When I was about four years old (about a million years ago) my favorite cartoon was called The Quick Draw McGraw show. McGraw was a gun-totin' horse. I don't remember much about the show, but he had a buddy on his adventures, a little Mexican burro called Baba Looey. Baba Looey was my favorite, and for Christmas when I was four I was given a little stuffed Baba Looey, who became my pal. I packed him around everywhere.
Flash forward a decade. I somehow managed to hang onto the little burro, but in 1971, following a divorce, my family moved from a big place in the country to a small apartment about a block from what would become my high school. There just wasn't much room in the apartment, and Baba Looey didn't make the cut. I placed him a pile of stuff to be discarded. He was pretty worn. And what high school guy needs a stuffed burro? As I recall, it wasn't a big deal. I was just getting rid of a little kid's toy.
There may be a photo of me and Baba Looey someplace. I'm not sure. Other than maybe seeing a photo, I don't think I gave the little stuffed animal another thought for many years. For 25 years, to be exact. I thought about other favorite toys, and I wished that I had them to share with my own kids. I loved my Johnny Seven (a plastic assault rifle that shot seven ways, including a grenade launcher and a derringer hidden in the stock) and favorite books, like A Wrinkle in Time, and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and Black and Blue Magic. Many of my favorite belongings were books, and through the years I've managed to buy them for my own kids to enjoy.
My sister Toni was three years older than me, although we were separated by more than years. She ran away regularly from about the time she was fourteen years old, and by the time she was 16 she was gone more than she was home. She had a tough life, tougher for living much of it out of a bottle. I don't think I saw her more than once a year from the time I was eighteen until I was thirty-five, although she lived just 100 miles away. And for seven years, while I lived two thousand miles away, in Pittsburgh, I don't think I saw her at all.
To my surprise, when I was 39, I received a Christmas present from Toni. We didn't exchange presents much, mostly because we didn't know whether she would even show up for holiday celebrations. But this year, when I was 39, she did show up. And brought me a carefully wrapped present. Inside was my old stuffed burro, Baba Looey. The memories flooded back.
Although she was just seventeen, Toni had some perspective at that age, and she realized that what I didn't care about when I was 14 might have a different significance when I was older. She had pulled him off the pile and hidden him away, just this occasion. I must admit I got choked up. I hadn't thought of him in 25 years. What a thoughtful gift. What I discarded as meaningless at 14 became a small treasure of memories. I don't know how she managed to retain him. She raised two kids during the intervening years. I would have thought that her kids would have found him and used him up.
Toni is gone. She passed away less than a year later. I never really got to talk to her about her thoughtfulness, about what motivated her, or about whether anyone else knew what she had schemed. I'll never know. The gift of a tattered stuffed animal was a special moment in time. Toni and I connected in a way we hadn't in a long time. I learned a little bit about myself, and about my sister that Christmas morning.
Yes, Toni is gone. But I still have tattered burro tucked away, out of sight. And he means a lot more to me today than he did when I was a preschooler, because of a Christmas morning when I was thirty-nine.
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