My Bunny Pillow

This flat pillow has a curious pedigree. Made of mattress ticking stuffed with feathers, the handmade object was brought from China by my great Aunt Minnie who served as a Protestant missionary. She was one of the thousands who visited the country in that capacity before the Revolution. The older sister of my grandfather, she was born sometime in the 1880s and preserved the style of another era well into brief window when I knew her in the mid-20^th century. She wore stout shoes, thick stockings, ferocious floral dresses that denied rather than emphasized gender, and a polished black straw hat that stayed improbably in place. She may have been one of the last persons in my life to possess a hat pin, that mysterious combination of weapon and utilitarian device. She had as little use for style or luxury as she had for any other form of frivolity. She had banished play from her vocabulary early on as an unnecessary distraction from the serious duties of her missionary life. And yet, through some loophole in the severe discipline of her existence, she had selected two cheerfully embroidered pillows, their linen cloth neatly decorated with stitched eyes, nose, mouth, and whiskers, to send her great nieces.

            By some logic worthy of King Solomon, my younger sister was given the cat, or Kitty as the thing was affectionately known, and I was the recipient of the more dubiously identified Bunny. How old were we? Six and three, perhaps? Young enough that we were of an age to bond with the soft objects in a physical attachment that dissolved separation. Bunny became an extension of myself, a frictionless object in a childhood world. Kitty lived in my sister’s bed, under her soft skin and blonde bobbed hair.

            Bunny was the recipient of tears, confessions, secrets and all the many exchanges prompted by the grievances children suffer. These were trivial rather than traumatic, but relationships are made in these many tiny points of exchange. Initially, my connection to Bunny was marred by the fact of his not being Kitty. This is a terrible confession, but the first years of staring at Bunny’s features, aware that his ears were long, rather than pointed, his eyes round rather than sharply feline, felt like a compromise. I had the sense that Bunny was a second choice and that I had been put into a relationship not of my own choosing. In short, Bunny and I had an arranged connection rather than one based on natural affinities. Or so I thought.

Gradually, however, Bunny’s features took on the role of my significant Other, the face I looked to for a return of my own gaze. Over time, he became my familiar, and in the process, Kitty took on an alien quality. Hers was the face of Another, and could not reflect not my own. Even in childhood, and almost unaware, I acted out the fundamental nature of transactional formation of self-identity in relation to the flat soft pillow. Who knew? Then I found relief in recognizing that my identity had not been circumscribed, over-determined by the feline category with which I originally felt identified. Bunny offered options, alternatives and broadened my range of possibilities. What a surprise.  

            My mother, whose aunt Minnie was, came from a combination of Pennsylvania Dutch and Scotch-Irish stock. Her mother, Nellie, had come to Illinois in a covered wagon, or so she claimed, while her father’s family were from Pennsylvania. Both sides of her family were staunch Protestants of various sects who could track their histories back to the Revolution (unlike my father’s recent Jewish immigrants). They had demonstrated grit and frugality across many generations of hard work on the farms that sustained their way of life. Their horizons were narrow, experience limited by realities. And their families were large. Minnie, the missionary, was one of ten or eleven children, some of whom died young, others of whom persisted into great age. In 1964 I met two of my mother’s great aunts, one of whom was 101 and the other 104. They had been born during the Civil War and had faces straight out of Grant Wood portrait paintings. They had lived life so parsimoniously that they had spread it thin as rationed butter across the decades. Their lips were fixed in hard straight lines, brows as well, and the habits of expression that shaped their faces were incapable of irony, joy, or ease. Determination had set their course and if the one accessory in their possession was a watch, it served to measure the judgement of value and self-worth against the expenditure of time rather than to be perceived as jewelry or decoration. No singing except hymns, no dancing at all, and no flirtation ever.

            This was the stock from which Bunny and Kitty’s donor had come. Unflinching and selfless, Aunt Minnie had spent her life in the service of her church and beliefs. She had gone to China sometime in the early years of the 20^th century. By 1953 the Communists had expelled the Protestant missions and Minnie had gone to a retirement community in Taos. We visited her there in 1963 where she lived in continued commitment to her faith, fearing for the people among whom she had lived so long in China. Bunny and Kitty must have travelled the Pacific in a steamer trunk, part of the luggage of a long slow voyage, kept in reserve until the right moment had arrived in her mind for them to be transferred to my mother and us. They were surely not mailed on their own from the Chinese mainland. Toys did not travel on their own.

            In her own youth my mother had been the recipient of another gift from Aunt Minnie, an extravagant set of embroidered silk pajamas that arrived during the Depression years. Hard to imagine the impact such a gift would have had in that era of austerity. These were not objects that would have been encountered in Downer’s Grove, Illinois, where my mother was raised. From time to time, my mother brought the garments out from the deep wooden storage chest behind her bed. The pajamas were not merely beautiful, they exuded an air of extreme exoticism. She never wore them, they were too precious, and we were not allowed to play with them either, just look at them with wonder. They were always either too big or too small, like a destination one never reaches, and they remained pristine, their shimmering silk threads possessed of a permanent aura and mystique. They preserved an unlived and but imagined possibility of sensuality kept closeted, a promise sealed by a taboo, a prohibition against the pleasure they suggested.

            For my mother, the pajamas offered a different kind of talismanic promise. They signalled the existence of worlds beyond that of that small Midwestern town that otherwise hemmed and defined her experience. They were the evidence that more could happen than had ever been allowed in that limited community.

            Our childhood, into which Bunny and Kitty arrived, was urban and cosmopolitan by contrast. We lived in Center City Philadelphia. Bunny and Kitty were companions to school adventures and the long succession of pets, to the fraught conflicts of family life, the stubbed toes and psychological bumps along the way to adolescence. Their linen covers frayed and their embroidery came undone. Little by little Bunny’s eyes lost definition, whiskers thinned and broke. At the critical point where the pillows threatened to break through the threadbare coverings, my mother initiated a replacement plan. White cotton cloth was cut using the worn covers as patterns. Features were copied onto the clean cloth. Embroidery threads were secured. The tasks of stitching and knotting were duly carried out.

But like any imitation, the new Bunny and Kitty never matched their originals. They were blander, somehow Americanized, in spite of our efforts at accuracy. Their original character had been lost in the translation. In this fall from grace, only the mattress ticking pillows retained their original form. What remained was the shape of Bunny stripped bare, a reminder of the ephemeral and transient character of childhood, the years of trust and dependence on the soft comfort of a pillow with a familiar face.

            The most profound lesson Bunny provided was that of a reverence for objects, for their ability to travel between worlds, to be the visitors from other cultures, across geography and history, repositories of personal emotions and multiple values. Bunny seems heroic in his persistence, silent, patient, eloquent in his enduring capacity to bear witness. That reverence carried with it a charge of care for the object, for small things that stay and whose stewards we are in reciprocity to their role in our lives, evidence of all that will not come again.