Here is something I wrote exactly one week ago.

I’m in the bed I slept in when I was nine, and for another nine years after that, in the bedroom I called mine when I slept in this bed.

It’s a waterbed, a size called single, what would be a twin if water weren’t involved. The non-conventional convention makes a hell of lot more sense to me.

I’m lying here, taking inventory of the room.

There’s a toy box that used to seem huge. Everybody says that about things from childhood, but what you have to understand is that when I was three or four, I would empty out this toy box and get inside it. I can remember, or, perhaps more truthfully, imagine what it was like to be under the closed lid and not feel even remotely claustrophobic. I look at this 12 x 9 x 30 wooden box trying, and failing, to make even that idea fit inside.

There are two stuffed animals on top of the toy box, on top because its filled with books and old school papers now. One of them is a cartoonish looking moose in a plaid cap with earflaps. Its expression is both confused and baleful, and frankly I don’t remember when I got it - probably in my early teens, certainly at Christmas, definitely past the stage when I would have given it a name.

Its fellow dust catcher does have a name, however, and quite a few memories associated with it. It’s a hand-knit bear, pink and what used to be white, with panda-like eyes and a tail that looks like a third leg, and in fact this nubby little tripod allows the bear to stand upright.

Here is how I came by this bear, and how the bear came by its name:

When I was three, my parents made a cross-country road trip to Pennsylvania, to visit my mother’s family. The bear was made and given to me by one of these relatives, I wish I could say who. According to my mother, at some point during the trip back, I was acting up, and she turned to me in the back seat and said, "You’re driving me nutty!" A bit later she asked me what I was going to name my new toy, and apparently I promptly responded, "Nutty Bear."

This is one of those stories that I don’t actually remember, and until my mother told me about it several years ago, I’d always just assumed it was called Nutty Bear because, well, it looks a little nutty.

From the age of three through the remainder of my stuffed animal bearing years, Nutty Bear was my inanimate companion of choice, appearing with me in countless photographs. Before Nutty Bear I traveled with one of those soft bodied, bean baggish baby dolls. My mother tells me that the first version fell out of my stroller and was lost, and that I was so upset my she and my father bought a new one and pretended to find it.

If it had a name, I don’t remember what it was. Like Nutty Bear, it found its way into this room after I moved out, and now it’s propped on a pile of textbooks, including an edition of "Modern Political Systems: Europe" that’s so old it’s inadvertently become a history book.

Also on the shelves are big, heavy, illustration-laden books about things like astronomy and seashells and the wild animals of North America, many of them published by National Geographic, most of them inscribed by either my parents or my grandmother to commemorate birthdays or holidays, all of them well-worn with affectionate use.

The rest of the books in the room are paperbacks acquired in my teens that didn’t make the box-n-ship cut, generally because they’re either too trashy, or not trashy enough. Some of them find their way back with me as reading for the flight home if I’ve exhausted the books I brought along. This time it will be "The Count of Monte Cristo", which I’m a little surprised to find here - it’s exactly the kind of vaguely respectable nineteenth century page-turner I tend to keep with me and reread every few years.

But I digress.

Another shelf has a picture of me with my parents at my graduation from the source of a stack of alumni magazines on the next shelf over. They just keep coming to my parents’ house, since I’ve never bothered to change the permanent address on file at any of the schools I’ve attended. My mother adds new arrivals to the pile, and I flip through them when I come home to visit. I never take them back with me; in spite of their efforts to focus on the present, there’s something about alumni magazines that seems hopelessly rooted in the past, and so it makes sense that they should stay in this room.

Lurking behind the picture is a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, also brought to this room after my depature, and purchased because the bottle is shaped like a nutcracker.

I am, a little surprisingly, not especially tempted to twist its head off.