Rice Pudding
A teddy bear, laundromat horror story
When my daughter was a senior in high school, we moved out of the house we had been living in for over nine years. First, though, we had a big yard sale to get rid of an enormous amount of accumulated junk and thereby make the job of moving a bit easier.
Before the yard sale, our daughter filled many plastic garbage bags of her stuff that she wanted to get rid of and chief among those possessions were the many stuffed animals that she had accumulated in her almost eighteen years. They had all been crammed into a corner of her closet ever since she suddenly became ‘too old’ for stuffed animals. There was one particular stuffed teddy bear, though, that I would not let her get rid of.
I would not let her get rid of Rice Pudding. Rice Pudding is a white teddy bear who is about a foot tall. He is male and has shiny black eyes and tan corduroy pads on his feet and hands and he has a tan corduroy nose — or at least he did; it has mostly worn off from the many years of being her favorite bear.
Rice Pudding was the very first present my daughter ever received in her life; in fact, she received it a couple weeks before she was born. It was the mid-1980’s, and we were living in Santa Fe where she was born. I worked at a bookstore at the time and I was called away from work one day in what…
