A Word In Edgewise: Take-Alongs For Your Get-Aways

On my first getaway–and my first commercial flight–in April, 1941, I was 11-months-and- some-weeks-old. I was being flown, my opinion unsolicited, from Hartford, Connecticut to Jackson, Mississippi to celebrate my first birthday and to be ceremoniously displayed before doting kin. A photo of The Day, shows my mother, my grandmother, my great- grand-mother, a single-candled cake, and, restrained upon Mother’s lap, me in a howling rage.

There’s no stuffed animal visible, one might have improved my temper, but once I became ambulatory, I was always dragging one along. (For whatever reasons–I never inquired–no siblings were forthcoming.)

Three years later, 6 July, 1944, my father and three other adults took me and Blue Elephant to the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey’s Circus performance in Hartford. The performance that was torched and consumed 169 spectators’ lives. My dad, as I’ve mentioned here before, threw me over his shoulder and ran out the uncrowded burning end; the rest of our group scattered, but escaped. Dear Mollie Duckett not only survived, but rescued and restored to me Blue Elephant.

A photo taken on my next birthday, 30 April, 1945, shows me hosting a little group of celebrants around our dining room table. I’m wearing a feather headdress and clutching my plaid stuffed rabbit. Old enough then to know something bad was happening in the world, and that because we lived near Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Company, we fastened the curtains closed at night, none of us, kids or adults, yet knew a great Evil had destroyed himself in a bunker that day.

As kids will, I clung to stuffed creatures less and less, as I grew older; went through high school and college without one close at hand. Then, as is wont to happen in adults’ lives, I hit some rough patches. Nerves, worries, adding sops that didn’t ameliorate. I needn’t detail; let’s just say, common, run-of-the-mill sorts of rough patches–fill in any of your own and read on.

On one serendipitous day, while walking and fretting across Harvard Square, I spotted him standing in a toy store window display; upright, fuzzy, brilliantly blanche–a perfect polar bear. Christened Cold Comfort, he went home with me directly. His silent, intuitive presence, turned the tide. Slowly, yes, incrementally, naturally–but things changed.

Now that was some time ago, and while CC remains in residence, and I have had others as well–from a large gray wolf draped in a wooly sheep’s cloak down to a tiny Steiff Donkey, an unobtrusive, packable brown bear has traveled with me East to West Coast, to Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, and the shores of Loch Ness with nary a quarrel nor regret.

Other adults are catching on. Sarah Gannett, in a February 18 New York Times Wirecutter piece, extolled the virtues of stuffed animals for adult consolation. I learned that decades ago when I was going through a fear-of-flying spell, but needed to head from Boston to California to interview famed Disney Duck Artist Carl Barks. I put my little brown bear in a little brown bag only to discover my seat mate was a six-year- old with her own open-carry teddy. “Surely,” I thought, “no Deity would smite two bear bearers.” And they didn’t.

Plan your gayest of get-aways, but consider–in addition to your complex, talkative human company–including a soft, silent sympatico travel mate.