Joey

Yesterday, @bloemche wrote a comment to my Valentine’s post about the teddy bear some of you may have seen by now. It’s in rotation in the header images above. If you haven’t seen it, just keep refreshing the page and you eventually will.

Or you can just look at this screen cap I embedded into the post. Your choice.

Anyway, I thought it might be a nice topic for a non-Lost related diddy (hey remember those?), after all Rae and Marivic both blogged about some of their header images. And to be honest, it’s odd I haven’t thought to talk about the little guy here yet. He does have an interesting story.

My Aunt Joanie bought him for me when I was 5. And actually… whoa… now that I’m doing the math… she was younger than I am now… still in her 20s, in fact! Wow.

……….. wow.

Okay so my mom, my sister and I were visiting her and my uncle in Brookline, Massachusetts. For some reason, shortly after arriving, I was really set on having a stuffed animal. I’m not sure why, exactly. I seem to remember some sort of deal I made with my aunt. So one morning, we set out for the toy store. It was just her and me. My sister was either still sleeping or too little… or maybe she just didn’t have the same sweet deal I had.

Now, we get to this place… and it’s, like, stuffed animals as far as the eye could see. Cause a 5 year old’s eye can really only see about halfway to the back of a toy store. I’m walking up and down every aisle, checking out tigers, alligators, what have you. And the way I always remember the story is that this little teddy bear literally fell from one of the shelves onto the ground in front of me. What’s more, the spot he dropped from didn’t have any other bears like him. He was a full-fledged, one of a kind! The decision was pretty easy. I mean, it was practically made for me.

So we walked to the register. But just as we were about to pay, my aunt asked if we should get an animal for my sister.

Okay now, what I’m about to tell you, I should preface by saying… I’m not proud of what I did. But it was a decision I made in the moment… one I cannot go back and change.

About 3 feet from the register was a big bucket of these really strange looking stuffed animals wearing baseball outfits. I say strange, because to this day, I’m not totally sure if they were bears or beavers. But one thing is certain, they were not the stuffed animal my sister would have chosen had she been there.

“She’ll like this,” I said.
“Really?”

And guess what. She did. Believe it or not, she loved that thing like she had picked it herself… she refused my insistence that it was a boy beaver… in her eyes it was definitely a girl bear. She replaced the baseball outfit with a little pink dress… the baseball mit that was permanently sewn to the end of her right arm was just a slight deformity that made her special… the cap sewn onto her head, a creative fashion statement. In her eyes, Ubi (pronounced: you-bee) was perfect.

Which would make my bear, Joey, even more perfect, right? After all, he wasn’t some generic gimmick from a bin. He was a one of a kind. I mean, he fell at my feet.

Well, over the next year, my sister and I grew pretty attached to our bears, Joey and Ubi. We took them everywhere with us. We took them to Spain in 1981. And they traveled with us through the Pyrenees into France. We stopped at this hotel near Lourdes (yes I grew up very Catholic). And it was there that I made what some might refer to as “a mistake 5 ¾ years in the making.” I decided to let Joey slide down a winding staircase banister. Because the picture of it in my mind was just way too spectacular not to make a reality. And I mean, he was more than the perfect bear, so he could easily pull off a simple, perfect slide.

But he didn’t. He didn’t slide. Just sort of toppled at my light push. I should have remembered that about the dude; his penchant for falling. He fell straight down on his face. And I saw something flick across the tile.

His eye.

If you notice in the picture he has no eye.

Oh man, I cried. I felt so guilty. I remember apologizing to him like crazy throughout the trip; my mom promising to fix him when we returned to the States. But would it be the same? Had I permanently stripped this bear of its perfection? Even if we glued it back, would I ever be able to forget that the glue was there? How was my sister doing it? I mean, it’s a baseball mit, not a hand! How was she able to look past that?!

Well, as you can see from the photo, we never did fix it. And actually, the missing eye came to define that little bear… so did the jelly that got stuck in his fur a few years later… and the second eye he lost on my way to college…

But I think it was during those initial months of guilt… the realization that he wasn’t perfect… that he was fragile, vulnerable to hurt… perhaps it was then that we formed this inseparable bond that keeps the little guy at my bedside always.

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