Remember Jacob Marley's ghost in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol? The business partner who visited Ebenezer Scrooge from the hereafter, clanging and dragging the endless heavy chains of his sins to announce the visit of the three spirits at the stroke of midnight?
Well, Darwin likes to play Jacob Marley.
Every night, around midnight, if he's not busy yowling in loneliness, re-enacting his rescue from the woodpile, Darwin picks up his very favorite toy and drags it clanging up the stairs, into our room, and onto the bed.
This toy is ancient. It's one of those long plastic wands that used to have a green fuzzy rabbit's-foot-looking thingy at the end with a little bell. Darwin took to that thing like sharks to bloodied water. It's so gummed and mangled and threadbare that you'd be sure it was trash by now, but not to Darwin.
He disdains the newer nicer-looking ones I've brought home, with pretty yellow fuzzy tips and bells or crimson-colored feathers and bells or multi-colored feathers and fuzzy thing and bells. Darwin can't be coaxed to play with those. So, I sew and re-sew the tattered toy and every night he does the Jacob Marley act.
The first thing you hear is his yowling. Then it's the cling, cling, cling, cling of the little bell as the toy bangs on each step of the stairs, and then you hear the scratching sound of him dragging the wand on the wood floor, and then the thump of his body on the bed and the toy finally comes to a rest and Darwin snuggles between my legs and the world is alright for him.
And if you throw the toy down the stairs you'll make his day and he'll bring it up as many times as you throw it down. Unlike Jacob Marley, Darwin is no harbinger of looming woes. He just wants to sleep with his toy close at hand to be ready for play and mischief as soon as either one of us stirs.
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