The Truth of Scruffy
Scruffy lives in a box on a shelf in a closet. He was supposed to live out his days in a display box on the wall, but I never found just the right case for him. Or maybe it was that I couldn't imagine putting him in a place where there would be no air, the fear of suffocating him stronger than the fear of dirt and bugs. Like the time when he and my son were three, and while Scruffy turned in the washer, my son and I sat on the floor of the laundry room and sobbed.
He was the things we wanted to be true, captured in stuffing. It was Scruffy who got the time outs in those days. It was Scruffy who started the fights. It was Scruffy who didn't like it when Mom went away on an airplane. He was the other child in a house with only one. We had breathed imaginary life into a stuffed companion, because it gave us delight, and it entertained our son.
I had had my Lucky, when I was a girl, and a handful of other stuffed animals, to entertain me, dancing across the bed when we should have been asleep, my sister and me. And outside the branches of the pine trees, blowing in the wind, snapped together against the night sky like the jaws of dark green alligators. A green that was not just cold and dark and mysterious, but a lonely green, even though I would never have used that word for it then. Then it was just scary, and a little wild. Inside, our menagerie twirled and cavorted in stuffing happiness, as if their very seams contained the secrets of the world.
My heart remembers the Scruffy years with a sweet, longing ache. And maybe it isn't the longing for the thing that had been, but the longing for the thing that had never been, that gives us so much pain. Our longing for the Truth of Scruffy.
He was the things we wanted to be true, captured in stuffing. It was Scruffy who got the time outs in those days. It was Scruffy who started the fights. It was Scruffy who didn't like it when Mom went away on an airplane. He was the other child in a house with only one. We had breathed imaginary life into a stuffed companion, because it gave us delight, and it entertained our son.
I had had my Lucky, when I was a girl, and a handful of other stuffed animals, to entertain me, dancing across the bed when we should have been asleep, my sister and me. And outside the branches of the pine trees, blowing in the wind, snapped together against the night sky like the jaws of dark green alligators. A green that was not just cold and dark and mysterious, but a lonely green, even though I would never have used that word for it then. Then it was just scary, and a little wild. Inside, our menagerie twirled and cavorted in stuffing happiness, as if their very seams contained the secrets of the world.
My heart remembers the Scruffy years with a sweet, longing ache. And maybe it isn't the longing for the thing that had been, but the longing for the thing that had never been, that gives us so much pain. Our longing for the Truth of Scruffy.
Comments