For Keeps

Elspeth and Bea sleep and Merry sleeps soon, hopefully, at a friend's house. Martin and his life-long friend Jeff are off in Ninevah, PA, attending a meeting about UFOs and Bigfoot. We saw the gathering advertised at the local Farmer's Market and off they went. I'm waiting for the report.

Tonight, tucked up in my bed, I read Elspeth an old favorite, "Little Bear's Friend." It's a green hard-back book and pictured on the front, Emily (in a straw party hat)sits across from Little Bear (in a striped, peaked party hat); on the table sits Lucy the doll, who has not yet broken her arm by falling out of Owl's tree.

Inside the cover of the book, I found a red, circular stamp: THIS BOOK IS BELONGS TO HML * HEATHER MARIE LONG; underneath, in large letters printed in blue crayon: and Kimberly Long. The stamp (grammatical error and all) was made, I'm sure, in Bangladesh, and the book is copyrighted 1960, so my sister Heather and I must have been about eight and six, respectively. The pages are yellowed and brittle but wonderfully familiar. I found myself almost choking up as I read the last chapter, which tells the story of Emily saying goodbye to Little Bear:

Mother Bear said, "Let us eat up all the cake. If we do, then it will not rain tomorrow."

"Let it rain," said Little Bear. "Emily will not be here tomorrow to play with me."
(Little Bear's Friend, by Else Holmelund Minarik, Harper & Row)

Then there's that wonderful bit where Emily, moved by her love for Little Bear, hands over Lucy, her dearest possession, and tells Little Bear she wants him to have Lucy for keeps. Little Bear barely responds before Emily pulls Lucy back again and says she forgot, but she has to take Lucy to school with her. Minarik is particularly perceptive in this book; we long to show our love in the face of impending loss, and yet we hold fast to the things that make us secure in the face of change.

Two big tears run down Little Bear's face after Emily and Lucy leave, and Mother Bear scoops him up into her lap. What Elspeth didn't know as I read the story out loud, what she has not yet experienced, is the bittersweet pain of leaving dear ones and dear places; what my childhood was filled with; what I felt when I saw my sister and my child-names in the front of this book.