The Legend of Lumpy

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I have this pillow, it has a name: Lumpy, a name Owen came up with some years ago when he used Lumpy as his bed pillow.

Folklore has it that Lumpy was my pillow from childhood, and I think I remember this—tucking into bed at night with a heavy pillow that was in parts too crammed with feathers and in other parts lacking, so that my head rested on uneven, contoured terrain, in places soft, in others dense, which apparently I found comfortable, as did Owen during his stint with Lumpy.

But I’m suspicious whether the Lumpy in my possession is the genuine article. I know for a fact I have not been lugging Lumpy around for more than half a century—across the score of apartments and houses I’ve lived in, the multiple cities and towns and states, the many beds upon which I have slept. A more likely scenario is that Lumpy stayed home when I flew the nest, and at some point after I had kids, I retrieved the pillow from the family estate upon discovering it and experiencing a fit of nostalgia. The other possibility is that my current Lumpy is an imposter.

I haven’t used Lumpy as my bed pillow for years, neither has Owen. Lumpy has been stored in the back of the linen closet for I don’t know how long, forgotten, and I might not have thought of Lumpy again if Harriet weren’t in a decluttering jag and presented me with Lumpy one day and asked if I wanted to keep it.

I hesitated to answer. My childhood pillow? No, I’m not ready to donate it. Lumpy was too sentimental, held too much meaning. I had so many memories of going to bed and luxuriating in my Lumpy. I decided to start using Lumpy as my number one pillow again.

I immediately welcomed Lumpy’s return with the royal treatment. I slipped over its peanut-shell contours the smoothest, shiniest, fanciest silver satin pillowcase I could find in the closet. I positioned Lumpy just so at the head of my bed and vowed to sleep with my precious pillow from that night forward.

The first night, I had trouble getting comfortable and falling asleep. I felt like my head was resting on a bag of wood chips. Something hard was pressing into my cheek. I was being poked in the ear. But finally, after flipping and fluffing and scrunching Lumpy in a dozen different ways, I drifted off.

And then it happened. The same night terrors from my childhood began to haunt me. There was the dream where the one-wheeled mechanism obliterated the nice white line I was painting. The dream of being stuck in the cave while the water level rose. The dream about the gnarled tree routes on my path turning into snakes. I woke up fiercely and sweating, almost crying out!   

These are nightmares I haven’t experienced in more than fifty years, and yet here they came back to me, as vividly and real as if they’d been with me every night. I immediately knew the source. I cursed Lumpy and threw the pillow to the floor. And to think I’d so romanticized Lumpy—when in reality he’d been a childhood antagonist, without my knowing. The next day Lumpy was gone, this time forever.

By David Klein

David Klein

Published novelist, creative writer, journalist, avid reader, discriminating screen watcher.

Novels

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