I miss Buster. He was my faithful companion in early childhood.

Buster was my teddy bear.

My brother also had a teddy bear. His was named Fuzzy Wuzzy. The bear, not my brother.

My teddy bear was black and white, while my brother’s was a golden brown. I was born at the end of the 1940s, just after the Great Depression and two world wars, when everything was bleak and black and white. My brother was born in the 1950s, as the world was evolving into a more colorful time.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was named after a famous poem:

            Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,

            Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair,

            So Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?

I don’t remember why I named my teddy bear Buster, a derogatory slang term from gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, which I had never seen. We did not have a television until the late 1950s. I learned to read in black and white before I watched television. It is perhaps more likely that I named my teddy after a character in a children’s book, The Adventures of Buster Bear by Thornton W. Burgess.

I don’t recall that my sister had a teddy bear. She was a girl (we knew the difference between boys and girls back then) and played with dolls. She was not capable of playing with manly toys such as teddy bears. But I think she helped make clothes for our teddy bears out of old wool socks.

My mother—kind, loving, honest, and saintly woman that she was—secretly burned Buster and Fuzzy Wuzzy in the big wood stove in the kitchen on the day I graduated from grade six. We moved that day from our big old house to a newer and smaller house a few blocks away. We left for school that day from the home we had lived in all our lives and returned in the afternoon to a different house. And Buster was not there.

We did not know that our mother had burned our teddy bears until many years later, when we were adults—and we were appalled that she could have done such a thing. But, truth be told, the teddy bears were old and torn and ragged by that point. I had not held Buster for several years. He had probably been left in the back of a closet or the bottom shelf of a bookcase, unseen and unremembered. That is why my brother and I did not notice that our beloved teddy bears had been so brutally incinerated.

When we discovered the truth years later, my mother explained that she had cremated the bears as a way to honor these beloved objects, the same way that worn-out flags are to be honored when they have outlived their usefulness.

I wonder about children in the current generation. Do they have a teddy bear that they love and cherish? Or do they have so many stuffed toys that cycle through their lives so quickly that they do not take time to name them? Instead of holding tightly to a teddy bear, do they hold tightly to their cell phones and tablets, as image after image flicks by in rapid succession? Do they have anything that is held in such a place of honor that it deserves a fiery funeral and a tearful farewell? Do they have anything to hold on to?