Thanks to my vivid imagination and childhood stories The Velveteen Rabbit and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I have an unnatural attachment to all things soft and fluffy. I cannot throw a stuffed toy away. I even feel sad if I think a toy is being ignored.
I remember crying and begging my mom not to throw away tattered Easter rabbits and dirty little stuffed toy dogs. Mom was a soft touch—she always let us keep them, even if they were losing stuffing or their faces had worn away. To this day, there are bags of stuffed animals belonging to her children in her basement.
When my boys were little kids, I had no problem throwing out broken trucks or Lego pieces. But the little teddy bears won at the Fair? The little dogs of the Pound Puppy era? Stuffed Ninja Turtles? No matter how cluttered their rooms were, I couldn’t throw any stuffed animals away. I couldn’t be responsible for a soft toy’s banishment to the island of unwanted toys.
I fortunately have not been faced with tossing toys for many years, but the trauma of unloved toys came back to me this week as I considered the fate of a fuzzy red orangutan holding a valentine heart. He was a gift from a friend, who had received him from another friend as a joke.
He is the homeliest of homely toys, with a shaggy reddish-brown coat, no tail, long floppy arms, and a goofy looking face. The orangutan may appear noble in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra, but the beast’s likeness as a stuffed toy is downright ugly.
I keep him because the grandkids like him. He is nearly as big as the littlest grandchildren, so they have fun hauling him around the house by his floppy limbs. For most of the year he lives in the closet under the basement stairs, with the other holiday decorations. I bring him out before Valentine’s Day and plop him on the couch for a few weeks, where he brightens the room with his confident unattractiveness.
He hung around the living room for a while longer this year. Just last week, I put him on the half wall at the top of the basement stairs to put away on my next trip down. After he sat there for a few days, I was tired of looking at him, so I tossed him down the stairs—only to see Chuck retrieve him, placing him back on the couch. He thought the grandkids had thrown him down the stairs.
I immediately felt remorseful. I had abused the poor ape, tossing him down the steps, where he lay sprawled out on the concrete. Chuck had rescued him. I let him “live” upstairs for a few more days, before finally tossing him down the stairs again.
This time he lay there only a few minutes—I couldn’t take the sight of his funky red arms flailed out at his sides, his ugly face on the floor. Funny looking toys have feelings too, I was sure.
I went downstairs, picked him up, gave him a hug and tucked him safely away in the closet. I stopped myself from saying, “See you next year.”
I’m sure glad St. Patrick’s Day traditions don’t include stuffed leprechauns!
A bear grows more alive with age. No one with one ounce of sensitivity could ever consign a bear to the dustbin.
Johnnie Hague
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