I have mentioned our bears and the sadness at having to part with the majority this past week.
Let me tell you about Lucky.
He was thus called because he was actually far from it, and he is one of the bears en route to a new home.
We found him face down in a muddy puddle in the road and reversed the car to pick him up Indiana Jones style (ie. door open, car in motion and me hanging out of the passenger side to retrieve him) .
Our story suggested that he had been snatched from a little girl’s hands and thrown out of the car window by her jealous brother.
This russet coloured bear had an eye missing, a shattered nose and was battered so badly that his stuffing was coming out.
When we got him home, we carefully ‘skinned him’ and described his concern at seeing his inner self being bounced around in the tumble dryer after a gentle shampoo.
There was a toy ‘hospital shop’ in town where we purchased a new pair of eyes and such a cute little nose, for the princely sum of two pounds (about $3).
We were extremely gentle sewing him back together, and he was quite handsome by the time we finished, but he looked more like a raccoon than a bear because he had two circles round his eyes.
We decided he was going to be a rather shy bear, and teamed him up in the romance stakes with Honey. She was a yellow and brown bear we found at the bottom of a tatty box at a car boot sale.
Again, we cleaned her up (though no surgery was required) and described her story as one of being bought for a spoilt child and then totally discarded when something better came along.
These two little bears were thereafter always placed together, and I did not separate them.
We often wrote about imaginary ‘meetings’ between the bears at night when we were ‘asleep’ or ‘out’. The dog was privvy to these ‘pow wows’ as we called them, and Grandad was always at the forefront telling stories of my childhood and passing on words of wisdom, comfort and dry humour.
I wrote the story of The Spitfire and our two pilots for my Mum, giving it illustrations and putting it in a binder for her. It’s 4552 words long, so too much for a post, but I will work on an abridged version so that you can get the idea.
Whilst none of my stories have been published, they are originals from my own mind and childhood memories, and as such I’d appreciate maintaining the necessary copyrights.
pensitivity101 