Vol. III.6 - P is for Pooh

The other day, Parker was fussing, and out of desperation I got out the wooden blocks and put them on the floor in front of him. He seemed happy enough with this, so I went into the kitchen and watched as Liam crashed his party. (“Oh, blocks! I haven’t played with those in forever!”) He picked one up, held it out where Parker could see it, and said in sing-song childish intonation, “P for Parker. What else starts with P?” A brief pause and then, triumphantly, “Hippopotamus!”

Liam has just, suddenly, learned to say his L’s. He came to me and asked something about his lovey, and I turned to him and said, “Wait a minute, you just pronounced the letter L! What is L for? Is it for Liam?” “Ehw foh Lee-ahm!” he stated with perfect pronunciation. Later that evening, Damian was having fun with this. “Is L for lion? What else is L for? Is L for ‘I love you’?” Each of these Liam pronounces with great pride. Then Damian asks, “Is L for Pooh?” “Yes!” Liam says. “Nooo!” we say. “P is for Pooh!”

Recently Liam has been hanging over the baby gate that keeps him out of Damian’s office equipment, asking to have “Momo’s Pooh” from the bed. This is the same Pooh Bear whom I discovered in a department store when I was eleven, and with whom I fell deeply, desperately in love, as only a child can. He was stout and yellow, so very soft and so completely huggable. It did not matter to me that he looked absolutely nothing like E. H. Shephard’s depictions of the real Winnie-ther, to whom I had given my heart long ago. Something about this Pooh yet captured for me the very essence of A. A. Milne’s silly old bear.

It did not matter that he was wearing a ridiculous and most un-Pooh-like Santa Claus jacket and hat. I knew perfectly well these could be removed to reveal the acceptable red sweater underneath. It did not matter to me that he was retailed by Sears, which store I practically loathed for being big and fluorescent and full of lawnmowers. It did not even matter that he was sitting on a display with 53 clones of himself. He was the only Pooh Bear in all the world, and I wanted him.

This did not escape my mother, who went home and told my father. I suspect he melted quickly and completely, because it was my dad’s name on the big box I opened on Christmas Eve. I trust that most of us, at some point in their lives, have opened a package to find inside it their heart’s desire.

Someone asked me recently what was “my favorite age.” My response was “now.” (Why go back and relive the joys and sorrows of the past, when you could just go on? Fortunately or otherwise, that’s what we’re all doing, anyway.) But I suppose that eleven really was something of a magical age for me. I suppose, although I have never thought of it before, that it had to have been that very same Christmas, a couple of days later at my grandmother’s house, that my parents gave me a card with a picture of a red rose lying on piano keys. Like the letter that Harry Potter received on his eleventh birthday, it changed my life. It simply said, “Your first violin lesson is scheduled for Wednesday, January 4^th, at 12:00.” I remember literally falling in the floor. (I had begged my parents for a year to let me learn, and had long since given it up as hopeless.)

This may sound trite, but I think eleven was my last year of true childhood. It was an age when my world was still intact. (When I was twelve, my grandfather died. My other granddad had died already, it is true, but I did not really know him.) It was an age when magic could happen – witness the rose on the piano keys. It was an age when a Christmas box could contain pure joy.

Growing always involves tribulation, and I may still have been eleven when I announced solemnly to my father that my Pooh bear had “been a great comfort to me.” Christopher Robin could not have been faster friends with his Bear. When I had horribly ingrown toenails and my mother would have to cut the corners out of my tender flesh with a special instrument purchased from the podiatrist, I would bite my Pooh’s ears and scream through my teeth. Afterwards, white and shaking, I would sit on the edge of the tub and soak my bloody feet in the warm bath. It was the worst pain I had ever known. When I was a teenager going through the usual, run-of-the-mill, coming-of-age angst, I would practice what my parents called “advanced belly-bawling,” sobbing into Pooh’s highly receptive round tummy. I still sleep with him, although this is mainly because he makes an excellent arm rest as I lie on my side.

My poor Pooh looks nothing today like his captivating self of yore. Now all that can be said about him, as of the nursemaid in Pirates of Penzance, is that there are “the remains” of a fine Bear about him. He stays grungy and dirt-stained, no matter how he is washed. The chest area covered by his sweater retains the merest hint of his original sunny yellow color. He is squashed down and misshapen. His ears are particularly tattered tributes to my childhood trauma. His eyes, once sparkling black spheres, are dulled and clouded with scratches. His fur is matted and rough. Not a one of you readers would look at him and find a single charm, except for those with eyes to see that here is a bear who Has Been Loved. He is more truly real, perhaps, even than the Velveteen Rabbit.

This is the Pooh that Liam sees in Momo’s room and covets. He is allowed to play with him under the condition that he treat him gently. Damian came and found me the other day, where I was nursing Parker in the boys’ room, to tell me that he had emerged from his “office” to find Liam all alone in the living room. He had my Pooh sitting beside him in the recliner, just as we sit with him, and he was “singing” at the top of his lungs: “Ike chee, ike chee… gween ahv chee inna house ohva Lohd… Pwaise ze Lohd…” (“Like a tree, like a tree, I’m like a green olive tree in the house, in the house of the Lord…” – Psa. 52:8) Truly “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings (Mat. 21:16)” comes sweet praise.

Parker likes to talk to my Pooh. Liam, on the other hand, was a late bloomer as far as stuffed animals went. When he was Parker’s age he was far more interested in the tag. When Liam dove after Little Yellow Man in his workshop, it was the tag he wanted. Parker very obviously wants to look at the silly painted face. Liam’s first stuffed animal attachment was simultaneously to the Peter Rabbit that his Babcia gave him for Easter when he was about 15 months old and, oddly enough, to the little Pooh bear that I once gave my mother. For a while, he wanted them both in his crib every night. His second, stronger attachment was to this year’s Easter Bunny, “Pink Jams.” I had no idea this seven-inch, pale pink velour rabbit would be such a hit. We stopped taking him everywhere only when I discovered that he is now irreplaceable. But truthfully, Liam is happy to relegate Pink Jams to a back corner of his heart. His real love is electronics.

Maybe Liam’s heart does not crave soft and furry things as mine always has. Perhaps that is a love that has yet to awaken within him. As I watch him cart my old friend around, I wager that at least once in his childhood, Liam will open a box – or an envelope, or a door – and find inside it unadulterated delight. It will be sweet to see the joy on his face.