A little afternoon chaser from Belinda Luscombe, who wrote at Time.com’s Healthland blog about a fishy (froggy?) new business in France:
Here’s how it works: you send Lamby, Kissy, Teddy or your stuffed animal of choice to Denis Gerber and he’ll escort it around the City of Light, snap photos of it at the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre and other landmarks and return it to you with a digital photo album chronicling its adventures. For an extra $70 or so, Teddy can take one of four extension tours, exploring chic Paris or the parts of the city featured in The Da Vinci Code. “We’ve decided to offer the opportunity to visit this beautiful city to furry toys across the globe, and make sure their owners enjoy it (almost) as much as the furry darlings will,” says the Furry Toys Tours website.
But before you start saying that sending a flippin’ toy to La Ville Lumière as if that would constitute some sort of life experience or really anything more worthwhile than shredding up a perfectly good hundred Euro bill and using it to restuff Lamby’s limp leg, Luscombe notes that 25% of men take a teddy bear with them on business trips.
That’s one out of four of us. Seems like a high number.
And yet, while I haven’t done it yet, that doesn’t mean I won’t start. The only stuffed animals in my luggage have been homebound trinkets that I bought for the kids while on the road. Oh, I found my daughter’s pjs in my suitcase once (and was irrationally afraid that the TSA would take me in for further questioning if they found them), but I’ve never intentionally brought anything from home.
I do notice, though, that the older I get, the more sentimental I get, and the harder it is to leave my children and fly off somewhere. When I’m on the road, all those pictures of my kids on my phone aren’t for showing other people; they’re for me to look at when I’m missing their dumb little jokes, outrageous bedheads and mochi cheeks. Stealing some bear that has fallen out of favor but still reminds me of them doesn’t seem so strange a concept.
But sending a toy to France? That’s not for people with children. That’s for people whose teddy bears are their children, a demographique I hope I never join.