Security Blanket

It quickly became clear that the Big P was a force to be reckoned with. When I got into bed, it felt as heavy as a Great Dane. Even during the chilliest winter nights in Upstate New York, I'd wake each morning drenched in sweat. Still, I adored the thing. Let others have their security blankets! I had a security shag rug bedspread.

The biggest unforeseen problem with Pink was that, much like an alien invader, it proliferated. Friends and casual acquaintances were forever plucking woolly pink fibers from my hair during homeroom; I discovered strands in my sneakers before basketball practice. Magenta fluff appeared in our cooking pots, in the cat's mouth, in the medicine cabinet. My cousin, who lived across town, called one morning and said a pink woolly had materialized in her scrambled eggs.

A few years later, when my parents decided to move us to an even bigger house, I packed Pink in a double-bagged heavy-duty Hefty. I couldn't part with it; it's possible I'd developed an unhealthy fixation. Pink grew sparser and developed a few unsightly worn spots. Mom actually patched it for me after my toes wore a hole in it. She couldn't help herself -- Big Pink had become a member of the family.

When I was 17, Dad gave his permission for me to go away to college. It was undoubtedly the riskiest, most liberating decision he'd ever made for me, and part of me had feared that he wouldn't let me go at all.

Unfortunately, Big Pink had started to disintegrate, and I wasn't sure it would survive the journey with me. In its six years of life, it had gone from lush and robust to balding and elderly. I had some hard decisions to make. After much agonizing, I decided to preserve Pink, rather like a museum piece in a diorama, enshrining it on my bed along with the rest of my retro, time- capsule bedroom. Then I went off to college, all alone.

Of course, going from my parents' house to a dormitory room with a couple of other teenagers was a bit like being slingshot into outer space. I was thrilled, frightened and maybe just a touch manic -- trying to sign up for every class I'd ever imagined taking, from modern dance to existentialism to criminal justice. After being cooped up for a lifetime, I discovered that freedom was a powerful intoxicant. I was homesick, but in a mildly pleasurable, self-indulgent way: I knew I'd come into my own.

Over the winter break, I went back home, but it felt like a sort of playacting -- as if I were pretending to assume an identity I'd already shed. I arrived a few days before Christmas and discovered that Big Pink was no more. "It utterly disintegrated -- the whole thing fell apart," Mom told me with, I thought, equal parts relief and regret. I received the news with solemnity and grave acceptance. I told her I understood, of course. I knew that, after years of pink woollies in the cereal, I wouldn't even have especially blamed her if she'd helped the process along with a pair of scissors. But I felt a real sense of loss that night, climbing under an ordinary down comforter, missing the human weight of my old chum.

On Christmas Day, my mother and sisters brought forth an enormous, gift-wrapped box. I tore it open and found another comforter, this one covered in a delicate yellow floral fabric. But when I tried to lift it, I realized it weighed even more than my old bedspread.

"It's Big Pink!" Monica shouted.

Mom and my sisters had decided that I simply couldn't do without my security spread, so they'd given Big Pink new life by laboriously encasing it between two massive bed sheets. They'd had to sew the whole thing by hand, like old-fashioned sailmakers, because the layers of fabric were too thick for a machine to pierce. So, over the weeks, stitch by stitch, they'd worked to preserve Pink and create the world's heaviest non-down comforter.

When I went back to college, I took my enormous new bedspread-comforter along. If it had been challenging to sleep under before, it was pretty much lethal now -- creating bed conditions somewhere between a Finnish sauna and a tropical rain forest. One of my roommates borrowed it off and on for the rest of the school year, convinced that it helped her sweat off excess weight. It no longer had its distinctive hallucinogenic impact, but it sure had the heft.

Big Pink 2 stayed with me for years before completely disintegrating -- I lugged it to grad school, then to academic posts across the country. Big P. became my litmus test for new boyfriends. Anyone who balked at having my comforter dragged over his legs was cut from the running. Of course, I no longer had any illusions about trying to sleep under it -- eventually it would be kicked from the foot of the bed with a dull thud. But at least I could feel reasonably certain that anyone who would put up with Big Pink had a good sense of humor, a lot of patience, or really, really wanted to be there.

Now that I'm all grown up, I sometimes think that I was very lucky to have been raised with my father's stern restrictions. This big world is an unknowable place, frequently cold and unfriendly, plagued, as Milan Kundera put it, by the unbearable lightness of being. How lucky, then, to have someone put up a strong gravitational force -- of love and family, connection and, even, obedience. How fortunate for a child to learn what it means to be held close and treasured before being released into the world.

It's a bit like having people in your life who love you enough to sew the world's heaviest comforter for your bed. It's too hot, and it's not terribly sophisticated, but at night you are never alone; you can lie (for a short time) under your comforter and feeling it pressing down, down to the earth, to the human family, keeping you whole, safe and connected to the rest of life.

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Arabian Jazz, Crescent and The Language of Baklava. Her newest book, Origin, was published earlier this year. She teaches creative writing at Portland State University and can be reached at Abujaber@aol.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.