Tuesday, May 5, 2009

What to do with these bears...

I have been cleaning the garage for two days (!). There are dozens of boxes of carefully preserved toys, school papers, journals and child-sized artwork. Among the stuff I have been trying to make decisions about are these bears. I thought I would tell their stories while I think it through.
When Andrew turned three years old, Grandma Carson sent him money to buy a teddy bear. He and I went shopping and he looked and looked until he found the biggest bear in the store. It was nearly as tall is he was.

It came home and joined Raggedy Andy who had been a birthday present the year before. Raggedy Andy has held up well because he has always had a place in the house, but Bear has been moved around a lot and gotten pretty dusty and battered. He was Andrew's constant companion for a few years in those early days.
These three guys belonged to Jonathan. The first one was a Christmas present from me when Jonathan was one month old. The second one was a gift from friends when he was born. The third one joined up a little while later, maybe as a gift from visiting grandparents. The distiction these bears have is that they starred in a story I wrote for Jonathan when he was about three years old. He was into destroying his room everyday at nap time and after many attempts to persuade him not to do that, I wrote him a story called "Jonathan and the Bears".

I kept these bears thinking that I would use them as models to illustrate "Jonathan and the Bears", but so far that hasn't happened. Anyway, here are the Thompson Bears. There is one more, but he went to be with his owner several weeks ago and I didn't remember to take his picture. His name is "Friendly" and he belongs to Matthew. Melody doesn't have a particular Bear in the garage, but some of her dolls and Polly Pockets may show up here someday.
I know this is a lot of sentimental nonsense, but it's my job to clean the garage and I can't help remembering where things came from and what they mean.

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