November 2006 Archives

This is short, but sweet: Emmie walked up to a small Christmas tree in the Cambridge city centre today, pointed out the lights to me, and made the ASL sign for ‘flower’.

So, a few weeks back, Emelyn pointed vigorously at a full-page picture of Tony Snow (White House press secretary) in Time magazine and said, “Da-da”.

Today, she pulled a five-pound note out of my wallet, stared long and hard at Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, looked up at me and smiled, then pointed carefully again at Her Majesty, and said, “Da-da”. At which point Azure tells me that Emmie did the exact same thing two days ago, when I wasn’t around.

This is a long story.

When I was a boy, I spent quite a few summers in Germany, visiting Oma, my maternal grandmother. Those are all happy memories, though like most childhood recollections, they’re fragmented, now: I can picture Oma’s tiny refrigerator, Opa’s metal-framed recliner, my Polizei Playmobil set, the miniature boiler above the bath, and a million other details. People and faces are harder to recall, although there’s one particular image of Oma at her stove, and a memory of my Opa in his chair (doodling mustaches on faces in a magazine) that still seem clear and right to me.

But the memory that matters for this particular tale is of a book - “Tales From Moominvalley”, by Tove Jansson. Somebody, probably Mom, bought it at Regensburg’s English bookstore. Moomin books are justly famous in their native Finland, and the children’s series eventually migrated throughout the UK and much of Europe (and Japan, as we shall see), but I don’t think it ever made an impact in the States.

I loved the Moomins, though. In particular, I liked Snufkin, who wears a dirty green hat and smokes a pipe.

Who is Snufkin? Hard to say with precision, but he’s a sincere fellow, who occasionally wanders into the Moomin stories to help the small Moomin creatures get their problems sorted. I wanted to be like Snufkin back then, and maybe I still do: he’s incorrigibly itinerant, unfailingly humble, surprisingly attuned to the natural world, and, most of all, thoughtful in how he deals with others. Tove Jansson, who wrote and illustrated the Moomin books, drew him like so:

Good guy.

Now, fast-forward twenty-odd years, and spin the planet to Tokyo, where Azure and I are strolling through quiet backstreets, getting purposely lost. And who should we find fifteen minutes later, but Snufkin, standing at attention on a junk-filled card table outside some ramshackle toyshop. It wasn’t quite Snufkin as Tove Janssen drew him, not quite, but a Japan-ized anime version that was almost more adorable.

That particular Snufkin was a chokinbako, or piggy-bank, and I simply had to have him. And for a fast 1,000 yen, I did.

Now, at those prices, we couldn’t justify buying the whole Moomin set on display, though I’m guessing we both secretly wanted to. The one figure Azure really wanted, but stoically declined to purchase, was Little My.

See, Azure had flipped through my old Moomin books some years earlier, taking an immediate fancy to another character, the aforementioned Little My. Strange, some might say, as Little My is not at all nice. Not mean or wicked, either. Little My is simply selfish and mischievous. She is small and cute and the books say that she fits inside a milk jug, but still, she is trouble:

See?

OK. Speed along for a couple years more. Azure and I are settled, now, and living in Berkeley. And while things might seem happy on the surface, the two of us have become preoccupied with a curious regret. My Snufkin bank seems sad standing on its own, and Azure quietly pines for the Little My that we never bought in Japan. We’ve had an active eBay search for ‘moomin bank’ and keyword variants for months.

Trouble, trouble, trouble.

And then, one fine day, she appears. We bid. We bid fast, we bid high. We bid with a total disregard for sense and sensibility. On eBay, you see, that’s what it takes to win. We won.

This is almost the end of the story.

Snufkin was indeed joined on our mantelpiece by Little My, just as you’d expect. The union of those two plastic piggybanks, for whatever reason, meant a lot to us. (Recognize ‘em, yet? They’ve stood side-by-side on the masthead of jasoncook.com for years.)

Which brings us to the present. Mantelpieces have come and gone, continents swapped out from under our feet, but Snufkin and Little My always stay in arm’s reach, most recently occupying a spot on the banister outside Emmie’s room.

There’s been a change, though, of late. They move. Now you’re more likely to find either (or both) in Emmie’s hands. Little My, of course, is the favorite. Trouble times two.

About a week ago, Azure called me at work. “I can’t find Little My”, she said, which hardly fazed me, since Little My is rarely where you’d expect her - hiding behind the DVD player, perhaps, or lying on the brick floor of the conservatory. Thanks to Emmie, she gets around quite a bit.

But, no, Azure explains, Little My is gone gone, last spotted in Emmie’s arms days ago as she was being pushed in her pram about town.

Watch Emmie with her toys sometime, and suddenly gone gone seems frighteningly plausible - the more Em loves something, it seems, the more likely she is to drop it from her grasp/pram/crib. It’s a phase, maybe?

Anyhow. We were sad. More than I would care to admit, I know, and ditto for Azure.

That’s almost the end of the story. Life moves on, etcetera. But this time, there’s a happy postscript…

Spin the clocks backward a day or two or four, until you see Azure, carrying a basket, and pushing a pram through the narrow aisles of Al-Amin halal market, Cambridge. It’s the closest grocer to home. It’s also the penultimate stop on a Great Retracing Of Steps that Azure’s been doing in the days since Little My went AWOL. Watch Azure asking the owner, now, against all hope, if he’s seen a funny plastic doll, maybe, one with a trouble-making appearance, just lying around?

“This thing?” he asks, pointing an accusatory finger at Little My, who is sitting proudly on top of his cash register, hands clasped in gleeful mischief.