Making One's Way

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
(- Lao Tzu)

Henry’s Baby Jaguar is nearly worn out. His cloth hide is dangerously thin and his stuffing knocked loose from so many washings, careful though they have been.

One wonders if any other little stuffed toy has ever been so loved or has ever come to its little boy owner at such a right moment. Our neighbor gave us Baby Jaguar for Henry seemingly long ago, near the first part of this story, after we arrived home from China and had quickly begun those early surgeries. She is an older woman of very modest means who lost her own home and all her belongings in 2005. During the slow exodus return she moved in with the quiet elderly man who has long lived across the street from us. In the time since, she has often given little gifts and thoughtful cards to our girls and when Henry came home she picked up the little stuffed jaguar toy for him, originally a chew toy, a promotional item from a pet store uptown. “I just thought little Henry would like him,” she said in her gentle way the day she brought the gift by. Henry grabbed the little jaguar and hugged him like he had found a lost child. And so the friendship began.

It reminded us of the special gift we found on our front porch years before, after one of our daughters first came home. Then it was the gift of a doll, an angel handmade from strips of old fabric fastened around an empty plastic soft drink bottle, heart-breaking and beautiful in its obvious painstaking construction. The word "family" was centered in the pattern on the cloth that was wrapped around its body. This tender celestial form had been made and left by another neighbor, a woman with no discernible financial support who lived with her young autistic son otherwise alone in an upstairs room in the building directly behind our home. The building was a dilapidated two-story apartment house, also eventually rendered uninhabitable five years ago and only last month finally torn down by a demolition crew. Even before the storm it had been a warren of hard luck stories looming over our cheerily contrasting domain. We have been privileged to observe that kindness has no income requirement. Here was a woman with desperate needs of her own but who instinctively saw in what she had heard about our children something she and her son very much lacked but that touched her: a sign that someone else could truly care.

Still, Baby Jaguar perhaps has been a more special gift because of how Henry took to him and how their bond never loosened, until a little bit lately.  Now Henry occasionally leaves Baby Jaguar in his room instead of constantly carrying him throughout the house. The other day Baby Jaguar was inadvertently left outside after Henry had come in from playing in the yard. It rained before we remembered to retrieve him.

Henry needs Baby Jaguar less now, as he has simultaneously found his place in the circle of other little children at his new school. He listens to his teacher and follows her directions, just as the other children do. Smiling. Laughing. Wondering. Learning to leave stuff behind, he is learning to to make his way in the world. Henry is growing out of his special vulnerability, and becoming a regular child.

The music with this post is a piece titled The Sixth Station and composed by Joe Hisaishi.