Polar Bear

I have always been a very sentimental person, what my mother calls a dear heart. As a child I had a bookmark with a picture of a teddy bear and some other toys abandoned by an attic window, captioned with some goofy poem about forgotten old friends, and it used to make me cry. It was this kind of thing that made my emotional state often frustrating to my father, endearing to my mother, and incomprehensible to my friends, but to me it was mostly just a burden. It meant that I couldn’t properly enjoy such children's classics as The Velveteen Rabbit, and that when my classmates were all celebrating the beginning of summer in June I was on the verge of tears remembering that 5th grade would never come again. It meant my room was always messy, because I couldn’t throw anything out, and when I tried to clean it I got distracted reading notes passed years ago and daydreaming over toys and crayon-covered paper menus from back when I still ate kid’s meals.

I wouldn’t say that I learned to turn that off completely, but I did learn to deal with this inability to take things coldly. It took me most of junior high and high school to come up with a good strategy. I avoided sad movies and books. I trained myself to look forward to change. I made strict rules regarding the length of time I could keep an unused item before discarding it, and I tried my best to stick to them. And so I made it through college with relative normalcy, only revealing my secret sensitivity to the few close friends I needed to help me through the most traumatic moments, and at graduation I even managed to feel genuinely happy and excited about moving on.

So I found myself at TJ Maxx one afternoon with Betsy, my college roommate, better described at this point as my best friend. I had recently acquired a full-time job and had more money than I had ever had before, all my own, and not many expenses. The awareness of my new wealth gave me an exciting feeling which competed with the thrill of being and acting like a grown-up. I tried to let the grown-up part win when it came to questions of spending money, but occasionally the grown-up part would slip and fall and the newly moneyed part would win the race to the cash register. I knew this about myself, and more importantly, so did Betsy, which made her a good shopping buddy. So there we were, making our way up and down the aisles, looking over everything so as not to miss any good bargains. I was on the defensive, trying to focus as Betsy did on the things that were so hideously tasteless or tacky that I could not possibly entertain the idea of purchasing them, and could instead be entertained by wondering aloud who had gotten paid to design these offenses to good taste. And then we stumbled upon the section that can always be counted upon to host the highest percentage of items that make any reasonable person say “why??”—the Christmas decorations.

As I'm sure you can vividly imagine, the shelves were overflowing with smiling snowmen with bright pink cheeks, green cones dusted with glitter snow, and prancing reindeer whose necks did not look nearly muscled enough to support their improbably large antlers. I felt safe waiting here while Betsy checked out her one weakness, the scented candles. Meaning to help her with a good distraction, as she always helped me, I began to pick up random objects and wave them at her, joking that she NEEDED this pinecone bird with real feathers, and how could she live without this candy cane candle? She turned around at the mention of candles, and that’s when I saw it. It was a polar bear statue, about the size of a kitten, and covered in glitter as if to camouflage itself like a wolf in sheep’s clothing before making off with the unsuspecting youngest member of the nearby glittery snowman town. I picked it up, laughing, and turning it over in my hands, caught a glimpse of its face. This was not the face of a carnivorous killer. I had clearly misinterpreted his size because of his fallacious proximity to the snowmen. This was the face of a cub, looking a little forlorn and very, very adorable. Lifting him for Betsy to see, I exclaimed “Oh, he’s actually kind of cute! And look, he’s only $4.99!”

Sensing danger to my credit cards, Betsy reacted with an admirable speed borne of years of practice, firmly announcing “You do NOT need a sparkly polar bear, even for $4.99.” And the reasonable part of me knew this, knew that I could use that five dollars for almost anything else and it would be better spent, knew that I would have nowhere to put the polar bear and that really, he was pretty tacky. But a persistent other part of me, a part that had been around long before the reasonable part grew in and was proving very difficult to leave behind, felt the polar bear tug at the heart strings I tried so valiantly to ignore and really just wished I hadn’t looked him in the eye.