For my Light at the End of the Tunnel quilting journey starring fictional characters that I've taken comfort in over the years, I had to choose one representative for all the stuffed animals I have loved (and continue to love) during my lifetime. There are so many that it’s embarrassing. I was probably more obsessed than the average kid with these so-called toys. My overactive imagination conferred each one with a personality and a unique life history. And Fever Foster got the MVP award every year.
He’s one of the few stuffies I’ve owned that has a traceable lineage. The small dog was given to me by my cousin, a very grown up fifteen years older than me. He was a gift from her boyfriend when she was in the throes of a terrible fever. Aptly, she named the dog “Fever”. As time passed, the fever abated…and so did the boyfriend. As both these influences waned, I was offered the dog. He was adorable, white and fluffy, with little black circles of felt for his eyes and nose. The combined belovedness of my cousin and Fever made this adopted dog my ultimate favourite.
However, it was a bit of a problem that he came with a name, since naming a newly acquired stuffed animal was a key feature in claiming it and creating its personality. My stuffed tiger had been named Bananaface. It’s likely that my sister thought that one up, since it seems surreptitiously derogatory, something I had not grasped until this very moment. I had a plastic-faced monkey that was simply named Monkey because I didn’t much like him or the stupid looking banana clutched in his hand. Another, cuter, plastic-faced monkey was given a pair of my old glasses and named Little Ricky. He sported olive green pants with buttoned suspenders. He was large and capable of sitting, so he could occupy major amounts of time on the piano bench, disguising my absence from practice sessions. Ultimately, his Fur Elise was much better than mine, and won him the new name of Little Rochie, when he began to rival the then-popular Liberace.
So, when Fever moved over to our house, he was an already named entity. I put my property stamp on him by lengthening his name to “Fever Foster”, since he was an adopted stuffie. Like Charlie Brown, he was always called by his two name designation. I found him a right-sized cowboy hat (he never knew that it was actually a pencil sharpener) and immediately knit him the requisite scarf.
Of all the innumerable stuffed animals I have owned, he was the most unusual – and I don’t just mean just his charismatic, mild-tempered personality. He was made of genuine sheepskin. He had a comforting wool smell. In his early years his sheepskin substrate was a great plus. Later on, as it dried out and cracked and flaked off, not so much. Bits of Fever Foster left a telling trail, always revealing his whereabouts. I did my best to intervene. At first I sewed his various cracks back together, and glued wool bits back onto his muzzle. He dried out to such a degree that the little black felt circles that were his eyes and nose fell off, got lost, and had to be crafted anew. Eventually his toughened hide rejected all needle piercings, so I knitted him a sweater (seen in the photo here) to conceal his un-healable wounds.
The real Fever Foster
He was definitely not a toy intended to have longevity. Eventually, as I put childish things aside (maybe a decade ago…) Fever Foster was placed in a dark box where, having finally achieved maximal dehydration, he ceased to deteriorate. And while I still own this fine not-quite-but-almost-real dog, he is a literal husk of his former self, possessing an ever diminishing allure.
In his heyday, when Fever Foster and I were very young, my imagination sent him on wild exploits, the most notable of which was fighting Germans at the Alamo. This seems to have been a confusion of historical events gleaned from an evening spent watching a John Wayne movie flanked by Hogan’s Heroes episodes. I too probably had a fever. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe it's just that Fever Foster, a veritable king among stuffies, actually had that much pizzazz.
