Panda was fluffy and fat, his white fur clean as snow, and his soft black fur shiny as patent-leather shoes. That is to say he was fluffy and fat at the onset, before the wear and tear of the boy's love flattened and thinned him somewhat. The red ribbon around his neck and tied in a bow under his chin often came undone as boy and bear started off in life together. For a while, the boy's mother would retie the ribbon on Panda when she found it lying in the crib, but eventually she gave up and just put it away for safe keeping. She knew even then that Panda was a family member, and that his baby things had to be saved, just as she later saved the boy's first little pair of soft, white shoes.
The bear had a tiny music box hidden under his fur, and at the least pressure on his stomach he would play a repertoire of tinkly tunes. If the boy should waken in the dark of night and roll over on Panda, the bear would lull him back to sleep with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Old MacDonald Had A Farm or Mary Had a Little Lamb, the strains of which often filled the nursery air. It wasn't long before the boy learned, when he was bored or scared or angry or hungry, to hug Panda against him. Then Panda would play his music and make the world right again. The boy also soon learned to rub the little bear's tiny soft ear against his cheek to give himself a drowsy feeling. Before long, in symbiotic love and friendship, the boy could not sleep at all unless the bear was in the crib with him.
What with the music and with the constant interaction between them, boy and bear managed on less sleep than required by most human babies and their stuffed-toy companions. By the time the boy was a toddler, his mother was convinced she was raising an insomniac. In desperation one night, about eleven o'clock, she knelt beside the boy's youth bed. “Will you PLEASE go to sleep!” she said.
The boy patted her face. “Don't cry, Mommy,” he said. “The TVs in my head are just starting to turn off. Panda can't sleep until they all shut down, but it won't be long now.”
One day, about the time the boy was just barely four, he and his grandmother and Panda were in the grandmother's walk-in-closet. They were pretending to be prisoners of the boy's mother. It was one of the boy's favorite games. The mother slipped a ransom note under the closet door, for that was how the game was played. The boy's grandmother bent to pick up the note, but the boy took it from her hand and looked at it, his eyes moving from left to right across the paper.
“Write out the next note in print characters,” the boy's grandmother whispered from behind the door to the boy's mother. “I think he's trying to read it.”
Soon, under the door appeared a second note, this one hand-printed: If you can read this, you are really smart. The boy's grandmother handed the paper to the boy, who looked at it intently for a moment and then said, “Well, then I guess I must be smart.”
“He's reading! He's reading!” the boy's grandmother shouted, flinging open the closet door. And then the two grown-ups went a little crazy and jumped around and talked all at once and took turns hugging the boy again and again. The boy bore it all with quiet grace.
Later that afternoon, the boy's grandmother said, “It's really wonderful that you taught yourself to read. How in the world did you do it?”
“Panda taught me,” the boy said.
The grandmother smiled. “But how?” she asked.
“Well,” the boy explained, “one day Panda showed me a word and told me to sound it out. So I sounded it out aloud – oak-see-gin. But Panda told me I could do better than that, to look at the word again and try real hard to sound it out. So I looked at the word again and tried real hard, and then I saw that it was oxygen and then I knew how to read.”
“What a smart boy you are!” the boy's grandmother said. “But how odd that Panda chose the word oxygen to teach you to read. I would have thought he might have chosen an easier one, like cat, or table, or something like that. I wonder why he picked oxygen?
“Because he's Panda,” the boy said.
“Well, that certainly explains it,” the boy's grandmother said. “What a bear!”