A Life in Lovies

Slothy

Provenance: Obtained at Lego Land, San Diego, CA on E’s 6th birthday

E cowered with hands over his ears throughout the entirety of the absurdly loud and tinny Ninjago ride, into which he had entered buoyantly (wearing his red Ninja Kai costume that my dad had sewn together a few nights before, by attaching a homemade Ninjago emblem and aiguillettes onto a run-of-the-mill red ninja costume from Target). He emerged utterly deflated and upset, and then immediately—to our horror—wanted to play a carnival game, insisting with a confidence untethered to his dyspraxic reality, that he could win it. We didn’t know how to tell him no without doing further damage to his spirit, so we paid the man and stood by helplessly. But then E miraculously, impossibly, shot three oversized softballs into the shallow, tilted barrel, and was presented with this giant faux Squishmallow sloth, the victory seeping sweet relief like warm molasses into our three hungry hearts. 

Cinnamon

Provenance: Purchased at The Toy Store on Mass St., Lawrence, KS

In Kansas for Christmas, having not packed the thick drawing pad and the box of Art Hub markers, we made pilgrimage to the Toy Store  on Mass St. to buy some art supplies with Papa, both so that E could be occupied and so that he could make something for Mimi and Papa’s wall as a Christmas present (two birds). We’d forgotten that they have a giant stuffed animal section, a whole aisle of which comprises various breeds of stuffed dogs. After much careful and controlled in-store cajoling, E proposed three different Corgis, and Papa bought him the smallest one.

Sealy

Provenance: The Old Fisherman’s Warf, Monterey, CA, November of 2023

Procured on the pier while E and Doug, both out of sorts, were up north for a few days visiting Auntie Cee (Doug’s Evangelical Christian sister) and Uncle Chad (her Evangelical minister husband), while I was away from them for twelve days in Colorado City, Utah, where my dad was in the final stages of an abruptly diagnosed lung cancer, attended to by an ex-FLDS former plural wife, whom he had adopted as his naturopathic healer, having left my mom after 50 years of marriage, to die in this woman’s trailer at the base of Zion Canyon, away from all of us.

Cat Mario

Provenance: The Los Angeles Zoo, CA

We paid cash at one of those pop-up, swap-meet stalls in the parking lot after a particularly hot and fraught summer afternoon visit for which we had to pry E out of the house (we often had to pry him out of the house) during the peak of his Super Mario 3D World obsession—while he was still very, very bad at it, but spending fervent, tearful hours playing—and he was always, always at meltdown-levels of emotional dysregulation.

Garfield

Provenance: Amazon

Arrived in vacuum sealed plastic wrap—essentially just eyeballs bulging out of what seemed a flat swatch of orangey shag. We were terrified. Had no recollection of ordering it at first, had no idea what it was. But he magically reinflated as soon as we sliced open the plastic. And then we were still terrified. We thought he might scare E. We were wrong. 

Waffle

Provenance: Rolling Greens, Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood, CA

Purchased as an early Christmas gift, in part because E loves Corgis, but also in attempt to cultivate our own family traditions (i.e., a special new ornament for E each season so that he can look back with nostalgic reverence one day and hang his childhood ornaments on his own tree—we are nothing if not heavy and sentimental). Within seconds of opening up the profusely tissue-papered package, E tried to hang the Corgi on the tree, only to have him slip off the branch, and shatter his mercury glass hindquarters on the wood floor. In a spectacular show of fatherhood, Doug made him some “shorts” out of red duct tape, and saved him. He was immediately given a name, and it was decided that he should adorn not the Christmas tree, but E’s bed post. 

Bella

Provenance: Ordered through the merch shop of YouTuber, “Half Asleep Chris”

In the era of 1st grade, the only YouTube videos that E liked that didn’t give me anxiety heartburn, alongside Mark Rober’s backyard obstacle courses for squirrels, were Half Asleep Chris’s impossible Lego contraptions, Rube Goldberg machines that spanned his entire London townhouse, and the cardboard castles he would build for his two cats. Bella, one of said cats, is an odd looking, smush-faced, loafy creature, who IRL wears an inflated donut around her neck to keep from obsessively licking her own fur off. E built her, abstractly, out of Legos—mostly she was just yellow eyes. When the inspiration hit to buy this merch version of her as one of the gifts for his 7th birthday, I felt both creative and defeated.

Ottery

Provenance: I can’t remember.

Potato

Provenance: Dave and Buster’s Arcade at the mall at Hollywood and Highland, CA 

Redeemed at the prize shop with 1,374 tickets (plus $35 at the register) when spotted as an acceptable (even desirable) prize on a low, corner shelf, after the three of us had paced, agonized, through the shop, searching it for something worthy, having hovered around the Xbox with E for 10-15 very tense minutes, first gently and then sternly and then gently again explaining (imploring) that, at 160,000 tickets (and because he already has a Switch), the Xbox was simply not going to happen. 

Piper McChloe

Provenance: A Japanese gift shop at Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, CA 

We were reluctant to purchase another stuffed cat, but it had been a long day in the city on a hot-chocolate crawl with Uncle Chris and Uncle Ori (the latter of whom was doing a piece for Eater, SF about hot chocolate), and there had been a difficult hour (!!) in front of a random dumpling shop that was not on the agenda, where E really wanted dumplings…and we obliged, and then went on crawling, a little ashamed of how we had indulged him. And somehow shame begets more shame, and we bought another cat to offset another difficult moment. We had no idea that Pusheen the Cat was a thing, and so when E named this cat after two recently deceased dogs that had belonged to Doug’s sister in Kansas (not the Evangelical sister)—Piper, a very fat blonde Lab, and Chloe, a very lithe black one—our surprise was more about his dormant affection for those dogs than anything else.

E.

Provenance: Amazon

First Corgi, purchased for 5th birthday. E named him E.

Cacao

Provenance: Bodega in Chinatown in San Francisco, CA

Another trip up north, another lovie. Over the summer between 3rd and 4th grade, never plussed by the other kids’ collective infatuation with Labubus, E nevertheless became performatively excited at a bodega where we had stopped for a bottle of water, when he saw the tell-tale POP MART box behind the counter. We were somehow heartened by this normative excitement about a trendy thing. We bought the brown monster, which he insisted was a rare, one of a kind. (It’s a knock off, but we haven’t told him.)  

Gigi

Provenance: Geppetto’s Toy Store, La Jolla, CA

My hair stylist moved to San Diego and I was at sea in terms of how to find someone new, so I booked with her at her new salon, thinking I might just have a little daycation by myself. But my anxious child wanted to come with me, and I dragged my brother along for good measure. While I sat under the dryer in my foils, awash in the loneliness of not recognizing any of the celebs in US Weekly, E and Uncle Ori went off to go find some hole-in-the-wall burritos, and returned with this marvelous Golden Gorilla, whose resilient arms and sturdy fists, like majestic wings, can enfold and protect.

Frankie

Provenance: Gift shop meant for tourists in Little Tokyo, CA

Purchased because I was worn down and simply couldn’t resist the nose and limbs of this creature. Named after Frankie, the Pit mutt puppy that Doug rescued from a shelter in Harlem, when we were both living in New York but hadn’t met yet. Frankie was 5 on our first date. When E was born, she kept vigil at his crib, padding over to my side of the bed and nosing me whenever he shifted or peeped in the night. During the early Covid lockdown days, when she was 16 and had been on steroids for a while because the vet didn’t quite know what to do about her various auto-immune symptoms, she began shrieking in pain in the middle of the night. My parents came over to watch E, who was three—my dad brought folding chairs and they sat on our tiny front porch with their masks on and the front door open so they could hear E in case he woke up. Doug carried Frankie in his arms to the car and we drove her to the emergency vet to put her down. Her pain was so awful, her relief equally so. 

Fred (bunny) and Hedgies (blankie)

Provenance: Have been with E since birth

Are filthy and completely disintegrating. Fred’s “body” has three nubby cotton “tails,” one of which E has been rubbing between his thumb and his forefinger since he was a baby. His near decade of fingering has eroded a dime-sized, grey-edged hole into the soft fleece. Doug has sewn it shut from time to time, but it’s a wound that keeps re-opening. Hedgies, a muslin swaddle, was a baby shower gift from my college roommate (and first real friend); we cannot wash them because their wispy tentacles wouldn’t survive. 

The Cousins (now known as Freddle, Frank, and Honey)

Provenance: The Pump Station website

When E was a baby, we dropped Fred on a stroller walk and didn’t discover he was missing until we were nearly home. We circled back the way we’d come—a groove so ingrained, our path through this neighborhood—up one block, over one, up one more, back over, and down two. Fred was there on the sidewalk, unbothered, unknown; if he hadn’t been ours, he’d have just been a nothing—refuse upsetting the clean lines of lawn and concrete, something someone left. If we’d walked by and recognized this beige rag as a child’s stuffed bunny, we’d have thought “awww” and then not thought about it again, ever. To shore up against such a loss, we went online and bought two extra Freds and an extra Hedgies, none of which ever made it into rotation, because they never felt “right.” They’ve always been known as The Cousins, and mostly they’ve lived in a drawer. But in the frenzied memorializing that has gripped him in this tenth birthday week, E is shoring his fragments. A small boat thrashing in the current between soft gosling with down feathers and boy whose mother is a separate body, he has pulled them from their slumber and given them proper names.