I recently became aware of a tourism marketing campaign that has dubbed this particular area and it's surrounding real estate as "The Pennsylvania Wilds". I found this out when a former student asked me if I had ever been there. Despite spending two-thirds of my life there, confused by this strange nomenclature, I said no. In fact, until I googled it, I thought it was either some kind of animal park or my second, more likely guess, an annual biker convention. Once I realized what place it actually referred to, I laughed out loud. After all, unless things have drastically changed in my absence, no one that I know in Pennsylvania actually uses that description. The next day, I warned my student that if he wished to avoid sticking out as a tourist, he should avoid referring to the area as the "PA Wilds". In hindsight, I fear I might have set him up for failure. Truth be told, no amount of linguistic subterfuge would allow this prepster from the suburbs of New York to blend in with the locals. Even if he traded in his Hollister hoodie for head to toe camo, the poor guy wouldn't stand a chance. God help him should he ever find himself at Cougar Bob's Tavern, where seamlessly disappearing into the hometown crowd is key to one's survival.
Going to the mountains was always filled with adventure and fun. Who needed summer camp, when you could squeeze your entire extended family into a three bedroom, two and a half bath ranch home. It's true that the accommodations might have been a bit undersized for the amount of guests it was required to hold, but we didn't care. The acres of surrounding forest that served as our playground certainly made up for it. Like any summer camp worth its salt, it offered loads of activities. The outdoor sort could enjoy swimming, boating, water-skiing, hiking, and fishing as well as salamander, tadpole, and crayfish wrangling. For the budding athlete, the sports field offered volley-ball, badminton, jai-a-lai, horseshoes, croquet, archery, riflery, and a trampoline. You could also enjoy large group games of Hide 'n Seek, Wolf, or Spud. If it rained or you weren't a big nature lover, you could participate in a variety of indoor activities. On the living room floor were a boatload of vintage board games, along with card games like Uno, War, Baloney, Spoons, and Speed, plus every version of Solitaire you could ever imagine. At the kitchen table, you would find a formidable arts & crafts area and on the nearby linoleum floor, you were likely to witness a rowdy tournament of Jacks, Tiddlywinks, Dominoes, or Pick-up-Sticks. For the younger crowd, there was a lovely sandbox full of recycled kitchen gadgets used to maneuver grains of sand, a teeter-totter, and a colossal handcrafted swing set. Not to mention the food was out of this world. Finally, weather permitting, every evening came to a close around a toasty, crackling campfire under a blanket of shimmering stars.
Having a giant sleepover with sixteen or seventeen of your cousins allowed you to find out a lot of interesting personal information about your relatives. The kind of details that might slip right by you if you hadn't been squeezed together in such tight quarters. Not being a family blessed with extremely keen eyesight or perfectly straight chompers, nighttime was when the teens broke out the contact lens cookers and special teeth straightening contraptions. A tiny parade of woobies, special pillows, and snuggly stuffed things trailed down the hall behind the little kids on their way off to bed. Unless of course they were too old or too cool to be seen with one. In that case, it was usually jammed inside their pillowcase for safe keeping beyond the judging eyes of older, cooler cousins. While this practice was universally overlooked, it could be quite a rough, unforgiving crowd for thumb-suckers.
Among the ratty blankies, one-eyed teddy bears, stuffingless bunnies, and one-eared koalas, a single nighttime pal stood out. He was an egg shaped little pillow with pre-flattened arms and legs...less stuffing, less problems. He wore a little pair of loud, patterned pants on his bottom half, and his top half was all white, except for his little tuft of yarn loop hair. He had a face on both the front and back of his head, but not in a scary monster sort of way. It was more like having two friends in one. The front version was sleeping and the version on the back was awake, but that wasn't even his best feature. He had a little snap on his belly that allowed his outside to be entirely removed and laundered. This amazing design greatly reduced the amount of spittle, snot, and snack remnants that were allowed to accumulate on your beloved bedtime buddy. He went by the handle Comfy. Lot's of people made the unforgivable error of mistaking him for Humpty Dumpty to which the exasperated reply would always be, "He is NOT a Humpty Dumpty, he is a COMFY!!
As a little kid, I admit that I may have suffered from a fairly serious case of Comfy envy. Sure, I had my own special teddy bear with a wind up crank on his hiney. He played rock-a-bye-baby and he slept with me every night, but the lure of Comfy was hard to resist. I noticed that he was quite a popular guy around camp. Almost everybody had one except me and my two siblings. My brother was probably in the too old range and my sister was probably among the too cool set. Since most of my cousins lived in the city, I simply thought Comfy was probably some trendy toy that just hadn't yet become available in my rural area.
Then one day, I asked the burning question that would turn my entire world on its ear. "Hey cousin so-and-so, where'd you get that Comfy?" Her unbelievable reply? "What a silly question, you know you're mom made him." "What!" My face grew hot as I instantly found myself under the influence of blind seething rage, bubbling up from the depths of my injured six year old soul. The fact is that I actually did NOT know that my own mom was the mastermind behind these highly coveted little guys. More importantly, why in the world was I walking around without one? In the entirety of the craft making kingdom, there has never been a more heartbreaking slight! I spun on my heels to track down my mom. I made a beeline for the kitchen, where she was elbow deep in a vat of potato salad, prepping lunch for the masses. An arc of potato salad flew through the air when I struck from behind. "WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO DOES NOT HAVE A COMFY? DON'T YOU LOVE ME?" I wailed.
My startled mother turned to face me head on, half-coated in mayonnaise, unsure of how to handle this delicate subject. She had hoped it might not come up but that plan was currently a wash. An infuriated little beastie was charging directly towards her demanding an explanation. The truth was that the Comfy crafting program had been discontinued, a result of a massive Tri-Chem shortage at the end of the seventies. Tri-Chem or liquid embroidery, was the craft supply used to create Comfy's two cute little faces. If a giant tube of permanent, indelible fabric paint and a roller ball pen could reproduce, their offspring would be Tri-Chem. Like the vinyl record, the bell bottom, and the macramé planter before it, Tri-Chem was the hapless victim of time marching on. While most of these things had newfangled replacements like the cassette tape, the stirrup pant, and the embroidery floss friendship bracelet, Tri-Chem did not. Washable fabric paint that could stand up to the intense amount of love bestowed on the Comfys of the world was not yet available at that time. Once the last metal tube of Tri-Chem found itself crinkled up and dried out, lying lifeless in a big metal box under my mom's bed, so was the end of the Comfy. Although the production line that churned out Comfys had been silenced long before I was born, this did little to improve my mood. "Well, you should have made one for me anyway." I yelled. I stomped off to pout on the swings, knowing that I would never know the joy of snuggling a Comfy of my very own.
Until one day, he found me. Every spring my mother hosted a community yard sale of epic proportions in our garage. (The details of which are far too great to be contained here, but I do promise to revisit garage sales in the future.) On a table at one of her yard sales is where I discovered an abandoned, unwanted Rescue Comfy in need of a good home. Some unfeeling child, who had probably become too old or too cool for Comfy had haphazardly tossed him aside. She and her cold, black heart had hastily slapped a masking-tape price tag across his right eye. Cruel. It wasn't even the closed one. The cost of heartbreak in those days was only 75 cents. I knew what I had to do. I ran to my room, grabbed my piggy bank, and launched its contents across the floor. I crawled through the change on my hands and knees, scrambling to gather the required sum. Worried some other savvy shopper might snap him up in my absence, I raced back with the exact change clenched tightly in my fist. I had impressions of nickels on both knees and a dime stuck to my left shin, but I didn't care. I had to be the one to save Comfy. It was my destiny.
I snatched up the Comfy and practically flew to the card table where my unsuspecting mom was sitting behind a little metal cash box. "Mom, I found a Comfy. He was all alone on a table and nobody else wants him. Can I keep him? I have the money and I promise to take good care of him. Please, please, please?" I begged. Her response? "Well alright, but he needs a bath." and with that, she ripped off his little cloth body and chucked the whole thing into the waiting washer. From that day forward, he has continued to live with me, even when I moved to Paris. Fortunately, improvement in the quality and durability of fabric paint in the early nineties also brought with it the resurgence of the Comfy. Now my son can snuggle his very own Comfy as he drifts off to sleep each night, only he prefers to call him by his full name Comfy-Cozy.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment