A blankie, a wubbie, a throw, a thing that everyone needs that holds a family together.
My dad had a hat that had once belonged to his grandfather. He came into possession of it when his grandmother began to clean out the chests of old clothes in the attic after he had died. Dad received the soft chocolate brown fedora when he was seventeen. It was in pristine condition then, though his grandmother wasn’t sure if it was because Great-Grandpa had never worn it, or because he was fussy and meticulous in caring for his clothes.
By the time my sister and I came around that hat had become well worn and scuffed, and he had added others to his collection, but the now slouchy brown Fedora would remain his favorite. It had been the entire basis for his wardrobe in high school, which continued to develop in the same direction into his adulthood. As a teen he’d built his own wardrobe on the remnants of his grandfather’s slacks and vests and sweaters. Even now he enjoyed going clothing shopping and having the pleasure of finding the perfect piece from the perfect thrift store. My father loved argyle and corduroy, pinstripes and vintage dress pants. He liked warm, dark colors and he mixed them in disorganized and slightly mismatched layers.
I always thought he looked like a library. Not the librarian, or a bookish guy who haunted the stacks, but the very library itself. He was the uncut edges of hardcover pages and the brass combination display plaque and handles on the big wooden card catalog. He seemed to reflect the fact that all books are different sizes and stood like broken teeth in every long wooden shelf. He was big comfy reading chairs and punishing wooden ones tucked under wide, scarred tables. He was the thin, ugly carpet and the warm, musty book smell, and muttered silence of learning.
When the Thneed arrived for him, straight out of one of my childhood’s favorite books it seemed as if it should have been in his closet all along. Mom whispered the secret of Daddy’s birthday present to my sister and me a week before. We thought she must be lying. She found an actual Thneed? “A fine something that all people need?” Mama promised that it was Truffula free and that made me happy. I wanted to be in no way responsible for the devastation of yet another Truffula forest.
I believe my father was first impressed by the color, his favorite; red. Always there was some hint of red on him, in the stripe of his dress shirt with the stuck-out collar, a red tie under a green vest, or simply the flash of crimson when the cuffs of his pants rose to reveal his socks. His new Thneed warmed from a shiny bright red into a deeper, warm maroon and back again along the length of fuzzy looking fabric.
He did not understand what it was at first, and I too was skeptical upon first sight. My little sister was only 3 at the time and more interested in the cake waiting in the kitchen. Mom was excited, she was the only one who’d seen it, touched it, and wrapped it in pretty paper for Dad. I watched the length of two-toned red unroll and caught the glint of a silver button, of a red one, a maroon one, a black one. Eventually we would all have a favorite of the 16 or so buttons, but I was only beginning to see the possibility hinted at by these mismatched discs.
My sister was entranced as well when she touched the soft fuzzy knit. Her fingers rubbed against the thin black border that framed the red. The black yarn had hints of glitter throughout, though not glaringly sparkly. We would learn in the years to come that it added the smallest bit of glitter to a pretty outfit my mother or sister had created, but was not so apparent that the Thneed looked too feminine on Father or me. We all favored the reds in our wardrobe to match it. The Thneed was a fine something that belonged to the whole family from the moment Daddy opened his birthday gift.
I think it was a rare day in our house when the Thneed was not used. Mom loved it as much as dad did, though she was an expert of buttoning and arranging it into something new and stylish, where dad preferred just simply wear it as a scarf. She looked fantastic in it, like my dad she favored clothing that was from an older generation than her own and the Thneed seemed to be the perfect fit in their vintage wardrobe. . But mom wasn’t a library like dad. Mom was the sunshine in the library. Mom was the color beyond the sepia range of neutral pages inside thousands of books.
I think, like most other boys with beautiful, loving mothers I spent most of my childhood with the recurring fantasy that I would grow up to win her away from my father. I would make her fall in love with me and we would go away and live happily somewhere together. Our morning ritual was my favorite place for me to dream this dream, when the light was still low and my bed was still a fond memory of a not too distant past.
The Thneed was hers in the mornings. Mom would pick it up first thing in the morning while she moved through the dark house from the chair back, or ledge, or shelf where it’d last been left. She wrapped herself in the incredibly light but insanely warm fabric, buttoning it here and there to keep it on her shoulders, but out the way of her hands while she started the coffee and packed lunches. Her morning stumbling sounds always woke me early and I tended to join her in the kitchen before my father had come out of the shower, before my sister woke.
I would sit in the tall chair next to the counter to help her fill Dad’s lunch. While I filled sandwich bags with crackers she would make a cup of coffee for each of us. She drank hers black with a little bit of brown sugar. Mine she called a Café au lait, though she used more milk, with two sugars. She moved around the kitchen draped in soft red yarn and morning shadows and a halo of sleepy brown hair and she was mine alone for half an hour.
Then my sister would get up and Dad would bring her down, changed and dressed and ready for breakfast. Mom fed my sister and Dad read out bits of the newspaper to us. Though he only read happy, funny, interesting stories he never pretended that there wasn’t also sadness in the world. He said that mornings were not the place for those stories and hoped to send us all out cheerful into the world and each day before us.
When he left for work there would be an exchange. He would kiss me, and then my sister. My mother accompanied him to the door where she kissed him goodbye and spoke to him about adult things that kids never understand. Sometimes we heard her laugh, and sometimes she closed the door a little more firmly. Sometimes she came back wearing the Thneed, and sometimes she came back without it. These two variables did not seem to affect each other, whether they were fighting or happy did not decide possession of our fine something. I never heard them discuss its use, who wore it what day, or request to have it from the other. They shared it without a word, passing it back and forth on what must have been a telepathic connection.
I sometimes wondered if Dad thought about her on the days he left it behind; if he thought about her wandering around the house in it all morning long. On the days it went with dad I know I thought about it. I knew that he kept it on the back of his chair; always near him in the small office he called his own. I wonder if he realized that it went nearly everywhere with us when we were young. It was a blanket that covered us both in the car, even from across the seats. It went with us to the park and the museum, stuffed into the back pocket of my sister’s stroller.
We used it as a blanket, an occasionally a towel if there was nothing else nearby. Mom took good care to wash it often and never soak anything up that would ruin it for good. Though it was small and oddly shaped, we always made a spot for it in our living room forts of sheets and blankets. I used it as a cape occasionally, whether as a superhero or a king it didn’t matter. My sister wrapped it around her head and pretended to be Rapunzel. She wrapped it around her legs and pretended to be a mermaid. Sometimes I wrapped her up into a cocoon and tortured her with threats of never letting her out of her buttoned up prison until my mom told me to stop.
Between my sister and me, when we were older, the Thneed was our Precious. We shared badly with each other, though we gave deference to our parents when they invoked their own possession over the garment. We were all devoted to the crazy misshapen thing. I remember the first year we had it Mom wrapped my sister up in a soft and warm red cloak and handed her a basket. She was Red Riding Hood for Halloween. I was the wolf that year, my mother as the Grandmother and my father as the Woodsman. Though we all showed our reverence to this silly little scarf I know that I was at least jealous that it was my sister who actually got to wear it.
Even the dog we got when I was 7 loved the comfy length of red. Perhaps it was because it smelled like all of us, but we would find him curled up in a ball in the middle of the Thneed when it was left, forgotten in a chair or on the floor. When he was a puppy he chewed one corner, including the button, nearly completely off. We never found the button, we figured he swallowed it and never looked hard for it after that. My mother repaired the tattered corner of the Thneed as best she could with a red yarn that was not quite as nice as the original but gave it a little personalization that had been missing. She replaced the button with a white bone shaped one in honor of the new member of the family.
That wasn’t the only repair made to the Thneed over the years. Sometimes I think my sister learned to sew from grandma only to ensure that she would always be able to repair any injuries incurred by our best friend. Snags were pulled and repaired, the border partially unraveled and was replaced with a feathery black yarn that Dad and I made sure to hide when we buttoned it on. A large hole developed once and a piece of fabric was sewn into the gap, my sister meticulously catching every loose unraveling stitch and save it from falling to bits. When she was done she decorated the fabric patch with some quick embroidery, commemorating the date of the injury and of the repair. We spoke of that nerve wracking day in hushed tones of reverence for our recovered hero.
When our dog died 9 years later my sister stitched two seams along the corner to stop fraying, and then carefully cut it off. We buried him with his part of the family friend. My sister replaced the corner with red fabric featuring little dog images and a new bone button. We would still remember it as his corner.
With all the additions and repairs it could have begun to appear tattered and homeless, but it didnt. Either we were blinded by our love, or the unique style shared now by the whole family was only reflected perfectly in our Thneed.
I took the Thneed with me when I was 15 to the park where I was to meet the girl from three doors down to watch the baseball game together. It had rained all morning and the sky was still hanging gray. I showed her my Thneed, bragging about the warmth and the ingenuity of the dozen plus buttons that could be pushed through at any place in the widely knitted fabric. I shared one arm of it with her when it got colder. I am sure that the Thneed got me my first kiss that afternoon.
Whether my sister has a similar story, you’d have to ask her yourself. I do know that she wore it to Junior Prom wrapped up into a hooded shrug. The glittering black border ran diagonals up and down her arms and draped from her hands in pointed bells. The dress she wore was forgettable on its own, but I have never forgotten how the little girl who had once been Red Riding Hood suddenly became so beautiful. You won’t tell her I said that, though, will you?
My sister made sure it was packed into my suitcase when I went to Europe with some friends after I graduated high school. I opened my case when I got to our first hotel and found it there and could have cried. It crossed countries with me and was borrowed by all of my friends at least once. My family spent four days in anxious anticipation after I had foolishly packed it in my big luggage, rather than my carry on for the flight home. They sent our Thneed to the wrong airport and though they swore they knew exactly where it was and would get it back to us, for four days we mourned.
My sister got married. My mother found me during the reception, only a little while before the newly weds were to leave and handed me the Thneed, rolled up and buttoned in an easy-to-carry pillow. She didn’t have to say anything. I snuck into my sister’s dressing room and buried it in her suitcase. She may not need it in Hawaii, but she might want it and that was all that mattered.
It was used by my own wife as a baby sling to carry our first born. She preferred it to the fit of the store bought ones, our daughter slept more comfortably in the one fashioned by her mother. My daughter was not the first one to throw up on it in its long life with us, nor the last.
Though it shuttled between my sister and me as adults it still made its way back into our possession parents just as often. The exact things they do with it or use it for, we can’t know, but we know they loved it and use it lovingly. It is almost all replaced by now, the old buttons sewn onto new patches of knitted red, or soft black fabric inserted into holes and gaps. There are still stretches of uninterrupted crimson to maroon fade that had so entranced my father when he first saw it and the glittering border that had caught my sister’s eye. No matter how it changes over the years it will always be our thneed. Our something special. The thing we will always need.
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