AT THE TIME, SHE HAD NO IDEA why she’d bought the little glass bear or what she’d do with it. But for $6.99, she thought, why not?
Then, for the next year, this purchase was completely forgotten and stuffed in a drawer. She had a few other things on her mind. For much of that time, her father had been sick. He improved a little, put up a good fight, kept his silly sense of humor through most of it. But then he died.
In the days after the funeral, friends told her that the oddest, most unpredictable things would trigger memories of her dad. How right they were.
Salad tongs. Scrawny newborn goslings swimming on the lake near her house. An open dictionary. All of these brought flashes of her lost parent.
Who knows why, but the empty glass bear became one of those memory triggers too. Was it a subconscious association with Papa Bear of the Goldilocks story? Or maybe it was because the only phrase her dad had ever learned from his “Teach Yourself Italian” tapes was “il piccolo orsacchiotto”–little bear cub.
Just before this Father’s Day she decided that the little glass bear, designed as a container for sugar, could remain empty no longer. It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to figure out what was going on here: She became obsessed with filling it. But with what?
If the idea was to choose something associated with her dad on this first Father’s Day without him, a martini, straight up with a lemon twist, poured ice cold up to the very rim, would have been fitting.
Instead, why not fill the big bear to overflowing with little (Gummi) bears? They’d represent the generations today and into the future who bear (!) the legacy of whimsy and boundless curiosity of her dad.
Today, she will park her colorful Papa Bear at Dad’s empty place at the table: a new Father’s Day tradition from his loving baby bear.
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Read Ellen’s shopping adviser column every Thursday in the Tribune’s At Play section and join the conversation at chicagotribune.com/ellen. shopellen@tribune.com
