I never really believed there was such a thing as an actual Tooth Fairy - the idea demanded a level of credulity too great for even the seven-year-old mind. There was talk around school as my classmates began to lose baby teeth: your Dad (or Mom if he wasn't available for some reason), would sneak into your room while you were sleeping and leave money in place of the tooth, which you must be sure to put under your pillow. He'd probably wake you up, but you were supposed to pretend to be asleep. I recognized the story at the time for what it was, a cultural tradition full of shared pretense and good humor, passed down with a nod and a wink from one generation to another.

I was thus well-prepared as one of my front teeth began to come loose. Not wishing to reject the traditions of my society - indeed, relishing the things I could buy with the money I was sure to get - I carefully placed the thing under my pillow, and soon enough fell asleep.

I awakened the next morning to find no money under my pillow. The tooth still rested there, where I had placed it. I stumbled into the kitchen with the tooth in the palm of my hand and there was my Dad, enjoying one of his curious breakfasts. I was a bit diffident, thinking perhaps my friends had deceived me, or that this was not the tradition of our family, just everyone else's. I was reluctant to demand to know where was my money lest I shame this wonderful man who was otherwise a source of constant delight. I set the tooth carefully beside my place at the table, got my cereal, and sat down.

Dad studiously ignored me for a moment, then seemed to notice me for the first time. A stern look flickered over his face. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a dollar, which he extended across the table toward me. "Here," he said, "This is yours. I'm afraid the Tooth Fairy failed in her duties last night, and I had to track her down, and beat this out of her."

Dad never did talk to me or my brother and sister as if we were children. His discourse everywhere and with every audience was always the same. He talked to us in the same terms, using the same words, as he used with the learned colleagues in his mysterious job at the university. He didn't seem to much care whether we understood what he said, or whether we addressed him in similar adult language, but we all found ourselves aping his style from an early age.

"I don't understand," I said. "Isn't the Tooth Fairy supposed to sneak in at night and trade money for your tooth?"

"Well, yes, she is," he answered, "but something you have to know about the Tooth Fairy is that she's a drunk."

"How could the Tooth Fairy be a drunk?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm sure she has some excuse," he answered. "She has problems like everyone, and maybe they cause her to drink too much. But when it comes down to it I suspect she just likes beer. Anyway, she drinks, and lately she's been drinking when she should be doing her job. It's an international scandal - everyone complains about it. Congressman Grimm's Subcommittee on Fairy Tales and Children's Literature is looking into it.

"When she didn't show up last night, I knew what had happened: she was down at Bobby's Broadway Bar, spending all that tooth money on beer after beer . . . and I decided it was time to do something about it. Other people might let their children be deprived of their rightful wealth, but not mine! So I went down there and sure enough, there she was, three sheets to the wind. She didn't want to give me the money, but after I slapped her around a bit and threatened to call the cops, she finally gave in."

Bobby's Broadway Bar really was a place, although by the time I was grown it had ceased to exist. It was one of those dives down on Vine Street before the Civic Center consumed the center of town, with a police car permanently parked out front, ready to collect the perpetrators of the nightly brawl. For us it developed a unique significance as our childhood mythology unfolded, becoming a mysterious and exotic place where notables of the family mythology hung out when they should have been engaged in the serious business of fulfilling childhood fantasies. But this was the first I'd ever heard of it.

I don't know if my Dad just made up the story on the spot to obfuscate his own dereliction of duty, or if he had been crafting this story for some time. Every encounter with him always had a quality of spontaneity, but everyone around him knew he had a rich inner life. Sometimes I think his real business in life was creating a personal mythology and drawing others into it, just for sport. Much of it had an extemporaneous quality, and sometimes I think he was just glibly spewing fantastic ideas to see where they led. But at seven I was too young to think of such things, and I was tickled. I started giggling, he smiled, and that was the end of it.

Every family is of course part of the larger culture, but it also has its own particular traditions, shared experiences that forge the identity of the clan. Most I suppose involve Christmas with the grandparents or Saturdays at the beach, or something of the like. We had those experiences too, but they had little to do with our family identity. Instead, the experiences that formed our sense of identity involved the evolutionary elaboration of a shared mythology that was more than a bit mad and always entertaining. My Dad's sister, once I was grown, remarked to me that the problem for me and my siblings was that we had grown up inside a Marx Brothers movie. It fit, but I had trouble seeing why it was a problem. Aunt Sally never did have much of a sense of humor.

I learned soon enough not to voice the family culture to my playmates. Mostly the family mythology brought incomprehension, but sometimes - particularly when some adult got into the act - I found myself confronted with shock, or even hostility. The reaction seemed to be related to the salience of the particular icon in the culture at large. Someone might find the idea of the Tooth Fairy as a drunk curious or even mildly amusing, but the notion that she spent most of her evenings carousing with Santa Claus was clearly, to the minds of other children and their parents, an aberration of some seriousness. I guess you had to be there to get the joke.

After a few adventures with uncomprehending or hostile playmates and their parents, I ceased to share the family mythos with outsiders. Dad didn't seem to care one way or the other: he floated these aberrations in the family culture to accomplish whatever purpose he had in mind at the moment, and where they went after that was of little interest to him. Aunt Sally had a comment on that too: "You'd think a man with children would care at least a little what people think. But your Dad never has cared for anyone's thoughts but his own, not even when it cost him."

Maybe Aunt Sally was right, but after many years of thought I have come to a different conclusion. Dad was otherwise a realist in just about everything, sometimes rational to the point of self-immolation. For him, I think, myths were too important to be treated as real. He didn't think it appropriate to muddy the facts, and thought to do so was a lie. But myths could be altered at will, giving you an opportunity to create an escape from the unrelieved bleakness of reality.

I guess that explains the family take on Santa Claus. Mom was from a fairly conventional family, full of Christmas good cheer every year, ready to bamboozle her children into believing in the jolly old elf. Dad on the other hand had grown up in a Fundamentalist household where any secularization of the True Faith was anathematized as heretical, and belief in Santa qualified as one of the worst examples of secular misappropriation of Christian symbolism. Dad had long-since abandoned his childhood faith, becoming a Methodist, but having never believed in Santa, he saw no reason why his children should either. At least not the Santa presented by the popular culture. Dad won out for no reason other than his refusal to support Mom - or anyone else - when they fostered the conventional Santa myth. She wanted to act as if Santa really existed: Dad insisted Santa was just one of those fictional creatures, like the Tooth Fairy, who are fair game for invention.

I believed in Santa Claus very briefly, until Dad disabused me of the notion. It began with Santa's curious habit of coming down the chimney: when I mentioned this to Dad, he snorted. "How could anyone do that?" He demanded. "Come down the chimney? Have you ever seen a picture of Santa? As fat as he is, if he tried to come down our chimney, he'd get stuck. Then we'd have to call the Fire Department, and if he was very lucky he'd get rescued before he roasted to death. And what about people with no chimney? Does he come through that little hose in the heat pump unit?

"No, son," he went on, "Santa doesn't come down the chimney. He comes through a hole in my pocket."

This seemed as unlikely - perhaps even less likely - as Santa coming down the chimney. After all, narrow as it might be, a chimney is considerably bigger than a pocket. But of course, a challenge to one of Dad's stories was just an opportunity to widen the myth. When I mentioned my misgivings, he stared at me for a long moment, then slowly turned his pocket inside-out. "See?" he said. "There's no money there. Santa comes through the hole in my pocket and takes my money. Then he goes down to Bobby's Broadway Bar."

Now I got it. "And drinks with the Tooth Fairy!" I shrieked, delighted to be able to participate in the family madness.

"Exactly," he answered. "But before he goes, he leaves a big pile of useless junk under the tree, some of which takes hours to assemble." Then with a sigh he said, "You know, Santa is not a nice man at all."

Just once as a child I told that story to a friend. I was dumb enough to do it in front of my third-grade teacher, who promptly took me aside and cautioned me in the strongest terms to keep such ideas to myself. When I told her my Dad had told me the story, she just shook her head. "Not everyone has parents like yours," she said. I don't think she meant it as a compliment - my third-grade teacher, like Aunt Sally, had no sense of humor.

The curious thing is that what scandalizes small children and the adults who serve them may delight the adult mind, unfettered by the need to maintain cultural standards of childhood belief. I next told that story to a group of college friends, over beers a few days before the beginning of Christmas break. They were thunderstruck. "Your old man told you that?" One of them demanded. "Come on, now, tell the truth."

"It's true," I asserted. Then I related the tale of the Tooth Fairy. They sat in silence for a while, then one of them said the one word, "Cool." Then silence for a while longer, and the laughter began, at first as a series of giggles, then loud guffaws. When the laughter ended, they began to tell stories, with laughter and not a little sadness, of how they had been disabused of the existence of Santa Claus. And I realized that Dad had presented us with a gift most children are never given, entry into a world of adult humor that somehow enriched rather than restricted childhood - and avoided the greatest common betrayal most American children experience.