There is only one time in my life I was ever late back from lunch. One. In all the years of showing up, being where I was supposed to be, doing what was expected — there was one afternoon where something pulled me sideways and I didn't make it back on time. I have never once regretted it.
It was a swap meet. The kind with rows of folding tables and tarps strung between poles, sunlight cutting through at odd angles, the smell of something frying somewhere nearby. I was browsing the way you do when you're not looking for anything in particular — which is, of course, exactly when you find the thing that changes everything.
He was hanging from a post.
Not on a table. Not in a box with other things. Hanging from a post, by straps, like he was waiting. Like he had been waiting for a while and had decided to be patient about it. He was a bear — round and warm and serious in the way that bears are serious — and he was, technically speaking, a purse.
I bought him immediately. And then, before anything else, I cut the straps off. He was never going to be a purse. That was never what he was. The straps came off and he became himself — just a bear, no longer hanging, no longer for sale, no longer waiting.
His name was Cake. T. Cake, to be precise, though I couldn't have told you then why that was his name. Some names you don't choose. Some names simply arrive with the thing they belong to.
I was late back from lunch that day. My only time. And I would do it again a thousand times over.
that I would be the first
to inhabit Rabbits Run Free.
Cake came home with me that afternoon. He has been here ever since. Thirty-something years of quiet companionship, of being present, of watching the world change around him with the particular patience of a bear who was cut free from a post at a swap meet and has never forgotten what that felt like.
He was waiting for something, even then. We both were. We just didn't know yet what it was called, or that it would take until 2019 to have its name spoken out loud for the first time in the same room where we were all finally, finally together.
But that part of the story belongs to Bun.