My childhood fear of the dark was monumental. Before the lights went out, I would carefully straighten my blankets, perfectly align the fold of the top sheet, place both arms under the covers and, from inside, tuck the top sheet tight under my neck so nothing could find a looseness to intrude.
What did I think would get in? I never pictured anything… it was just idea, which probably made it worse.
Some nights I would realize I had forgotten to sequester my stuffed animal in with me. In my zeal to clang shut the fortress of my sheet, I had left it alone on the blanket. For minutes I would screw up my courage, then lash out with octopus tentacle, grab the mock beastie and pull it in.
My stuffed animals were part friend, part comfort, part talisman, protecting me from the unnamed “other” that must not enter. I had started with four or five, maybe half a dozen. By the time I relinquished their protection, some time in my early teens, I had accumulated 15 or more.
The originals included a dirty and tactilely uncomfortable giraffe, a stuffed beige horse with a printed-on brown saddle and stirrups, a small teddy bear missing patches of fur, a real stuffed koala (I had no environmental pity in those days), and a cracked, flaking rubber pig – not stuffed but hollow – with painted blue shorts and red top. Brother Rod named the pig “The Boohoo” because when you squeezed it, it expelled a rubbery stink of air through a tiny whistle in its foot that sounded much like a baby’s cry.
The horse met a sad fate. About age six, the whole family, myself included, decided that horsey was beyond salvation; it was time for the last roundup. Dad was burning leaves in the back yard at Hastings Ave. and he (or I) added the horse to the tiny conflagration. That was OK – it worked for Vikings. But Dad poked the fire with a stick, hit the horse, and it broke just forward of the painted saddle. Some little thing in me broke too – I had allowed a terminally maimed friend to be broken like a heretic after serving me without complaint.
Rod was gifter of most of the more interesting additions to my stuffed collection. The ones I remember most fondly are a grizzly bear and a platypus with one webbed foot sewed on upsidedown.
Mom hand-sewed at least one – a snake, brown on top, yellow on the bottom with green sequin eyes. It was tightly stuffed and shouldn’t have been that pleasant to hold, but it was weirdly comforting nestled between my bent forearm and my neck. Either she or Rod gave me a penguin with moveable arms (flippers, wings – what should they be called?).
I slept with each of these animals in rotation. I would search through the big floppy bag beside my bed to find the night’s designated attendant to join me on the road to sleep. When I would forget who had graced my bed the previous night, I would veer close to panic. Were I to pick the wrong companion for the night, how would the overlooked rightful evening-owner feel?
What made me feel I was betraying a simulacrum? I suppose children do that, and I shouldn’t look back with such disdain on my small, quailing self. But the encapsulated child in me (probably in many of you) still worries that I have slighted the dog when parceling out pan lickings.
(What? You don’t let your dogs lick pans? What the hell’s wrong with you?)
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An aside: Daughter Caitlin, now living in upstate New York, where she’s constructing a “tiny house” studio (12 x 12 feet) for her burgeoning stop-motion animation business, has started a fundraising campaign to buy solar panels to provide electricity in her off-the-grid woodland site, along with batteries to keep it operative on cloudy or otherwise uncooperative days (of which there are many that far north). Should you find yourself inclined to support such an obviously environmentally sound and artistic endeavor, you can drop a penny or two in her jar: https://gofund.me/e446e758.
lickhaven 