The right stuffing

I still have my first teddy bear, named Teddy (how original). He is older than I am. He was my older brother Scott's bear, so the story goes. Scott gave him to me when I was but a babe. I, however, did not pass him along to the next sibling. Teddy and I suited each other admirably, so he stayed with me.

Teddy has long been a creature of comfort and company, but he’s not much of an eater or drinker. When I was a little girl, I shoved the red buds from springtime trees into a crack in Teddy's hard shell of a mouth. I figured he must be hungry, and wouldn't a bear like berries? Such were my thoughts. Then, thinking he might be thirsty, I poured in some milk. I was sharing. Over time, the resulting mess turned unfriendly inside my bear, and my mother had to perform surgery, a tree-berry-and-ruined-fluff-ectomy. He stills bears the stitches. The bear survived, but his voice box stopped working. Eventually, the silent voice box migrated downward, along with much of the remaining stuffing. Eventually, it had to be removed as a nonfunctioning body part.

Gravity and wear have a way of causing padding and parts to shift, making us lumpy or saggy or both, even as we become and remain lovable and, if we’re fortunate, wise enough to know that the downward trend isn’t all the important.

The years have not dimmed Teddy’s shiny-black eyes nor his ability to radiate acceptance and understanding, though they have done damage to his two-tone fuzz and the tilt of his head. May the years be no less kind to you and me.

Books: Berg and duplication

I keep finding Elizabeth Berg books on my shelves and in the stacks of books on my stereo and credenza and elsewhere in my book-glutted house. This week I found Until the Real Thing Comes Along. Last week I discovered two: Joy School and What We Keep. I polished off What We Keep in a few days by reading at night and in waiting rooms, then started on the new one I received just this week, The Last Time I Saw You. I knew I had Pull of the Moon and Talk Before Sleep; I've read and loved both. The latter is the one I took with me to a reading given by the author at our local Barnes & Noble the last weekend in April. If there had been a prize for bringing the oldest or shabbiest paperback form of a best-selling Berg book, I would have won it.

The miracle in finding copies of Berg's books I didn't realize I had is that I didn't find duplicates. I have been known to buy a book and then, unless I read it immediately, I may buy it again, thinking, "I've been wanting to read this book." This becomes especially likely when I'm shopping in our Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, where hardbacks are $3 and paperbacks are less, and I have the pleasant excuse of helping to fund the library by buying a donated book. While sorting through my bookshelves, I found duplicates of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Scatterfield, The Shape of Sand by Marjorie Eccles, and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It gets worse. I have bought The Thirteenth Tale three times. The first time I bought it, the book had just been published. I gobbled it up and passed it along to a friend. The next two times, I was buying to replace it, because it was such a good yarn. I had only intended to replace it once. Apparently, there was a blip in my mental inventory of books.

What do I do with the spares? I donate them to the Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, of course. I just have to remember not to buy them back.

Lisa Rice Wheeler, Elizabeth Berg, Kelly O'Dell Stanley

Dry silk

The sound 

on this sun-bright afternoon 

is the dry-silk 

rustle of trees 

crowded with leaves 

jostled by an exuberant wind.

Minneolas

Three weeks ago I found Minneolas in the local Whole Foods store: tangelos. The Minneola is a cross between a Duncan grapefruit and a Dancy tangerine and was released in 1931 (thank you, Wikipedia, for that info). Amazing flavor and scent. Richly juicy. Intriguing ovoid shape. And the color of my favorite marigolds, the ones I can't find anymore: Janie's Tangerine.

Delicious. Better than any other citrus. My opinion, of course.

Cat's feet and dusk

I wrote this in an e-mail to my friend Kelly, to tell her about a recent Sunday evening: “Mike, John Michael and I went to Shapiro's for dinner and ate plenty of comfort food. Then we took a walk along the Monon as twilight crept up on its little cat paws.”

Something about dusk and cat’s feet stirs my lit-major brain, but I cannot recall what the quote is that is niggling at my thoughts, whispering and then hiding. So much of what I think about when writing is like that: glimpses, soft sounds, light seen through a curtained window, spring rain against dusty glass.