Generations of Pooh

"If you want to make a song more hummy, add a few tiddely poms." -A. A. Milne

We did her nursery in so-called classic Pooh, which is to say, not the Disney version.  Her beloved Bashbo (blanket) has Pooh and Piglet on it.  Her sheets have Pooh and Eeyore and Tigger and Piglet.  Her animal crackers are Winnie the Pooh characters. So there has been plenty of Pooh in her life, but it took her this long to figure out who he is. 

And this is why.  As Maeve loves to tell anyone who will listen, Pooh pukes the bees.  By which she means, he makes a pew sound when he spits them out of his mouth.  She thinks this is the funniest thing she has ever seen on television, almost exactly as funny as watching Snoopy wrestle with the folding chair in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

What's sweet about Maeve liking Pooh is that she is the fourth generation in my family to do so.  Not just a passing fondness for Bears of Very Little Brain, but a deep and abiding love and commiseration with A Wedged Bear in Great Tightness that women on our side of the family have felt for about eighty years or so.

My grandmother loves Pooh so much that she hand-made the characters into stuffed animals for her kids, long before Disney made a cartoon.  And those kids, including my mother, absolutely loved the stories and the toys, and she passed that love down to me.

And now when I sit and watch with Maeve, we both crack up at Pooh's antics, but I also feel a little comforted by a bear who loves food and is single-minded in his pursuit of the foods he loves, and who doesn't really mind being stout.  I can get behind that kind of freedom, definitely.  It all comes from not having front doors big enough.  

My little, silly old bear.