I think it’s safe to say that 99% of the stores in America’s malls hold absolutely no interest for me whatsoever. They amount to nothing more than a collective blur of storefronts that I scarcely notice as I rush to Barnes & Noble, F.Y.E., the food court, or whatever department store has a decent selection of men’s ties. Of course, being married to Kathy means an occasional foray into C.J. Banks – and come to think of it, a good-sized Hallmark store can be fun. But as for most of the rest, it would never dawn on me to cross their thresholds. . . not even for a brief little peek. And frankly, there are a few stores geared to teens that I wouldn’t enter if you paid me! (How’s that for sounding like a crotchety old man, sitting in his rocking chair on his front porch, barking at the world?)
Thank goodness for those occasions when something or someone causes us to veer off of our well-weathered, overly familiar course, and draws us into unfamiliar adventures. . . like Build-A-Bear! ! !
My niece Lorelai has quite the menagerie of stuffed animals and dolls in her bedroom, but special prominence has always been given to the dozen (mostly) bears she has from Build-A-Bear. I had heard my niece describe this whole experience on a couple of occasions- and my wife has been along on more than one of those expeditions- but this was something I had never seen with my own eyes. And for as painstakingly complete as Lorelai’s descriptions have been, I didn’t quite get it. So in the interest of having my horizons broadened a bit, I offered to take her to Build-A-Bear so I could see for myself what all the fuss was about.
This past Friday was the big day, and Build-A-Bear more than lived up to Lorelai’s breathless, exuberant praise. The place also lives up to its name. One gets to literally Build A Bear, for a fairly modest price and in fairly quick fashion as well. You walk into what has to be one of the brightest, happiest looking stores in the whole mall, and after a warm welcome you’re invited to choose which animal you will be building. And there is quite a lineup available- mostly bears but a few other creatures available as well – and each with its own vivid color scheme. Once you select what you want to build, you take one empty “shell” (for want of a better term) – which you then take to a funny-looking machine (that looks like something straight out of Dr. Seuss) where your shell receives its stuffing. But before you do that, you have to place a small little heart inside of your bear, and you’re invited to do several sweet little rituals with the little heart- shaped medallion before its slipped inside the shell, just ahead of the stuffing. Also, the employee asks you how stuffed you want your animal to be – and once they’ve done it as they think you have chosen, you get to take the animal in your arms and test it. And if you want it to be stuffed more or less than it already is, they’ll made that adjustment for you. Once the toy is stuffed, it’s sewn up and then you are invited to head over to another Dr. Seuss-looking contraption that turns out to be a bathtub where you can give your new toy a thorough cleaning. Air is the only cleaning agent, but there are plenty of scrub brushes handy for those hard-to-remove stains. After all that, you can choose clothing and accessories for your animal- and that is a process that Lorelai takes very very very very very seriously. No quick or rash decisions made about something as momentously important as that! Finally, you are invited to take your place at a little computer station where you can type out your bear’s birth certificate, which means that you get to name your bear. Then you plunk down your money and proudly stroll out of the store with your very own Build-A-Bear creation!
Of course, the customer isn’t really doing all that much actual Bear Building- but it feels like you are, and there are enough choices you get to make along the way that the bear (or pony or puppy or whatever you’ve chosen) starts to feel like your own creation. And in this day and age, anything you buy in a shopping mall that taps into your own creative juices is worth celebrating.
So Lorelai chose to create a Rainbow Bear (you see her holding it in the above photo) in honor of her Uncle Greg and his love of bright colors. And I wasn’t about to let her have all the fun, so I built a toy of my own: a brightly- colored sea horse. And to assuage my envy of Lorelai’s brilliantly-hued bear, I bought a pint-sized version of it for myself. Lorelai named her big bear “Rainbow Sherbet” – while I chose operatic names for mine: “Brunnhilde Bear” for the one, and “Sam the Seahorse” (named after opera bass Sam Ramey.)
One option at Build-A-Bear is for your stuffed toy to include a sound component which is sewn right into the animal- and you get the message or music to play simply by squeezing the paw or belly or wherever the little mechanism is placed. There are just under a dozen pre-recorded choices, or you can elect to record your own – and for two free spirits like Lorelai and me – 🙂 – this was the way we had to go! We were dispatched to the restroom at the back, where there would be a little less background noise, and we did our thing. For “Sam the Seahorse” I recorded the first two phrases of the famous Toreador’s Song from Carmen in my sturdiest/loudest operatic voice. And then Lorelai recorded for the bear the following message: “I like music . . . but I don’t like opera!!!” And for the rest of the afternoon, our little comic spiel was for Sam the Seahorse to sing to which the bear would issue its pronouncement about not liking opera. Lorelai couldn’t stop laughing about our little dialogue. (By the way, Aunt Kathy was along as well to add to the fun and to take photos chronicling our experience.)
It was tremendous fun – and especially precious because Lorelai is growing up, and it’s hard to know how much longer she’s going to be Building Bears. (Maybe for a long time, since it’s something I wanted to do too.) One of my favorite authors, Wisconsin’s own Michael Perry, made reference in his latest book (“Visiting Tom”) to having reached his late 40’s, in which he finds himself “adam’s apple deep in the middle-aged maudlins,” which hit him like a ton of bricks every time he sees his older daughter Amy do just about anything joyously childlike. Or as he writes so movingly a few pages later: “The Love I feel is nearly overcoming, and as always in these moments the joy is crowded by a breathless realization of how fleeting this moment is, a desperate desire to burn it deep in some crease of the brain so that you might call upon it even as you let go this world.”***
It makes me really glad that at least one of our nieces lives right down the road from us, and that her parents have allowed us to share so many wonderful experiences with her, experiences which I’m confident are a permanent part of who we are – and who she is. And although our contact with Aidan, Anna, and Kaj have been much more sporadic- and with Henry even more so- I can only hope for the same thing, whether it be in the form of Bear Building or something else in which we get to share some deep and lasting joys together.
pictured above: Lorelai and I at the Build-a-Bear Bath Tub. Lorelai is holding Rainbow Sherbet while I attend to Sam the Seahorse.
***MIchael Perry’s newest book is “VIsiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace” and is published by Harper Collins. It is marvelous, as are all of his books.