The lost tooth and coward assailant the lost years

He would live the rest of his life without a tooth, lost in an act of childhood violence.
Later in life he would learn who the assailant was, but long after they were no longer the children.
There was violence to face however and there would be violence in the future from the same assailant.  All part of the lost years.
His mothers body was not cold in the grave when this happened.  It was at a children's school and all the players were children.  10 or 11 years of age.  The coward assailant was no more than that, the victim the same.
It took place in a bathroom.  He did not yet wear glasses although very soon he would need thick reading glasses.  Somehow he found himself bent over, his back to the room.  Years later an adult would learn the name of the assailant.  By the time he learned his name, the relationship would have changed from one of two children who fought (well one was a bully, the other one wasn't really involved in the world enough to fight and didn't understand the reasons for the bully to have singled him out and even the adult would never be clear on this) to two adults.  One who knew the other's secret and wondered why the other never saw fit to appologize or acknowledge the terrible wrong done in youth.  But in truth the event that was to be so traumatic and so transforative that was about to happen, would also ultimately give the thin reed of a child an inner strength which would be a bar as light as a memory and and as strong as iron when he was forced to face the world years later and would perhaps be the source of the most transformative moment of his young life, but that was far, far in the future.
For now without even knowing he had been pushed he was slammed into a corner wall, one of his two buck front teeth, lying on the floor in a thick saliva-blood.  Him looking at it numbly, wondering what had happened.  The coward assailant vanishing, though not completely innocently.
The rest of the adventure was something of a blur.  An older person would know to put the tooth in milk, or if not available water, but the child and those around him knew nothing, not even the adults and the toothless child held the tooth dying in his hand while he waited in the principle office and then his father was there, having come from work.   Only an adult years later would wonder what the father had heard on the phone, what he had felt, then he was at the dentist's office who took the tooth and forced it back into place where it would, for a time rot, but what would actually happen involved much more time and is farther off.
next-a strange new place