The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Roots cclxxxix-cccxiv

If there's one lesson I've learned from life, said the Father of Teeth disingenuously, that lesson is: if you want a job done properly, you should do it yourself. Even the Creator of the universe, that senile old bungler, once knew that much. In the beginning He did everything Himself, creating the world and the flesh and the serpent just the way He wanted them, and for quite a long time afterwards everything went just the way He anticipated. Perhaps that was the problem, said the Father of Teeth: His attention span isn't the greatest at the best of times, and after a while He simply became bored. That was when He decided to introduce automation, so He wouldn't have to worry about creating every last amoeba and flea and head-louse, to say nothing of human beings, whose fault it all was, apparently. Since the job was entirely beneath Him and the sexless angels would have had no idea what He was talking about, He came to me in the shape of a burning root canal and ordered me to get on with it. Well, said the Father of Teeth, if a job is worth doing it's worth assigning to someone who can do it, so I gritted my gums and went all the way back to the old days, when there was nothing on earth to be found except the primal ooze, which was globberng and bubbling with annoyance because the moon had been recently formed and the tides kept going in and out all the time and keeping it awake. I won't pretend, said the Father of Teeth, that the primal ooze was particularly pleased when I turned up again, since of course I was partly responsible for the moon's formation, though I never meant it to be so oversized; but that is another story altogether. I told the primal ooze that the Creator wanted a more efficient system that would mean less interference from head office and more freedom of action for the lower forms, and the primal ooze chewed it over for a while, allowed the thought to percolate and encrust and dilute and seep with disgusting leisureliness; and eventually, when I was just about ready to go back to some even older days and try to inject some alacrity into the pre-primal proto-ooze, somewhere amid the bubbling and the globbering a protein appeared, and then lots of them, and soon enough after that one particular protein began to replicate itself. It was the wrong one, of course, said the Father of Teeth, which explains all that's happened since and then some, and that's when I learned that delegation isn't everything, and if you want a job done properly you shouldn't necessarily leave it to primal ooze, especially primal ooze with a grudge. And hindsight, said the Father of Teeth, is all very well.