The two-year-old decides, one February night, that he cannot sleep without his green shoes—a grimy pair of sneakers he hasn’t worn since at least November, before there was snow on the ground. He cradles them both in his sleep for ten days or so, carries them lovingly around the house to accompany him as he does puzzles, plays games, watches movies. We have to ransack the cushions for them at naptime and brush gravel out of his sheets every time he wakes.
Then one evening as I am tucking him into bed he blinks, like Rip Van Winkle awakening from a dream, and says, “Actually, I don’t really need to have these shoes in my bed.”
The reasoning does not extend to his top hat.