My grandson, Ari, is in love with a
bear. He’s two. The bear’s been his friend since birth and the two are
inseparable.
He sleeps with Bear, he eats with Bear,
when he bathes, Bear is there beside the tub, waiting patiently.
It’s hard to say how long the
relationship will last. A dark truth of parenthood (and grandparenthood) is
this: children grow up. Stuffed bears do not. And as anyone who’s ever heard the
song, “Puff the Magic Dragon” already knows, little boys move on to other toys and
stuffed friends are left behind.
But the transient nature of the
relationship in no way diminishes the love there. Neither does the fact one of
the participants is still wearing diapers and the other is made of cotton and
polyester.
It’s real.
I know this for a fact. Because the
best friend I ever had was made of cotton. He was a dog. Or, to grant him
proper noun status, he was “Doggie.” I don’t remember when I got him, but
Doggie is there in my earliest, gauzy memories.
Doggie was my confidante, my friend,
my co-conspirator, my ally when there were no other allies. He shared my joys
and tears, never judging, never unengaged.
His long, flappy ears were fuzzy on
one side and red flannel on the other. His ice blue eyes were deep marbles of
understanding that seemed to grasp my myriad preschool miseries better than anyone else in my life at
the time. He didn’t mind if I occasionally chewed on his plastic nose as I fell
asleep.
His wind-up music box, cleverly
secreted away in his stomach, lulled me to the land of dreams every night.
When my guinea pig died, Doggie
didn’t say, “He’s only a rodent.” He knew my heart was breaking and offered
nothing but unconditional support.
I traded Doggie away once. I must
have been six or seven; I don’t remember exactly. Chuck, the kid who lived next
door, had found a wounded baby robin. Chuck was a jerk; he and a couple other
kids were tossing the bird back and forth, laughing, trying to get it to fly.
The bird wasn’t going to survive the
experiment. So I offered to trade Doggie for the wounded bird. In my kid mind,
I hadn’t quite figured out that trading something meant it would be gone from
my life from that moment onward.
But I understood that night, when it
was time for bed. My mom tucked me in, as usual. I snuggled under the covers,
as usual. But something was missing. I couldn’t sleep.
I missed my friend.
An hour or two later, my folks
checked in on me, as parents do. I was still awake, sobbing quietly. Over a
stuffed dog.
My old man, to his eternal credit,
went next door and offered Chuck five bucks for Doggie’s return. Five bucks was
a lot of money back then.
I never again considered trading
Doggie away. Ever. He stayed with me through my childhood, though I’ll admit he
was eventually relegated less esteemed status and moved from my pillow to the
foot of the bed. In time, he was tossed into a toy box with the other flotsam
and jetsam of early childhood.
But somehow, as childhood gave way to
my teen years, as the GI Joes and Tonka trucks slowly vanished from my life,
Doggie remained. He moved with me into my first apartment, a Detroit hovel in
which a killer pit bull would have made a more practical pet.
He followed me to several other apartments.
A dozen different girlfriends thought it was “cute” that I still had my special
stuffed childhood toy. I never thought of him as cute. Doggie, even after all
those years, was not a toy; he remained my friend.
My buddies teased me about it from
time to time. I didn’t care. I was one of the lucky few who never allocated peer
pressure more weight than it deserves (which, generally, is none).
I finally lost Doggie when I lost my
first wife. He was in a box in a closet somewhere and when I left (under a hail
of automatic weapons fire) I forgot to take him with me. By the time I
remembered, my ex had moved twice and at some point thrown him away.
It broke my heart to think of him
moldering away in a landfill. But nothing lasts forever. Which, as my grandson
could tell us, is the reason we need friends like Doggie and Bear in the first
place.
(616) 745-9530
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