<\/p>\nAround here we have a little friend we call “Barney Bear.” Lucy loves him, he’s soft, he smiles all the time, and he makes a gentle shush-shush when you shake him. He’s so perfect that I had a strange thought the other day: how about buying a whole case of him? <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I instinctively found this thought a little alarming. But why is that?<\/p>\n
On the one hand, why not take advantage of mass production in order to guard against future loss of this beloved toy? If he ever had a bad spin in the washing machine, or got written on with permanent ink, or {gasp} got left behind on some outing — well, we’d just pull out his identical twin and happiness could be restored. We buy mass-produced items all the time, don’t we? Everything from diapers to onesies to a favorite food rolls off the factory lines so smoothly that we’re assured of our satisfaction with the next one as much as the last. So maybe stocking up on Barneys wouldn’t be a bad idea.<\/p>\n
But I think there’s a difference. We replace a disposable diaper with a new one because, well, disposable diapers _have_ to be replaced! We eat the next Cheerio because the last one is already getting digested and absorbed into our bodies. They’re consumables by definition. But buying a bushel of Barneys would be hedging against _emotional_ loss. And I guess I don’t believe that can really work. It starts to sound more like the lonely millionaires who get their favorite dog cloned so they’ll always have someone to talk to. That’s really the heart of it, in fact: my scheme to stockpile Barney would feel like an attempt to cheat death — that it wouldn’t be replacement but reanimation I’d be attempting.<\/p>\n
Besides, I admit that I believe “_The Velveteen Rabbit_”:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0385077254\/octothorppres-20 really does have it right: a beloved toy becomes unique when it’s really loved. So if Lucy really did love Barney, it wouldn’t be the product she loved but really Barney himself. If he were lost, then he’d be gone, and we’d have to be sad. Swapping in another as if it were just a replacement part of her childhood would be ineffective as well as a little industrial. Knowing that he’s one-of-a-kind means admitting we might have to be sad someday. (But of course, I could be wrong: maybe this tactic really can work. Has anyone tried it who can report on how it went?)<\/p>\n
But now that I think about it, maybe what’s really creepy is that we humans fall in love with our stuffed animals in the first place!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Around here we have a little friend we call “Barney Bear.” Lucy loves him, he’s soft, he smiles all the time, and he makes a gentle shush-shush when you shake him. He’s so perfect that I had a strange thought the other day: how about buying a whole case of him?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}