When I read [the call for object stories], I was excited by the opportunity to participate in some creative endeavor or at least to contribute to one. Then I thought about the specific request and it called forth longheld fears about my relationships to objects. Objects are one of many things that I'm decidedly meta about. For as long as I can remember I have always looked for the perfect souvenir and have hoarded all manner of material items because they held some meaning. And yet, when I think about it, I always feel like I have chosen the wrong things to keep and to discard. Further, I often feel guilty for not loving or cherishing the things that hold meaning and/or memory. What I've decided to tell you about for this project is an object that both exemplifies and disrupts that pattern.
Below, I'm pasting in a blog entry I wrote about a year and a half ago on the occasion of my parting ways with Big Teddy, a stuffed animal that I got from my god-parents (Uncle Greg, who I was telling you about tonight, and his firt wife, Aunt Karen, a woman I barely know) when I was an infant.
Per your request, here's an elaboration on what he looked like: As I mention below, he was bigger than me until I was five or six. I think this makes him almost three feet tall. I also mention his belly button below and how I don't think I've ever seen another teddy bear with this feature. I suppose, given that bears are mammals, belly buttons are not anatomically incorrect, but if someone asked me to describe a bear I would not immediately respond, "Well, they have belly buttons...". I also find Big Ted's belly button notable in that it's really the only thing about him that was anything like a real bear. He was much more like a cartoon bear. He bore a certain resemblance to Yogi, BooBoo and their Hanna-Barbara brethren, I guess. He was brown, except for his belly and muzzle which were white. His brown was not the brown of any living bear, though. I'm not sure any living thing actually comes in that middling orange brown hue. His belly button was black and hard, like a blob of glue or once-melted plastic with some fuzz stuck in it. His nose was also black and took up most of his protruding muzzle. The inside of his mouth was a pink that I don't remember ever seeming unfaded. He had black plastic eyes with these strange white crescents lining the inner edges. They were made of something leathery, but profoundly man-made. Naugahyde, perhaps? He had ears that stuck up off the top of his head. They were unremarkable, but I think they were kind of key to how I knew he was a bear and not some other creature. They were in the right place, I guess.
It's hard to know now how I came to these conclusions and I hate to project too much awareness onto my younger self. I don't remember ever being able to prop Big Ted's head up, but he had a spot that seemed like a neck. I tried in vain to shift his stuffing so it would keep his head up and he wouldn't look so mopey and so, I seem to remember, he might be able to look back at me.
I think what I wrote in the blog post does as good of a job explaining his significance so I'll move to that...
Good Night Sweet Prince, And Flights of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest July 8, 2007
Yesterday I cleaned the f out of my room. I took all sorts of things out from under my bed, threw some shoes out, kept some to sell, and extracted enough of white kitty’s hair to make a perfect decoy white kitty. I was sweaty and covered in dust and fur, but it felt good to purge. Part of this process, however, involved a decision I’ve been putting off for years: What do I do with the big 70s-looking teddy bear I’ve had since I was less than a year old? Seriously, Big Teddy has been with me a long time. I can remember when he was bigger than me. I dragged his ass everywhere. To this day he’s the only teddy bear I’ve ever seen with a pronounced belly button. For a period of time I re-named him Luke after the character on The Dukes of Hazzard, my favorite show circa age 5. After a while I got embarrassed about that and started calling him Big Ted. To this day my Mommom still calls him Luke and it only recently stopped making me blush. Note: At no point did I get embarrassed about sleeping with a giant and increasingly decrepit stuffed animal. Yes, Big Ted has been through a lot with me: being held extra tight when I could never sleep or was afraid of the dark, practicing kissing on him in middle school on the very off chance I would get to kiss a boy, my move to Chicago and the subsequent very drunk phase, my many moves around Chicago (including his exile to the floor when I lived with a boyfriend), and the move to Ann Arbor.
I haven’t had him in the bed with me for quite some time, not because the spark is gone, but rather because he is literally falling apart. This is nothing entirely new, I’ve been sewing various parts of him shut for over a decade, but until the last couple of years it’s always been the seams giving. Now it’s everywhere. Big Ted’s body is just giving way. Look, it’s not like I think my body is so perfect or anything. It’s just that I can’t keep his stuffing inside of him and it’s weird 70s stuffing-a combination of orange foam bits and a strange Styrofoam-like substance. I’ve known that Big Ted was beyond repair for the last couple of years, but I’ve just let him hang out on the floor at the foot of my bed because I couldn’t let him go.
Yesterday I decided it was finally time to say good bye. So, I picked him up off the floor, gave him one last hug (resulting in a new coating of fuzz on my arms and clothes), and put him in the big black trash bag full of similarly worn out shoes. I cried then and it makes me cry now, which really blows because I’m in the frigging fishbowl because my laptop died. It’s not that I am usually so attached to objects, but Big Ted is one of the few things, maybe the only one, that I have (now had) for so long. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have him because I got him when I was about 9 months old. At a point in my life where very few people have known me for more than a few years that's always meant something even if he isn't a person. I guess it’s always a little freaky to move forward without something that has served as a constant for so long, but for whatever reason - I can’t really articulate one-it’s time for that to happen.