Monday, October 11, 2021

Little Charlie’s Travels

Before my wife and I brought a child into this world, we had Little Charlie.

Little Charlie is a small teddy bear. He appears to be of the Ursus maritimus species. My wife, Maria, nicked him in 2011 at a fiber optics convention she attended for work. He was one of the free giveaways at the General Photonics booth, which is embroidered on Little Charlie’s fuzzy chest. She feigned interest in their products just so she could get him. Maria brought him home around the time we started dating. She named him after Charlie Chaplin because she imagined him to be a rambunctious scamp. This is all noted in a short story I got published in Prairie Schooner.

For years, Little Charlie was like our pretend kid. Under the guise of our spirited little rascal, Maria would write me cutesy goofy notes and leave them on my backpack when I would wake up at her apartment before I would head home. In turn, I would slip notes from Little Charlie under the bathroom door when Maria was taking care of her business. I don’t know who started that, but it was a thing we did, and all the notes were in Little Charlie’s child-like scrawl with backwards Rs and misspellings (like “pikturs”). In our teddy bear epistolary, Maria was “mama” and I was “papa.”