Sunday tales: moose.

Back in the day when Younger Son was even younger, we acquired a moose puppet that he named Bradley. Bradley J. Moose, if you are not into that brevity thing. (Name the source of that quote.)

Bradley became a sort of family pet, just like the dogs and cats. YS and I gradually built up a complete persona for him.

He often drank to excess.
He was a member of the Moose Lodge.
The Moose Lodge was housed in a pole shed somewhere in the woods.
The Lodge had an official Moosemobile, an aged conversion van not unlike our own.
Bradley was, not to put too fine a point on it, not very bright.

YS had the typical issues as a middle-schooler — angst, resentment, rebellion, insecurity, searching for his own identity — and it seemed to me that he dealt with some of them by projecting them onto Bradley.

*Bradley had a side hustle as a knitwear model. He was really good at it because he never moved unless I told him to.*

Elder Son did not care for Bradley and would get annoyed when he witnessed his mother and younger brother playing around with him. He particularly did not like the voices we used for Brad. (Elder Son spent fourteen years being annoyed with YS, from YS’s birth and until he, ES, went off to college,)

After ES left, YS and I couldn’t find Bradley. After several months of fruitless on-and-off searching, I emailed him, asking if he had any idea where BJM was hiding. He replied that perhaps we should look in the bottom drawer of seldom-used filing cabinet. Yup, Bradley had been there all along.

We tortured Bradley regularly. Here he is hanging by a painting of my grandfather, left, and hanging above the Christmas tree and squirrel cage, right. The second photo was taken after YS and I had had fun tossing the moose across the open foyer into the Christmas tree.

*I wish I could remember where this was taken. It was probably in the parking lot of a microbrewery*
*in Eau Claire that had a moose as their logo.*

YS and I found this moose near Mackinac, Michigan in 2002. We were on the way to Ann Arbor to pick up ES (then a *rising* high school senior; he had participated in the TASP summer program there) and continue on to Philadelphia, where we would meet up with Smokey. We all continued to New Haven CT, then separated. Smokey and ES visited Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Princeton, *while YS and I went into NYC for fun.*

In the background is a motel in Black River Falls WI, where the then-boys and I stayed at when I and ES both became too tired to drive, on the way home from a 2003 Christmas break trip to Chicago, where we visited the art institute and ate Chicago-style pizza and Greek food. ES and I **NEVER** *missed an opportunity to memorialize a moose sighting*.

*Display in MSP airport, December 2007. I spent something like 9 hours there waiting for ES’s plane to land. It kept getting delayed because of weather. Christmas break of his freshman year, 2007.*

*A random moose I found on the internet.*

5 Responses to Sunday tales: moose.

Kathleen Walsh says:

January 9, 2022 at 00:24

Great story! In some Canadian gift shops (at airports?), you can find stuffed moose and packaged brown candies called “moose droppings”. If I ever come across them again, I will get some and mail them to you so you can continue your themed playing around with this. Sounds like a lot of fun in joking! THANKS FOR SHARING.
kayT says:

January 9, 2022 at 06:07

Great stories. Sounds like you raised a couple of boys with great senses of humor. Well done.
Ruth says:

January 9, 2022 at 07:43

Wonderful! Enjoyed every word.
Gayle says:

January 9, 2022 at 09:37

Great pics and great stories! Who knew that such happiness could come wrapped as a moose?
Helen Mathey-Horn says:

January 10, 2022 at 21:57

My son had a raccoon puppet named…wait for it…Mr Raccoon. I thought it a good idea but had second thoughts when told the raccoons in our area where we were living with a toddler had rabies in their population. (Great my little son will think anything that looks like a raccoon is a friend.) Then we moved and Mr. Raccoon went through many trips with us, only to be lost in a hotel in France, where I think he might have been accidentally kicked under the bed and not noticed until we were long gone. Son was old enough to be accepting of that once we got home. I’m still kind of bummed. However, anytime I see ‘raccoon’ things such as ornaments, it is all I can do to keep myself from buying them, ahem, a few have been purchased over the years for adult son. So I totally get the idea of a moose!