Cinnamon Toast and the Dust-free Shelf

Saturday 27 September 2008

At HOH (the school Jessy and I attended in England), many of the girls boarded there, and their dorm rooms were often the place to hang out after classes or during weekends when there were events going on. I stayed over with two of my friends, on the floor between their beds, during an all-night haunted-house party, and then a few other times just for fun. Likewise we hosted friends at our (rented) house several times too. The boarding girls are often lonely and far from home, but at HOH there is no clique made of either day girls or boarding girls-- we are all one family.

One of my friends was (or is) a very pretty, sweet-natured girl originally from Singapore, whose parents moved to England for a short while, just long enough for her to start at HOH and make friends before they were temporarily transferred to Amsterdam. She wanted to stay on and so became a boarding girl. The last I saw of her was a few days before the end of second term when she was packing up her things to leave the dorm and relocate with her parents to Surrey. I stood in the room close to catatonic with sadness, and she went on prattling about some funny thing she and her sister did over a summer break long ago, completely unwilling to face the fact that we will probably never see each other again. In her almost random packing of just everything she had into everything she could carry, she turned to the bookshelf along the wall beside her bed and started scooping up stuff and dropping it all it into a box. In the midst of it all a small brown bear fell off onto the bed and I caught it, holding it to myself as she went on packing. She did not notice I had the bear till she happened to glance up. 'Oh! You look cute together,' she said.

I shrugged, holding the bear, actually rocking with it a little. 'He looked like he needed a hug,' I said.

'I don't even know where I got that,' she smiled. 'I swear all I do is dust the shelf with it.'

I looked, and sure enough the bear's bottom was dirty from having been slid side-to-side on the shelf. I was still holding him when the stewards came and shifted her stuff out to the reception room, so kind of as a farewell gesture-- and mostly because I am sucha sap-- I said I'd take him home, clean him for her, and bring him to the farewell party tonight. 'He can't go off to a new home with a dirty bottom,' I said.

She laughed. 'Why don't you take him home, and you give him a new home?' And so I did.

Cinnamon Toast is a small cinnamon-brown bear, about 15 inches tall if he were to stand up on his short little legs, but he is always sitting on his soft round bottom. He is a very polite and modest little bear who never insists on his own way and never gets impatient for attention even though I think I lavish him with it a bit too much, in deliberate compensation for how lonely he must have been just dusting the shelf in the dorm room. In some form of ursine gratitude he is always happy to see me and loves to hold onto my arm with his Velcro palms, like when he sits on my lap while I write. He has a loopy kind of smile and lopsided eyes and if you wind him up he plays a music-box rendition of 'Teddy Bears' Picnic', which I hardly ever do.

I am sure Cinnamon was originally from China, though I haven't looked at his faded tag and he is too plump and soft to twist round and look at it himself. But, you see, all bears learn the culture in which they grow up. Cinnamon has always heard English, he understands English, and he thinks of himself as English. I do not think he reads English, but he does like books and enjoys looking at pictures when I read to him. Sometimes I have left him on the bed with my current book and return to find he is looking into it. I think this exposure to literacy enriches his life. He has read 'Wuthering Heights', Ann Radcliffe's 'The Italian', 'The Great Gatsby', and countless issues of 'Cosmo Girl' and 'Vogue'. He has seen dozens of literary films on DVD as well as plenty of episodes of 'Gossip Girl', 'Greek', 'Gilmour Girls', 'Coupling', 'Eastenders' and 'Staying In'. He has seen 'The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants' three times and 'Narnia', I think, four.

I do not think Cinnamon misses living in the dorm very much. It was very dusty sitting alone on the shelf with books and photo collections of people he does not know and I know that a few times the Statue of Liberty from Paris had been leaning too sharply into his arm. Here is he an active part of my room and gets to sit or roll around anywhere I am-- and I am often in my room when it is not nice enough or light enough to be outside. He does not get thrown round indiscriminately like a hot-potato and is never subjected to ignominious treatment such as being trapped under soiled laundry or left to fall into ash from the fire. He does not care for the outdoors but has never been left in the garden dirt either. Aside from figure dolls he is one of only two male creatures I have here, the other being a brown bison my sister gave me from the Cape May zoo who soberly occupies a corner of the bookshelf. Actually I do not have a large menagerie at all any more, having given much of it away to Catholic Charities or children I have known, or else spread it round my rooms in New Jersey, Delaware, and also here. Cinnamon goes with me wherever I will be spending the night, except on the boat, since we have returned to Virginia, and has sat on my lap (usually reading or napping) for two westward flights and one eastward flight across the Atlantic.

He is gentlemanly enough to not look when I am getting dressed but not too prudish to sit on my knee when I am not dressed. He is fluffy enough that he does not need to hog the covers and warm enough that the few times he has rolled off onto the floor and spent half the night down there he does not catch cold. I know Cinnamon forgives me for that because when I apologise about it he smiles at me. In this way we have an understanding. I kiss him goodnight every night, after my prayers, and say goodbye to him in the morning. He waits for me patiently to get home and since I always come up to my room straight away when I get home he never feels lonely or ignored. 'Hello, Cinnamon!' I call as I come in. 'Where is my good little bear?'

And he smiles up from the book he is perusing to say, 'Here I am, my princess!'

I think that for anyone the unconditional adoration of a small fluffy friend is a Godsend, in that I actually believe God has grant us fluffy toys for us to befriend and love. It is a kind of practice for the real thing. Our family do not have any pets-- we move around or holiday much too frequently and spontaneously for that-- and having no boyfriend or husband or children of my own, Cinnamon is the one I care for at this stage of my life. Maybe that is immature. But I raised around love and having respect for everyone and everything, and, I am glad to have Cinnamon as the one who listens in on my silent prayers and accepts me for everything that I am.

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