I sat for a long moment at the end of my little boy’s bed last night. It struck me how much of the stuff he truly treasures is little more than trash. He struck me quite a bit, too, with many of the items he keeps at hand.

It’s all marvelously bright and tasteless and kinda shoddy. It never was much, and now it’s all mostly busted up and in a sort of exquisitely arranged jumble. He picks through it all in an exact manner, each thing his friend and companion. They talk to him, and he talks to them.

I don’t think it would be possible to arrange his things beforehand. You could not go to a store and pick them out. The things he cannot live without are usually some off-handedly chosen present from someone who barely knows him, if they know him at all. How would you know he’d want to play with a two inch tall Spiderman figure that has lost his lower body? Forty people, me included, gave him stuffed animals when he was born, and out of all of them he chose a Winnie The Pooh and chewed its ear off, a little at a time, while he was falling asleep. His mother had to perform a radical earectomy on the little little bruin, and our son just sort of placed the spot where the ear used to be near his mouth and carried on falling asleep with it. The other thirty nine still have tags on them.

In a thousand years, I could never part with that ratty doll. My boy will lose interest in it altogether, as his older brother did with the things of his infancy. Any stranger would just see a mangled, dirty ball of stuffing and give it the heave-ho.

Like all treasure, it’s buried.