Micah and the Wonderful Basement of Ted

Micah and the Wonderful Basement of Ted 7 ? by Bettie Sellers Micah's Teddy Bear lives in a basement , though where this mythical land of plenty is, who knows? Micah knows, and who better since he has been bosom buddies with the battered bear for all of his five-plus years. Even stranger, the famous basement doesn't always seem to be in the same location. It moves around with the day or the time or even with some changes in the weather. Ted, Micah, and Grandmother (that's me) were driving toward Ellijay through a landscape dotted with drifts of snow left by a recent storm. Micah's running conversation suddenly turned to Ted's basement and lo, it was just over there in the snow on the side of yonder mountain . He pointed out the exact spot with a none-too-clean finger. I could have been the literal adult and said: "Micah, you know that Ted and his Basement are purely imaginary, don't you. And, dear small grandson, you do know the difference between truth and fiction, right?" But I restrained myself, having known a few bears of little brain and being fully aware that they all must have a basement somewhere in the land of childhood's fantasy. I am well acquainted with a certain almost hairless bear, now close to a hundred years old, which was given to my Aunt Même when she was a little girl. That bear, whose nakedness she covered with a little suit and hat made from old socks, striped ones, sits on a shelf at the home of my other grandchildren . He came there as the result of 3 Meme's will, this early Teddy Bear having been of sufficient importance historically and emotionally for her to have included him in the legal document . And I know a little something about the creative lying and imagination that Micah uses so freely. A couple of years ago, it went down to twenty below in North Georgia, and I was writing a poem about cold, trying to out-freeze the opening of Keats famous poem where "the owl for all his feathers was a-cold." The only problem was that the poem developed a mind of its own and ended up being about my mother as a little girl, and Meme's bear sort of crept in between the lines. That would have been fine except that the concept worked better if he was Mother's bear, which he wasn't . . . and so it goes with these bears who live with Christopher Robin and any other human with a heart for short furry creatures. I didn't know A.A. Milne, but I do know much about how comforting it is to be able to leave the realm of the literal self and go galumphing through the Hundred Acre Wood where a donkey can talk and a bear has an unquenchable thirst for honey. I never had a bear, only a Mother Goose Doll, who had the longest nose and little black patent leather slippers with heels. She vanished from my old trunk long after I had children of my own, and they were telling stories about their Barbies as I did with that treasure of my childhood. I can remember when I wrote the first book of poems about growing up at Shoal Creek, my most pragmatic brother took some exception to the chronological way I had arranged some of the events. "But, Sister, that's not the way it was!" And I realized that not all of us have the same feel for the fine line of difference between real Truth and the sort that arranges time, place, and characters just because it makes a better story. The made-up parts were as real as those that we actually experienced on the farm. Micah, for example, has had little or no experience with basements—none in his house or mine. So I wonder just where he got the idea that his Ted lives in a basement of wondrous location. From a very early age, maybe two, that is exactly or inexactly where Ted has lived. By that I...