My Bear

 When my father died, I spent the better part of a year cleaning out the house.  I found an old friend.  This is his story.

When I first discovered it in the clanking boxes of jars and rolling bolts, it was still alive, it seemed.  Two eyeless brown spots on a clumped, fuzzy body in a wood box covered with 45 years of dirt and summers of dark heat.  If he wasn't a bear, he'd have rusted like the bolts, but instead he was a little soft spot of life, almost, living for years upstairs in Dad's garage. I was surprised how he had been tossed, almost recklessly thrown next to the Ball jars and pump fittings.  No, he  wasn't wrapped the way baby shoes usually are, but he was almost thrown away for me to find, I guess, after my folks were gone.   Why didn't he get wrapped in newspaper like Dad's house plans, or a radio coil?  The eyes have fallen off and he's left with little brown spots where the eyes used to be.  He lies lifeless, unable to love again, dead like Dad and Mom now, having once been a new bear in my small fingers.  It was no one, no heart in him at all, but it moved like I did.  It couldn't cry, but it did when I did, I suppose. 

He's been pretty well beat-up.  The stitching shows in his groin, and even his cream color is fading to road dirt, dust of passing cars from fifty years ago when he rode behind little footsteps in my Radio Flyer wagon.  He was a pampered passenger.  He got to sit in the back and bounce along Lowell Street.  He fell a lot, I'm sure, when I was sick and he'd end up on the floor, maybe even wondering, in his own dirt-bear way, why such a nice boy could treat him so.  But maybe God gets sick too and we end up in a cast or war zone in Cam Rhan Bay.

I suppose he's got wisdom if you ask him, or maybe, since he can only love as much as we love him, there's wisdom in knowing all love starts right here in our own heart.  Was there a nice lady, like my Mom, from the forties, who hand stitched it's little groin?   And now I see her, maybe a tear in her eyes too, as she tied a little black leg on a tan body for a little boy she loved so. 

Maybe the bear would like to go flying.  The bear waits, and maybe it will live longer than me.  Maybe God still looks through the eyes that fell off and reaches out with black paw and pats my cheek.  I'm sure my Mom did too, but the only difference was, she wasn't lucky enough to be my bear.