Bears of long habit

Honeybear and Berrybear

Travels: State College, PA; Lock Haven, PA; Athens, GA; Many Farms, AZ; Farmington, NM; Ottawa, ON; Winnipeg, MB
Total miles traveled: 4880.67

When my brother and I were young children, someone gave us these two stuffed animals for Christmas. I wish I could remember who. All I know is that we were cautioned to be careful with them. They were Nice stuffed animals, and I recognized the name Gund on their tags. The Gotta Getta Gund ads were memorable enough that I recognized them from my mom’s magazines. I got a 1977 Collector’s Classic bear that I promptly called Honeybear. One of the things I liked best about him was that you could barely see his eyes when he got good and fuzzy from very uncareful use. My brother got the 1978 Collector’s Classic shown above, and was not interested in it at all. Mixed in among the bear’s varying brown fur-strands were the occasional maroon bits, so I named him Berrybear and took him for my own. I liked the idea of the pair of them staying together, anyway.

For their first few years, I played with them only occasionally, and they mostly lived in the middle strata of a large toybox. When I was a little older, I got into the habit of setting them out on my bed for the day like girls did on TV shows. After a few more years had passed, they lived in my closet, because I was far too mature to have stuffed animals. Then they came back to the bed as soft fluffy irony bombs, because—yes—I was far too mature to have stuffed animals.

I brought them with me when I left for my first apartment, and they have traveled with me ever since. Once again, they were usually relegated to boxes, but they came out from time to time when I wanted some sort of nebulous comfort that only they could provide. Sometimes they sat on display in corners that seemed to want a little something soft. They have starred in their own Adventures of Two Stuffed Bears puppet shows when I was in college. My first cat developed an intense attachment to Berrybear and would snuggle up with him for naps. Every time I packed a box to move to a new place, I considered tossing them or passing them on to someone else. But then I would use them to cushion a box full of breakables and before I knew it, I’d be in a new place, wondering yet again why I was keeping these bears.

A few years ago my husband, who never ever ever gets sick, picked up a hideous virus and wound up in bed for a few days. I brought him cough drops and hot tea and mostly left him alone to sleep away his illness. At one point I teased, “Do you want me to bring Berrybear to keep you company?”

“Yes,” he said. And he was probably teasing too, but I did it anyway. At one point I had tied a red kerchief on Berrybear’s head—a gift from a Pirates of the Caribbean kids’ meal. He looked rakish and weird, but he remained seated right next to the tissues for the duration.

We moved to a new house in February, and unpacking is going slowly. I found Honeybear first, his nose smashed in and his eyes obscured. He’s not quite Grumpy Cat, but if he were sentient he would probably be somewhere between unimpressed that he was packed separately from Berrybear and piqued that I can’t explain why I still have them when the answer is so obvious. Some loves are instant and make sense, and some loves grow on you the way family does, through proximity and consistency. As strange as I know it sounds, these bears are family by now.