My son when he was very small had a security blanket that was soft, loosely woven, cream and baby blue, and he held it up to his face like Linus in the comic strip, carrying it like that through stages of disintegration until it was reduced to a handful of strands. Even then it must have retained an identity for him. Finally it was gone. We knew it would go, but were relieved nevertheless. It had long been a fond joke, though we rarely mentioned it in his presence for fear of embarrassing him, though I do recall one mild sally which he ignored. We couldn’t help ourselves. I have no idea whether he remembers the blanket now.
I can clearly see him holding it, standing in his pyjamas.
I had a teddy bear when I was small, and I remember it very well. It was of a brown that seemed the very colour of friendliness. The eyes and nose were leather and looked like dark chocolate. I liked pressing my teddy’s leather nose with mine, in a Maori kiss, and pushing its shiny plumpness with my thumb. Right now I am straining to remember the colour of its fur. Was it a sort of caramel? Or darker? My brain is humming like a generator. I remembered the colour very well just yesterday. The humming becomes more urgent. My brain is vibrating as I pump more electricity through it. No. I give up. It is any brown you want it to be. The colour of your teddy perhaps.
One day I was sitting on the floor at the back of our flat where the light came in dimly though a high window. The light was dim because the land rose beside our ground floor flat and on up until some metres back it had risen above the window’s height. Also the day was overcast. The teddy bear lay on the floor and seemed to be looking at me. Suddenly it was alive in a way it had never quite been before. Though I could not have found words to explain this, I knew I had been projecting life into it, and that for a moment I had passed beyond pretence. A strange feeling went through me, as if I had seen a ghost or had become aware of another dimension in which inanimate things had a life independant of my imagining. Under this spell my teddy bear was actually alive, to the point where I expected it to speak. I loved it. It was my friend. In a while that deep supernatural feeling – a feeling that seemed possible only in the dim rarified light of this room – passed, but I never forgot it. I still loved the bear, though I knew that my love was a fantasy. I remained happy with that until my teddy bear went, at some moment I cannot pinpoint, out of my life.
Out of existence.
Who knows what happened to my teddy bear? I cannot ask my mother. She too has long gone. Actually she died before an accurate memory of my teddy left me. That was just minutes ago of course. It left just as I chose to write about it. Unless the true colour suddenly reappears it is now a memory of a memory. This process is rarely reversed.
A similar complex of feelings rose when my sister’s doll was broken. I felt her distress quite deeply, but this was replaced by a sort of qualified gladness when it was sent off to the doll’s hospital. in fact I awaited its return with some anxiety. I remember this quite clearly. I stood beside her on the grey cement roof of the garage down on French Street below our flats, certain that we were both waiting for the doll. We stared down onto the street without speaking.
The doll’s hospital. I felt it was called this as a comfort to little girls. It showed an understanding that for the girl who nursed it her dolly was real. Soon it returned intact, though with some barely discernable change to its appearance, which disturbed me; but she accepted it quickly and I was very happy for her. In some ways I would rather not broach this, but I could not help feeling that she knew her doll was not quite the same. Under the surface this was one of the pitiable events of early life, a terrible unspoken tragedy. Or perhaps not. She gave no sign. Soon that feeling passed.
Self absorbed as I was, it surprised me that I could achieve an empathy that approached selflessness.
In fact I had often surprised myself in another state of selflessness, when I walked and gazed at things more real than I. Things that were much bigger than a little boy, and things that were very small. But that is a different thing. Often I still feel it.
I felt it the other day when I sat in the bus after leaving the water. Full of euphoria I gazed down on the sea, still deeply blue in the dusk, as the bus wound up along the Marine Parade. Then the bus turned inland, and up more steeply toward the city and night, rising from the zone of the ocean up onto a plateau of suburbia where the sea still subtly breathed. These succeeding zones held me in a thrall all the way home. I was beyond myself. I live for this. And also the feeling of my self returning as I open the door on my things. Things that will one day be scattered and will disintegrate. Some will remain for a while and might even remind someone of me. Eventually they will all be gone. Out of existence. The way of my teddy.
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