Security Blanket
The magic of a pink shag bedspread

By Diana Abu-Jaber
Sunday, December 2, 2007

IN 1972, MY FAMILY FINALLY MOVED TO A HOUSE BIG ENOUGH for me to have a room that was mine and mine alone. I was 11, a wannabe flower child chafing under the stern restrictions imposed by my Jordanian-born father, who harbored a vast suspicion of all American popular culture. Because I wasn't allowed to go to parties or dances, I channeled my creative energies into my glorious new bedroom.

My American-born mother, who was in charge of home decor, let me select the striated, rose-colored, floor-length curtains that filtered the morning sunlight and filled my room with a fiery glow. I was drawn to intense, eye-popping colors -- the more vivid the look, the more it belonged to me. I covered my walls with black-light posters of peace signs and rock bands, hung canary-yellow mobiles (so many, a visitor had to duck to get from one side of the room to the other), filled my door with curtains of brilliant purple beads that made a satisfying jingle every time someone passed through. I covered my desk, dresser and bookcase with dozens of strawberry-scented votive candles. But, even with this innovation, I felt the room wasn't quite complete.

One day I was peeping into the windows of my favorite store in downtown Syracuse -- Jasmine Imports -- when I saw it. I stopped dead in my tracks. "Oh, my God," I breathed.

"What? What?" My younger sisters Suzy and Monica looked around.

"There." I pointed. "Look." It was an immense, flowing, magenta-pink shag bedspread. I'd never seen anything like it. I had to have it.

The salesclerk was at a loss for words. "You want that? I think Raji put it out as a joke."

Mom thought that it wasn't really a bedspread at all, but a rug that they'd thrown onto a bed frame. But we turned it over and discovered that the long, finger-thick shag fibers were hooked into some sort of heavy cotton fabric, and the whole thing was cut and seamed for a queen-size bed. "But even if it is a bedspread . . ." Mom said slowly. "It's not normal." She thought I was being perverse, hankering after something so loud, so egregiously strange.

How to explain these odd passions? I'd always been a slightly off-kilter kid. From age 6 to 7 1/2, I wore a Daniel Boone hat on a daily basis. Why? I don't know, but these were the odd wavelengths of my childhood; I loved that hat the way I loved the flag of Malta tied to my bicycle, the way I loved my chest-covering Aztec calendar necklace, all of which found ultimate expression in the way I loved the pink bedspread.

There wasn't a price tag on it, so the clerk shrugged and said, "Twelve bucks?" There was no shopping bag big enough so the salesgirl handed me a receipt, and my sisters and I carried it out like a body. We took it home in the trunk of the car.

Once home, we wrestled it onto my bed: It lit up the whole room with its flowing electric magenta fibers, like a hallucinogenic dream. I sighed with admiration.

It was an instant sensation. We invited over friends and family for viewings. Everyone under 15 loved it. Adults shielded their eyes. My bedspread was a personality, a fabric canvas, so imposing we had to give it a name. Mom suggested "The Blob," but Monica cut to the chase, "Big Pink."

Dad grumbled over this decor innovation, concerned that Big Pink could be a sign of weakening morality, but eventually he decided to let it stay.

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.