forty years, dentists have been telling my daughter Susy that her wisdom teeth are crowding her less intelligent teeth and that the “wiser” ones should be extracted – or to put it more tersely – yanked out.

Until now, Susy has managed to avoid availing herself of this exciting opportunity, but now one of the choppers has thoughtlessly acquired an infection, and tomorrow, all four are scheduled to face “The Chair”. Susy will be coming home from the dentist’s office with four less teeth. (We can only hope that losing her wisdom teeth won’t affect her IQ, which until now has been quite serviceable.)

Those of us who live here at Kartar Ridge Ranch are anticipating that, temporarily, Susy’s recovery from this experience may adversely affect her job performance as Superwoman.

Susy’s job description includes the intensive caregiving of her disabled brother Matthew – his care and feeding, daily peritoneal dialysis, medications, recording his vital statistics everyday – blood pressure, pulse, oxygen, temperature, and weight – physical therapy, showers, transfers, iron injections, haircuts, transportation to medical, dental, optometry, kidney center, lab and radiology visits – and then she seasons it all with her cheerful conversation and optimistic encouragement.

In her spare time, Susy cooks, cleans, vacuums, does the laundry, puts on her boots to go outside to administer the care, feeding, and training of seven donkeys, two horses, a pony, and miscellaneous farm critters, cleans the barn, and then turns her attention to several gardens she’s been cultivating for the spring planting.

Now you must be wondering who could possibly fill in for Susy during the few minutes she will require in order to recover from her surgical persecution by the dentist. This is not an assignment that can be accommodated by normal human persons. There can only be one solution! If there was ever a job for the Tooth Fairy, this is it!

Anytime this week would be a lovely day for the Tooth Fairy to pay Susy a visit. But not to hide four quarters under her pillow – one for each tooth. Pah! No indeed. Surely, the Tooth Fairy can do better than that. She’s a fairy! She knows about fairy dust and spells and waving magic wands and stuff like that! While awaiting Susy’s return to action, our household will be under a magic spell. What could possibly go wrong?

Besides, Susy is going to need her pillow (and hopefully narcotic pain prescriptions) for getting some restful relief. It would be really tacky if a fairy is scrounging around under the pillow trying to locate the whereabouts of four wisdom teeth for her collection.

Tooth Fairy, meet the challenge! Take the helm! Shoulder the load! Brave the unknown! Take on the daily tasks normally performed by Susy, and knock the socks off your TikTok followers! You’ll go viral!

We’re counting on you, Tooth Fairy! We know you can DO it! And you’ll be able to add four more superhuman teeth to your collection! Show the stuff you’re made of! And besides, otherwise, we may have to give you a really bad review on Yelp.