“Daddy, I have one dream for this trip,” the Boy has been saying since we arrived. “I want to go shark tooth hunting.” We watched a couple of videos on how to do it, and it seemed entirely possible that the Boy could find a number of them during an hour or so of searching.
After a little hunting, we asked someone who seemed to know what he’s doing. “You just have to look for black triangles,” he explained, shaking out of a small bottle the small black fossilized teeth he’d found during the morning. “Like that one,” he continued, reaching down and plucking up a small tooth that he’d just discovered.
If it was that easy to find, we all thought it would be a simple enough matter for the Boy to discover one.
“It’s my dream to find a shark tooth,” E reiterated. Multiple times.
Soon enough, L found one. Then K found one. Then L found another. But E found nothing.
“Maybe we can come back later today and look again,” E suggested. It was, after all, not quite low tide yet.
We headed off to the historic district of Beaufort for a little lunch and exploring. We found a charming church with an old cemetery that had a few graves from Revolutionary War soldiers. E was impressed with the age of the graves, impressed with the size of the church, but still thinking about that shark tooth he still hadn’t found.
We finished up our time in Beaufort with a walk along the waterfront where marveled at the homes of the rich, large mansions that spoke of fortunes beyond our own considerations and imagination. (We got echoes of that in the evening when we watched Pride and Prejudice.)
Finally, we found a good spot for a few portraits.
Then we headed back to the beach where we’d started the morning searching for shark teeth.
The tide had risen, and the search was all the more difficult for it. Everyone searched for teeth; everyone found shark teeth. Everyone except the Boy.
It crushed him.
The whole way back to the car, he was on the verge of tears. “Everyone found a tooth! Everyone! Even L found a tooth, and she was not even interested in it until this morning!”
When we got back to the place we’re renting through AirBnB, he threw himself into the corner of the couch and fought back the tears. “It was my dream to find a shark tooth!” he whimpered. “My dream!”
Earlier in the day, in a gift shop, we’d bought a small bag of shark teeth. He bought them because they were cool; I encouraged him because I knew after that morning that finding a tooth is not a guaranteed adventure. I used this to try to reason with him: “Look, you wanted to look for shark teeth. You wanted to find a shark tooth. And you wanted to go back home with a shark tooth. You’re accomplishing two of your three desires.”
I knew it was a long shot, and he saw right through it. “But I wanted to find a tooth!” If he’d managed that one simple feat, the other two would have automatically been fulfilled. My cleverness might have soothed a younger boy, but not an eight-year-old E.
These are the silly things that happen in the course of parenting that seem both highly significant and completely trivial. His pain and frustration were highly significant: I recall wanting something so badly at that age, how I used to get my heart so set on it that if it didn’t come to fruition, I might as well have died, so bleak seemed my prospects afterward. Yet it was at the same time so trivial: he’s going home with thirty to forty shark teeth in his bag. In a few weeks or a few months at most, this will be an almost-disappeared memory. It will be a foggy memory he recalls as his own son deals with similar frustration.