Bear in the Water

I found him on a Tuesday, tucked inside a cedar chest I hadn't opened in forty years. Bear's brown fur was matted, his glass eye clouded with age, and his left ear hung by a thread. My grandmother had sewn him for my seventh birthday, back when hair still grew thick on my head and the world stretched endless before me.

That summer, Henry and I played baseball every afternoon until our arms ached and the sun painted the sky in oranges and purples. We'd collapse under the oak tree in Henry's backyard, Bear watching from his perch on the fence rail, his serious expression somehow critiquing our form. Henry's mother would bring us lemonade in sweating glasses, ice cubes clinking like wind chimes.

"You boys wear yourselves out," she'd say, though she smiled when she said it.

One August afternoon, heat shimmering off the asphalt, Henry suggested we go swimming at Miller's Pond. Neither of us knew how, but Henry insisted Bear could teach us. He marched to the water's edge with solemn purpose, Bear clutched in his arms like a holy offering, and tossed his beloved companion into the depths.

Bear sank like a stone.

We scrambled in after him, thrashing and gasping, until Henry's father waded in to rescue both boys and one very wet, very heavy teddy bear from the mud.

Now, sitting on my back porch with Bear on my lap, my grandson squints through bifocals at the old photograph I've handed him. "This you, Grandpa?"

"That was me," I say. "And Henry. We were friends for sixty years."

Henry's been gone three years now. His hair had turned white as mine, and we'd watched our grandchildren grow tall and strong. But every summer, we'd still sit by his pond, dangling our feet in the water, and talk about the day Bear learned to swim.

Some treasures don't lose their worth with age. They only grow heavier, weighted down by memory, until they become anchors that keep us tethered to who we used to be, even as we change beyond recognition.