A Trifle

This afternoon I was tutoring a quirky and wonderful eleven-year-old girl who has a very natural funny writing voice but has never learned much about structure--about organizing her thoughts and words in ways that allow her to best express herself. She, and her equally amazing older brother, are examples of why I continue to do some tutoring; working with them is gratifying, fun, and helpful to me as a thinker and writer myself.

Anyway, I was helping this girl write an essay about the time she met her hero, Jane Goodall. I can't remember how it came up but at one point she let it slip that she had a baby blanket, one that had been given to her mother at her baby shower, one that she'd had all her life. It is called Silky. After she told me this she looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes, waiting to see, I think, if I was going to give her that "aren't you sweet" smile adults give kids so often and that Lily, at 4, already dislikes. I don't blame her; I hated it too. So instead I told this girl about my baby blanket, which was also given to me on the occasion of my birth, and which I had until my freshman year of college.

My blanket was called Soft Blanket. (I also had a black cat named Midnight; what can I say? My creativity kicked in late?) I loved Soft Blanket. To be totally honest, I feel a little sad writing about Soft Blanket now; I miss it still, I realize. When I went on an exchange trip to France in eighth grade, I cut a little square of Soft Blanket to bring along with me--my sister's idea, as there wasn't room in my bag to bring the whole blanket. And when I went to college, I brought Soft Blanket along. It didn't occur to me to be embarrassed by this, and as it turned out both of my roommates, and Nicole, had brought along their own "attachment objects"--a term I'd never heard until becoming a mother.

Nicole and I regressed with our blankets, even more than the actual fact of their existence implied. I guess we did this in appropriate college student ways: throwing each other's blankets out our fourth floor windows onto the quad, holding each other's blankets hostage, talking trash about each other's blankets. Wow--sounds dorkier than I realized when I see it in print. Know that we were not actually social outcasts: This was an activity reserved for bored Sunday afternoons or late night post party wrap-up sessions; it's not as though we were parading the blankets through the dining hall.

Anyway, over spring break of that first year of college, I went to visit Nicole in San Francisco. I brought two of my favorite possessions: my red Swedish clogs, which my mother had brought back from Dallarna, and Soft Blanket. Which, in hindsight, was a mistake. I had bought my ticket with these American Express vouchers that were popular at the time and cost $129 round trip but required a stop in usually Minneapolis. And Minneapolis, it turns out, is where Soft Blanket met its (his? her?) untimely demise. Or at least was lost to me forever. When I went to pick up my luggage at the airport in San Francisco, where Nicole's mother had come to pick me up, my bag had come open. I rifled through its contents quickly, urgently; three things were missing: the carefully wrapped house-guest gift I had brought for Nicole's mom, my red handpainted clogs, and Soft Blanket.

Nicole's mom took me to the customer service counter to report the damage to my bag and the missing items. The woman behind the counter asked me to give a complete description. She told me there was a team of people at the airport in Minneapolis who would be able to search and likely find my missing things, that it happened all the time. She said she would call right then, as soon as she had my descriptions. I duly described the wrapping paper, the shape of my gift. I described my distinctive red clogs. And then....I stumbled.

"Well," I said slowly. "It's a blanket. Or it used to be a blanket. It's more like a piece of material that's kind of....falling apart. It's pink and white--or it used to be pink and white; it's actually sort of a dirty whitish grey. It has a little square cut out of one corner where--" I stopped. The woman was looking at me a little sympathetically, a little concerned. Nicole's mother's brow was slightly furrowed. I knew then that Soft Blanket was gone. The airline staff in Minneapolis was not going to be able to locate and salvage what to the untrained eye was a dirty threadbare rag.

Sure enough, within 24 hours I had the gift and my clogs. I got the zipper fixed on my bag. I never saw Soft Blanket again.

I told the girl this, as I am telling you now, and she listened, carefully. When I was done, she lowered her head, shaking it a little in dismay. "That sucks," she said, finally. I forgave her the slang. She is, after all, eleven. And, she was right.