Winnie-the-Pooh – No. 911

Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). This was followed by The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and two children’s verse books. All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. In the 1940s, Agnes Brush created the first plush dolls with Pooh in his red shirt. Rights to Winnie-the-Pooh were first licensed to Walt Disney in 1961. Disney has released numerous animated productions starring Pooh and related characters, including theatrical featurettes, television series, and direct-to-video films, as well as theatrical feature-length films.

A stuffed Pooh Bear from my 1980s childhood is one of my daughter’s favorite toys. She also believes that old Pooh and Baby Margot are some kind of inseparable team. It’s sweet. I am often reminded of the final passage of On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”