Lost (and found?)

I lost my teddy bear and blanket yesterday. This was the scenario: I’m in Vienna and changed from one room to another in the hostel, since I extended my reservation. I changed rooms in the morning. When I got to the new room, I made the bed I was assigned using the sheets and put my bear and blanket (hereafter referred to as the “comfort objects” or “stuffed animals”) on top of the newly made bed. When I returned in the afternoon, the bed had been stripped and the comfort objects were gone.

I immediately checked with reception, who reported no losses. I asked them again in the evening and this morning: no change. I spoke today to the cleaners in my room. They hadn’t seen anything, but they confirmed my fear: the sheets are sent away to be washed by an outside company.

This is the current working hypothesis: the bear and blanket were scooped up in the sheets and shipped off to the cleaning company. If I’m lucky, they’ll be found before the sheets go through the wash and dry. If not, they’ll be sent through the industrial machines. The blanket’s top was already in tatters and will not survive a pass through the washing machine. Its back may fare a little better, and I imagine that the bear will make it. The question, though, is whether I can track them down before I leave Vienna next Monday.

When I ask for my missing bear and blanket, I get differing responses. Nobody has been unhelpful, but the dignity with which they act changes. The first person I asked was a young woman my age who took the matter in full seriousness: she reacted exactly as she would have for any other lost object. The middle-aged man I spoke to this morning was helpful and encouraged me to speak to the cleaners about it; he was, however, slightly amused by what I had lost.

As you know, I take Baby Bear and Label with me everywhere. The name Baby Bear comes, I think, from a children’s book I was read as an infant. The name Label comes from the blanket’s silk labels, which I rubbed to soothe myself: I always loved the smooth texture under my finger tips or against my cheek. When I rubbed through the original labels, my mother replaced them with new patches of silk: one large, one medium, and one small.¹ They have genders: Baby Bear is a “he,” and Label is a “she.” One psychotherapist I saw with my mother and Michael for family therapy suggested that the comfort objects were a stable point in my life, and made some importance of their genders: presumably they represent my infantile desire for my mother and father to stay married and be constantly present to me. Michael always referred to them as my “toys” and encouraged me to put them away. I was never successfully weaned off them.

I always took them with me everywhere I went. Once, I left Baby Bear in a hotel on a trip I took with my father. My father called the hotel and arranged for Baby Bear to be returned; Baby Bear came back with a note on a string around his neck, written by the house keeper who found him, describing his adventures. When I got him back (this was after the seperation, but not long after: my father was still living in his bachelor’s apartment in Evanston), my father and I celebrated “Baby Bear comes home day.” I don’t remember the date.

It’s difficult to ascribe any sort of value to them. Or rather, trying to ascribe value to them already reveals how little of a human being I have been made by history. They have some vanishing monetary value: it’s not as though they weren’t bought for money at the time. But they’re irreplaceable, because they’re these particular objects that I carried with me through the first twenty-five years of my life. They can’t be replaced anymore than my childhood can be brought back: their specialness inheres precisely in that they were there for what happened in my life. Any new object would be exactly that: new. Any other object would be precisely that: other. But these things are the only part of me that still exists from the beginning. They are worn, but worn by me. The fur around Baby Bear’s eyes is still ragged from where I (at seven or eight) trimmed it back so that he could see better. He used to have a bow tie, but that’s long gone. Label, as I mentioned, is in rags. I already, at another hotel, lost half of her top piece. The other half is shreds and the original quilting is only distinguishable to people who knew what she looked like. Kathleen said a polite hello to them when I pulled them out of the bag.

And they’re gone in such a sudden, undignified way. Someone was a little thoughtless (and I understand why they changed the sheets, since the bed was marked to be checked into (by me) later in the day, and they had no way of knowing that I had already checked in and made the bed) and tossed them. But I can’t help thinking: how could they not have noticed? How could they not have looked? What if it had been my phone, or my watch, or my wallet, or my passport? Would people take the loss more seriously then? Would they care more? All of those things are replaceable, even if they’re more or less of a pain in the ass to get replaced. Nothing I have with me, not my clothes, not my camera, not my computer, not my notebook, is irreplaceable. Even the writings are just that: written. I wrote them once, and I can write them again.

But Baby Bear and Label (and I’m going to use their proper names because that’s the only way that I can properly refer to them) are irreplaceable. They’re the only thing that I travel with that I can’t afford to lose, and I don’t know whether I would have been able to travel without them. I don’t know whether I will be able to travel without them. I don’t know what I’ll do without them. People die because their bodies wear down; I know because I’ve seen it happen. But I pretended, or believed, or thought, that Baby Bear and Label would be a permanent piece of my life, that they would never be really gone.

Once when I was about eleven I was at the orthodontist resting as the glue dried on my braces (or something, I don’t know). I fell asleep in the reclined dental chair and felt Label hovering over me and Baby Bear tucked under my arm. My mother gave it the term of art “internalization,” like we internalize the voice of authority as the over-I. Baby Bear and Label were (as though they’re gone — have I submitted to despair so easily?) a part of me. A human body isn’t just itself: I have artificial skin and eyes and ears and, in the comfort objects, an artificial home. My entire feeling of being home inheres in the simple ragged fabric and stuffing, in the stale-piss/warm-laundry/musky-body smell of something that spent almost every night of my life in bed with me.

And god fucking damnit if I’m going to let some crude happenstance take them from me; and to paraphrase James Baldwin’s mother (as he mentions in the essay “Equal in Paris”), if this is the worst thing that ever happens to me I’ll be one of the most fortunate people around. Somehow I can’t despair, since there is no motivation for anybody else: nobody else cares, nobody else knows their value. Maybe they can imagine it, but it feels somehow “less real” than the value of something replaceable like money or tools or documents. Maybe it’s because all of those things are, precisely, replaceable: their value is somehow a function of how difficult they are to replace. But Baby Bear and Label are irreplaceable: I can’t relive my whole life from infancy again; they’re as irreplaceable as the past is gone. Somehow it doesn’t make any sense to talk about their having value: they can’t be exchanged or replaced. There’s nothing that I’d trade them for, and nothing (is that true?) that I wouldn’t trade to get them back.

And I know that if I don’t get them back I’ll be fine, since they’re part of me. I’ve lost enough places, enough people, enough time to know that. But they’re not completely lost to me yet: we’re just temporarily seperated. I’ll keep you updated on further developments in the case of the missing stuffies.