Teddy

We’d been together since I was five months old, waking up in my crib Christmas day face-to-face with this large black-and-white bear staring down from my stocking.
     Those eyes, in fact, were the first thing to go, replaced with some crude needlepoint nubbins for safety’s sake. Other indignities would follow, but the bear endured, until eventually my mother set about to convince me that one couldn’t stitch old cloth with new thread and besides, the foam rubber was beginning to smell. Until finally, after a brief and private good-bye, I solemnly tossed fourteen years of companionship down the garbage chute.