#frog puppet

A fun Mothers' Day gift! Sillies :)

closeups!

2019/08/28

I’m back?

So... I left Japan almost a year ago and have been back home for... yup, you guessed it, almost a year now, living closer to uni in a shared apartment, working part-time as a teacher for some months and now back home with my family. Gonna be working as a teacher again starting next week (September! Yes, it is practically September, can you believe it!). AND, I have an undergraduate thesis to work on! AAAAAA

I got a haircut today.

Any time I leave my house, I'm fairly meticulous about making sure that everything is turned off and that everything is in its proper place.  This time, since I knew I'd be gone for two months, I was extra OCD about it all.  Checking every corner of my Hollywood apartment to ensure that everything was where it needs to be. I recently began a trek up to the great white north in British Columbia - where I'll be working for the summer. The last thing I saw before I left my apartment for the next few weeks... is what sparked this very post. 

As all good posts tend to do, this one begins with a story. 

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When I was a toddler - no more than five years old probably - I was given a toy.  I couldn't recall say who it was from and I can't even remember when exactly it was given to me.  That's how young I was when I received this gift.  He was a puppet frog.  His name was Freddie.

His name was actually important in the context of this story.  When I was a kid, I had this insane imagination.  I happened to love my stuffed animals dearly and not only spent hours talking to them like a lunatic, but they also had complex names provided by yours truly.  Raul Pete was a stuffed Dauchund,, Arf was an abbreviated name for Arturius C. Dogg.  I mean... I was a real whackadoo.  And I had about 100 stuffed animals, all with their own names and distinct personalities.   Freddie had a personality that I invented for him just as well.  His name though?  He came with that.  It was written across his yellow t-shirt in big black font. "FREDDIE."

I'd be a liar if I said that Freddie was my most favorite stuffed animal, but he was definitely in the "inner circle."  I carried him everywhere and he was like family to me.  In fact, I'd probably have chosen him over some family.  (I probably still would.)  Freddie was my right hand frog for all intents and purposes and after a number of years, this had its unfortunate side-effects. 

By the time I was nine, Freddie was pretty beat up.  His clothes were tattered, his fabric ripped.  He had a plastic tongue that was supposed to roll up and shoot out of his mouth when his jaws opened.  Now it just hung loosely out of his mouth like a retarded bulldog staring at a T-Bone.  He had experienced my childhood with me and because of that, he was a mess.  Time and circumstances took their toll on Freddie and looking back, this was my first foray into the sometimes brutal nuisances of true friendship.

My mom was always great growing up, but like anyone, she's only human.  This was definitely not her finest moment.  And yet it was a moment that stuck with me forever and not because of her actions, but because of mine.

We lived in New York City in a tiny apartment packed into a big building like every other idiot from New York.  We barely had enough room to breathe in that place and as a result, every so often, we needed to do a little spring-cleaning.  When I was nine, I was forced to throw out a ton of crap, but at the end of that list was Freddie.

At first I protested - obviously.  My mother told me how unbelievably beat up he was and that he needed to go.  Still, I was adamant.  All of the other things she had me toss away went right out with no complaints, but I held onto Freddie because even though I was getting older, he still had a place in my heart. 

Finally, my mother convinced me that if I threw him out, he would reappear brand new - which frankly is a pretty evil thing to do, especially when it's not true.  But my being nine, after a whole lot of convincing, it suddenly made sense.  After all, I saw how messed up he'd gotten and I didn't want to see my friend in that kind of shape.  I thought maybe...somehow... this would fix things.

My mom stood in the doorway as I marched down our apartment building's hallway crying, all the way to the garbage chute.  We called it "the incinerator," which is exactly what it sounds like, but it's something I didn't fully understand until years later.  I opened the door to the chute that would carry Freddie six stories down to his fiery demise.  I slowly placed him into the bin and looked him in the eye.  I remember it vividly.

"It's not goodbye.  I'll see you soon," I whimpered.  Door closes.  Down he fell. I sobbed all the way back to the apartment.  My dad told me to stop crying and be a man.  Freddie never came back.

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Our story jumps ahead about 15 years.  All grown up, I was now working in the big city at some awful job.  I literally spent my days in solitary confinement at this place spinning in a chair and thinking aloud to myself about various musings.  Like "why is the sky blue?" and "how come we drive on parkways and park on driveways?" - idiot shit like that.  It was the sheer insanity of my situation that got me laughing about how I wished I had someone to talk to.  Obviously, this train of thought had me remembering when I talked to stuffed animals as a kid and if you draw conclusions here, you'll see how it all lead me to remember Freddie the Frog.

My suppressed childhood memory was born again and with it came all of the emotions I had forced myself to forget as a teary-eyed nine-year old.  Now I was teary-eyed in my mid-twenties, sitting at a desk of some meaningless office job.  My infinite remorse over how it all ended for Freddie led me to some existential questions about who I was as a person.

I realized that I had a hard time letting the things go - especially things I love. I valued relationships and generally "being there for people."  And the reason I got so sad at 24 was because it occurred to me that I had been this person all along.  And if that's the case, the day I put Freddie the Frog into that garbage chute, I turned my back on someone important to me.   And I did it because someone told me to.  Is there anything worse than that?

I didn't want to be that person.  It's been an important realization for me that we all possess the innate ability to make edits and corrections to the script we pen for ourselves, even as we're still writing it down.  It's all a part of a never-ending learning process as we live our lives.  I was ultimately duped by a parent who wanted a tattered piece of crap out of her house, and I grew to understand that over time.  It would be easy to blame my mom for that, but it became more important for me to blame myself.  It was important because it was difficult.  It was so hard in fact, that I had put it out of memory for 15 years.  That "tattered piece of crap" was my responsibility and a part of my development as a person.  I loved it and I gave up on it because someone told me to.   Again - how could I do that?

Sitting in an arbitrary office chair in the middle of Manhattan, there was me - coming to terms with all of this.  And right then and there, not only did I remember Freddie the Frog, but also a promise I had made to an old friend. 

"Fuck this job."  I wasn't supposed to be on the Internet messing around, but that's exactly what I did.  I started searching high and low for Freddie.  Going off of hazy descriptions of frog puppets from when I was little, I looked near and far.  After I opened each and every new door, it seemed the next one slammed shut right in my face.  I literally worked at this for a month.  You'd be surprised how many frogs there are out there wearing a French beret.

And then I got close.  I ordered a frog puppet with no picture off of E-Bay.  It fit the description so I overnighted it to myself at work.   He arrived at my desk the next morning.  I signed for him and found a really cool frog puppet... just not Freddie.

Side note - in all this time, I developed a weird thing about throwing away anything 'with a face."  My sister in particular, enjoys making fun of as she gives her dog old stuffed animals to chew on - only as to upset me because she sucks. So one thing leads to another and I had a new, pretty sweet frog puppet at my desk named Mr. Ribbits.

The search for Freddie was exhaustive and completely unfruitful.  I suppose the joke written in the subtext was that for a month, I was paid by some shitty company to search for long lost frog puppets.  Har Har.  It wasn't funny enough for me to laugh at - just kind of a sad reminder of all I lost by giving up too easily as a kid.  I tried one more search and clicked through about 10 pages on Google.  And then this...

"Vintage toy shop..... 1960s... 1970s...puppets... Frog.... trains.... 1980s.... radio controlled cars 1990s...  Freddie..."

I stopped and reread that link about ten times.  It was all in ellipses and it brought me to some shitty website with nothing but an address and store hours.  As fate would have it, the address was 20 blocks away from my office the store was in 45 minutes.  I shook my head and clicked off of it and sat in my chair silently for 10 minutes...

Finally, I muttered, "it said 'FREDDIE' with an 'IE' at the end..." I leapt up from my desk, grabbed my coat, and took off, not telling a supervisor or anyone else that I was leaving.  I didn't care.  I wish I could say I was so badass that I got fired, but my job was ultimately so useless that nobody even knew I was gone.  (I ended up quitting in less than a month's time because I felt that life was too short to be made to feel unimportant).

I ran through a snowstorm with the wind battering my face as it whistled through giant corridors of downtown Manhattan south of Canal st.  I ran because it was exciting and I ran to make amends.  I just ran because... well... it seemed like the thing to do.

I found the dingy toy store from Google on a random street in the middle of Greenwich Village moments before it was set to close.  The street was so old and run down, it was still cobblestone.  The store was equally as ancient - a dust covered relic from a time when my parents were probably kids.  The ancient man at the counter looked at me all out of breath and asked, "You OK, son?"

"Freddie the Frog."

He inspected me through beady grey eyes under giant silver eyebrows, confused as all hell.  Then suddenly, his eyes went wide.  He put his finger up and hobbled away into the back of the store.  After about five minutes, he came out and said,  "Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but his name is written in big letters on his shirt.  I'm afraid it's not what you're looking for though.  He's from before your time son.  Everyone's up and forgot about this guy.  Shame too..."

He handed me the package and I looked it over.  I almost cried like a lunatic in this random store.  For the first time since I was a kid, I spoke to a stuffed animal like it could hear me.

"Hello old friend.  Told you I'd see you again."

----

Upon further investigation, I found out that Freddy was actually a vintage buy, probably by my long-departed grandfather who acquired him well before I was born - decades maybe.  That made it all the more satisfying, having reacquired him through happenstance and dumb-luck. 

Speaking of luck... Luckily for me.... I have hundreds of real relationships with actual human beings (so fear not, folks). I'm writing this because seeing Freddy sitting there on my dresser every day serves as my reminder of how we throw away pieces of ourselves far too easily, far too often.  It's never too late to remember that who we were is a large part of who we want to be.  Even if I life takes me to some crazy places, I'm going to try damn hard not to lose myself along the way.