Father-Daughter Trip to Baby Gap

I call him Dirty Ernie. Or at least that’s what my parents call him. Once upon a time he was a pristine, fluffy, white teddy bear but that’s not how I remember him. The Ernie I know is kind of yellowish. Shaggy. His bear snout squished and flat. Fur all matted and worn from being thoroughly loved and then thrown in the washing machine one too many times.

My mom likes to tell the embarrassing story of how he first ended up in the washing machine because I peed on him as a baby. There’s no hard evidence of this, but I do have a black and white VHS tape somewhere of me talking and reading to Ernie while he sits in a kid-sized rocking chair.

Ernie has a rather large incision on his back. Apparently, over the years his stuffing got a little limp, so my mom— as she puts it— gave him surgery, to plump him up a bit. 

At some point in his early life, I decided Ernie should start wearing blue eye-shadow and clothing. I put a baby-shirt on him, which must have belonged to me at one point. It had thin horizontal pastel blue and pink stripes. That’s how I remember him: Classic Dirty Ernie. 

Somehow in the shuffle from my parent’s old house in New York, to storage, to me eventually reclaiming him and taking him to California along with a trunk of other childhood treasures— the shirt got lost. When I was about 25 I flew out to Austin to visit my dad and brought Ernie with me. My Dad and I don’t have a lot of shared memories from childhood, but he remembered Dirty Ernie fondly. While we were out outlet shopping with my step-mom, my dad and I decided to look for a new shirt for Ernie. We went to Baby Gap. My Dad picked it out. It was kelly green with horizontal yellow, black and red stripes.This is the shirt Ernie rocks today, minus the blue eye-shadow. 

When I had kids, took Ernie out of the trunk to show them, and he’s been out ever since. Somehow I don’t have the heart to put him back.