Parting with a best friend is sometimes more than we can bear

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.

Mtaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

Sometimes, life gives us more than we can bear

Every year around this time I remember how glad I am to be alive. Even with the grim knowledge that winter is on its way, I’m happy to simply be drawing breath.

Because 39 years ago a bear almost ate me.

Believe me, when you’ve been almost eaten by a bear, every day after seems a blessing.

I was just a kid, 17 and therefore fairly bursting with the assurance of my own immortality. I was young and strong; death — or even serious injury — was a faint shadow lurking at the periphery of my awareness, something that happened to other people, those whose lives were less charmed than my own, those who had not been charged with my unique manifest destiny.

 Armed with this mindless (and baseless) confidence, I ventured into the woods. Like Robert Frost, I took the road less travelled by. In fact, in late October, 1976, the road I took was travelled not at all.

I picked up the Bruce Trail near Tobermory, Ontario and — carrying only what would fit in my battered Kelty backpack — I headed south along the trail with the intent of going as far I could go in seven days, and then hiking back.

I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time, the Bruce Trail wended it’s through nearly 900 kilometers of Canada’s most beautiful, uncompromising terrain, from north of Tobermory to the southern edge of Lake Ontario. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, but it was, make no mistake, what even hardcore backpackers think of as “the wild.” 

I had heard that during the summer months, the trail is heavily travelled by hikers and nature lovers of all stripes, but in October, I was pretty much it.

On my fourth day out as the sun was setting, I made camp. I was an experienced hiker and knew enough to hang my backpack from a tree branch to keep the critters away from my food and clean underwear. (I’m kidding; I was 17; I didn’t own any clean underwear.)

But after pegging out my tiny “bug” tent, I hung my pack from a nearby branch anyway. I built a small campfire and boiled up more Cup-a-Soup. These were the days before every grocery carried a full line of freeze-dried, gourmet “camping food.” Cup-a-Soup came in small, lightweight envelopes and could be reconstituted with water straight out of Nottawasaga Bay, as long as you boiled it first. Sure, it tasted like something that had been sweat off the back of a dyspeptic gorilla, but it was edible and easy to carry.

Maybe it was the smell of the soup cooking that attracted the bears, a mama and at least two cubs; I’ll never know for sure.

After washing up, I snuggled into my goose down mummy bag, zipped closed the tent and curled up with my machete. I had never used the machete for anything but cutting firewood, but having it beside me was somehow comforting. I dozed. 

The snuffling sound woke me. Outside, a full moon bathed the forest in a flaxen haze. Shadows traversed the semi-transparent, orange nylon surface of my tent. One of those shadows was big. Real big.

My machete suddenly felt about as formidable as a moist Q-tip.

Other shadows passed, smaller than the first, though still big enough to intimidate by the light of this Hunter’s Moon.

The shadows were accompanied by a good deal of snuffling, growling and noises that were, to my city-bred ears, all but unidentifiable. I did, however, recognize the sound of my backpack being torn from the tree limb and shredded like so much wet newspaper.

Bears, it turns out, can climb trees.

I considered exiting the tent, machete in hand with the intent of making a lot of noise and scaring the bears away from my small store of foodstuffs. Then I thought about how nice it would be to live until my 18th birthday and huddled further into my bag instead. I was not, I decided, going to offer myself as the main course to the bear’s Cup-a-Soup appetizer.

An hour or so later, having eaten my Cup-a-Soup, envelopes and all, the Three Bears padded back into the forest. It was at least another hour before I screwed up my courage to the point I dared leave the tent.

My pack lay in tatters; even the aluminum frame had been bent until it was virtually useless. My soup, the little bit of jerky and the crackers I had been carrying were now inside the bears. I, thankfully, was not.

I was camped between Wiarton and Owen Sound, a day’s hike in either direction. I had no food. And unlike the present, back then I did not have large fat reserves to call upon in times of famine.

Eventually, I hobbled into Owen Sound, the broken remains of my pack, sleeping bag and tent bungeed together like something one might find tied to the end of a hobo’s stick.

But then, like now, I was simply glad to be alive.

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

It is from bears like this that legends are made

The bear roaming through town this past Sunday weighed well over 500 pounds, was followed by three cubs, and viciously attacked at least one mail carrier and two toy poodles before being brought down by a sniper's bullet. She left a path of destruction not unlike what one might expect from a small tornado. It was chaos! Madness! Panic in the streets!

That's not true, of course. The bear clocked in at about 170 pounds, didn't attack anybody, had no cubs and was a he, not a she. Moreover, the poor, frightened thing beat cheeks out of town at the first opportunity, leaving no path of destruction other than the occasional pyramid of bear scat.

But that doesn't matter; my far superior (and highly inaccurate) story will be the one told around dinner tables and campfires 10, 20, however-many years from now. In many cases the narrator — who may never have seen a bear in his life outside a zoo — will insert himself into the story, generally in a role far more heroic than any he ever played in real life.

It is from such mundane events as a wayward bear that legends are born. Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, the Lincoln Death Train; all probably had their origins in some long-ago, real-life occurrence. All were stories told and re-told, gaining weight with each telling, gathering embellishments the way a grain of sand gathers nacre inside an oyster shell until, in the fullness of time, a pearl is born.

The first paragraph of this column is my attempt to get that pearl started with regard to the bear story. 

Earlier this week I read the accurate, honest account of the bear's trek through town on the newspaper's website and Facebook pages. I related the tale to Sweet Annie, more or less factually, increasing the bear's weight by only 20 or 30 pounds and allowing him to chase after a couple kids who unexpectedly walked out of a restaurant and surprised the critter. Not much of an embellishment, but a start.

When I share the story with my daughter during her visit next week, the bear will have grown larger still, more vicious, and will have chased a hapless state trooper up an oak tree; maybe one of the oaks in my back yard. I may snag a couple torn shreds of blue fabric in one of the lower branches, just to add some semblance of credibility to the tale.

Even with the planted physical evidence, my daughter — who knows me too well — may not believe me. But my grandson, Edison, will. And someday he'll tell the story of the killer bear to his kids, who will tell it to their kids and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-doo right on down the line.

One-hundred years from now, that lost, frightened bear will be transformed into a 100-foot tall giant whose rein of terror lasted decades and encompassed half the state. He'll have gained a name, one the primitive, provincial yokels of the time (us) uttered only in whispers, their voices tremulous with awe and fear. Caesar, maybe. Or Xerxes. Something to inspire terror in kids as they gather ‘round the fire cooking s'mores. 

And since no legend is complete without a hero, someone to vanquish the unvanquishable foe, and since I'm kind of getting in on the ground floor of this particular legend, I humbly nominate myself for the role. OK, OK, in real life I slept through the entire incident.

Who cares? You think there's really a Lincoln Death Train? You think Paul Bunyan actually had a blue ox named Babe? Not a chance, buddy.

So what's so hard to believe about Mighty Mike the Bear Slayer? It's got a ring, yeah? And who's to say I couldn't wrestle a giant bear bare-handed? (Well, anyone with a modicum of common sense, but that's not how these things work.)

I just wish I could be around 100 years from now to hear of my exploits.

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com

(616) 548-8273