Pupcake

It’s the story I know Mama and Chelle have been secretly, silently waiting for since they’ve started reading this blog. It’s the story that must be told. The greatest story ever told. The Story of Pupcake. I warn you in advance, it may just be one of those you-had-to-be-there kind of stories, but I’ll do my best to do it justice (and invite the other involved parties, to toss in their two cents).

So here I was, roughly seven years old. I was a huge fan of the whole Strawberry Shortcake franchise (Strawberry was later unceremoniously dumped for the Care Bears, but we won’t get into the sad, bitter details of that). At some point, I think it was during the summer, I had gotten sick. Not seriously ill, but sick enough that someone (my parents? one of my grandmothers, both of whom would use any excuse to give us presents?) had given me a stuffed toy that was supposed to be a birthday present. Specifically, a stuffed Pupcake. Now, for those of you who only know the franchise in its current incarnation, Pupcake is the little puppy that belongs to Strawberry. Purists from the old days know that Pupcake really belonged to her simpering boyfriend, Huckleberry Pie, to whom a pet frog is now ascribed.

I loved that stuffed puppy. At the time, our beloved dog had run away, a spaniel named Belle who had been part of our family longer than I had. In fact, for most of my infancy she had believed me to be her puppy, and was suitably protective of me. So Belle was gone, and we had yet to run through our succession of cats. Pupcake was all I had.

It had been only one or two years since Shelly had been deemed old enough for a bedroom of her own, so we went from a shared bedroom and a shared playroom, to separate bedrooms. For some reason, the dark green sofa-bed that had once been in the playroom, became part of my bedroom furniture. One night, my sister was expecting company and so she and my mother came into my bedroom, where I was already snuggled up under the covers but not yet sleeping, to liberate the mattress from the sofa-bed. I can still see it in my mind today, in that horrible slow-motion of dreams, where you know something terrible is happening but you are powerless to stop it…

Pupcake was perched across the top of the sofa-bed…

Mama and Shelly opened up the sofa-bed to pull the mattress out…

As they maneuvered it out and closed the bed again, the bed came away from the wall…

Pupcake tumbled into the space between sofa-bed and wall…

Mama and Shelly “accidentally” pushed the bed back up against the wall…

And I screamed in horror, “YOU SQUISHED PUPCAKE!!!!” and burst into hysterical tears.

Mama and Shelly were hysterical too. With laughter. Summoned by the cacophony (which I know how to spell, but still can’t really pronounce), in bounded my Daddy, my hero. With a glare that could stop a Mack truck and a bellow of “What’s going on in here?!?!” he rescued me from their ridiculing laughter. Well… for a few seconds; they just couldn’t stop for long, even in the face of his anger. In retrospect, I suppose I can see how it might have been funny… or would have been, if not for the tormented, tear-stained face of Little Baby Sara, heartbroken that her beloved Pupcake was squished. Yes, my analyst made a small fortune off of that single incident.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, the analyst part. But the rest of it is true. I’ve forgiven Mama and Shelly, and they’ve more than made it up to me over the years. Daddy was, and remains, my hero and my knight in shining armor… and Pupcake… well… I don’t really know what happened to Pupcake over the years. I know that he recovered fairly well from the incident, though he never quite regained his original shape. And as I mentioned, eventually Strawberry and her cohorts were relegated to the bottom of the toybox, phased out slowly but surely by Tenderheart Bear and Love-A-Lot Bear and Wish Bear. But for that one magical summer, Pupcake and I…

Ah hell… even I can’t say it with a straight face.