151201 Does Any American Know Poverty?

Stuff It

Were you a fan of stuffed animals or plush toys as a child? Do you still enjoy them as an adult? What was your favorite stuffed animal when you were a kid -- do you still have it? Are there any toys from your childhood that you wish you had held onto?

REPLY3

When my mother was sixty or so years old, my little sister bought her a stuffed bear. It was supposed to be a gag gift from the last child to move out of the house. My mother grew up during the Great Depression. Hers was one of those desperate families that had to grow their own food in a garden order to survive. The only time they had meat was when the milk cow died. Then they didn't get to have milk. The only person to get new shoes was the eldest of her nine siblings, and she was number seven. Clothing was stitched from rags. Few Americans today can conceive of the type of poverty she endured, and this poverty was nationwide.

Between his education and his work ethic, my dad had made a comfortable living. By the 1980s, he had provided my mother with just about every material object she desired from a large house to gold and diamonds.

When my mother opened the present that contained the stuffed animal, she cried. Between sobs, she said that as a child no one had ever given her a stuffed animal, and all she had wanted then was a teddy bear to call her own. That bear was with her when she died twenty years later.