Snowy

Boys had trolls. Subtle difference from boys being trolls. But I remember back in Junior School you'd see the odd troll pop up during the exam season. Small olive-brown plastic dolls, with the bright, usually gaudy, perpetually messy Marge without a hairbrush style hair. I don't know how lucky they were, I never had one. My sister did, and I would often play with their hair, or at the least twirl them round using their hair. Purple, green, blue, teal... fascinating colours and a welcome addition to any bookshelf. But I never owned a troll. Perhaps just one of many things I missed having. Eventually nobody brought them to school anymore, probably hiding them away with the other skeletons in their closets.
What I don't have is boxes upon boxes of memories. The little things, the giant ones, all those companions during my prima-evolutionary stages. In small hidden dispatches, those objects that I thought I was done with would slowly reach my "toy chest". And the toy chest would never really fill up as the lower layers would conveniently find their way to the chosen orphanage of the season. Spring cleaning came far too often back then. Garage sales remain something of a mystery to me.
In what was an enviable collection of Transformers figures, along with a hardly dismissible array of heros from the worlds of Thudercats, Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles and Batman/Spiderman to name a few... oh don't forget Buck O'Hare, I now retain just small scraps. A leg-less Venom, a broken arm from a terminator, lost kitanas found too late. Bags and bags are now a collection of "junk" on the bottom of the toychest. By now it must have gathered a friendly group of dust bunnies to keep it company, but there they'll stay because even some memories now are better than none.
Possibly.

There was something else that everyone had, other than trolls. And if everyone is used unfairly in discussions pertaining to troll ownership, it's no exaggeration when speaking of the current paragraphs focus. Everyone minus epsilon had, in some way or another, at some time or the other, given by a mother or a brother (ok scratch the last line!) a "soft toy". A cuddly? Or whatever general name one might have gifted to that range of childhood co-adventurers that inevitably included Mr.Teddy Bear. Of course I'm not being brand specific. I had a "Teddy", but was really never rather attached. The whole brown look kinda threw me off. No, my best friends were my monkey, who really wasn't all that soft, with a hard plastic face and hands and feet (the fingers and toes could be inserted into Mr.Monkeys nose/mouth/ears 8-)) and, of course, Snowy.
Other than Snowys more memorable distinguishing characteristics, it's probably important to highlight that he was my only softtoy that didn't end up with a name as original as Mr.Monkey or Mr.Bear (it was a predominantly male collection). My brothers equivalent was his large soft German Shepherd called Beethoven, received soon after the movie about the dog by the same name came out. But this isn't his story. And Snowy goes back a lot further.
As fate would have it, Snowy was in fact a bear. And a soft toy. But this was no ordinary bear. He was a polar bear! Pure white, and the softest most velvety feel, special I suppose because it wasn't velvet fur really. I'm not that good with materials, a failing I've long deemed to be one of my greatest, and yet one I shall probably never put enough effort into correcting. But he was white. And real. Not like those flimsy fictional teddies that could stand on two legs. He was on all four, shaped a bit like an igloo, and lusciously squishy. Obviously he had little beady black eyes, with slight shades of brown swimming in it. Not exactly an iris, unless an iris could just fade in and out of the pupil. And a soft, only barely hard brown nose. That was surely velvety on the top, not some horrible plastic. And you could press it in, turn his whole face into his body, and end up with a sort of tortoise-come-polar bear. I might have even though a decapitated polar bear, but I'm not sure about how sadistic I was as a child, and do remember my despair when once I had trouble getting his face back out again.
Snowy was old though. I have some vague dim memory of a rather large store stuffed with soft toys (reminding me that they were known as stuffed toys as well) in which either I picked him or he was picked for me. He travelled a fair bit with me though. I rarely actually slept while holding onto a soft toy, and would more often engage him in battles with other figures. Sometimes if I were cold though, and many a cold winter night there were, he would be warmer than a bed that had not been used all day.
I suppose it's funny. Depends on the angle. Eventually, after dragging him across the world and to the drawer under the bed in Lahore, his significance started to fade. Maybe around the same time that the trolls vanished in school. He'd be taken out now and again. His fur would be grey at times, but nothing a washing machine cycle couldn't fix. I was, and probably never will be big on pets. But his fluffed up post wash fur might have been similar to what any four legged animal would've looked like.
There's no real reason to even remember him now. He's gone, that much I know. I hope he actually found his way to someone that might've looked after him. What might have been physical manifestations of "memories", I have few bordering on none of. Maybe that's why I wear the ring around my neck every day even after my obsession with Lotr has faded. Maybe that's why I wear my leather wrist band even to an interview where I doubt it went down well. Maybe, though in no way certainly because it's just more of an "image" now and I have no concrete reasons for doing what I do. Just as maybe though, I might be able to attach memories to these items that are not essential now, like the watch I wore from my 13th to my 19th birthday. That's my Teen G-Shock. Maybe it's not really childhood memories, and then memories are things you don't forget anyway, but at least I have things I can look back on. Is that useful? Not in any real way. But maybe decades from now, if I can hang onto it all, it might be.
Maybe.

The snow is beautiful now. It took its time to start falling, but it falls now. Like the wind has blown through a field of dandelions, and none settle on the ground, swirling magnificently in the air and under street lights. It's snowy.