The e-mail was urgent: “We’re all somewhat out of sorts, bordering on distraught because Speckles has gone AWOL. . . . Thanks for praying for his safe return and understanding that he ISN’T JUST a stuffed giraffe.”
The posters, plastered all over downtown Evanston: “LOST! Speckles. Somewhat grubby, VERY well-loved stuffed giraffe. Crucial and vital member of our family. Last seen Panera Bread . . . ” Smack dab in the poster’s middle: A photo, in silhouette, of said giraffe, all orange and yellow spots, sucking down a strawberry smoothie.
Clearly, this was a matter of urgent proportions.
The background: A lad of 4, Spencer Turk, was slurping his way through noodle-y soup one ordinary Wednesday a few weeks ago at the Panera Bread in Evanston.
As was always the case, Speckles, Spencer’s alter-ego, a grimy stuffed giraffe whose insides have been shoved around after years of tagging along everywhere, was right there on the table.
And that’s the last anyone can remember.
Spencer’s mother, Barb, also mama to Charlotte, who’s 1, takes it from there: “Everyone melted down. We stayed five minutes too long. It all got very discombobulated. My memory at that point gets fuzzy. I do know I scooped up the kids and got out of there.”
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Later that night, the sad realization crept over all of them: Speckles, the giraffe who always had been there, decidedly was not. Thus ensued the usual retracings: under the couch cushions, under the car seat, even back to Panera at 7 the next morning. Zip, zip, and zip. No Speckles. Nowhere.
Barb Turk called everyone she could think of: the Evanston Department of Streets and Sanitation, the Chamber of Commerce, the Maple Street parking garage. She even chased down a street sweeper.
That’s when the posters came into play. Twenty-five in all, taped in storefront windows, tacked onto bulletin boards, slapped on city lampposts. And then the e-mails.
Fearing the worst, Turk delicately laid the groundwork for Plan B, What to Do If Speckles Remains Among the Missing. She suggested to Spencer that perhaps Speckles, a giraffe with a mind of his own, might have seen fit to go on vacation.
Sure enough, less than two weeks later, there came in the mail a letter, postmarked Seattle. The letter begins: “Dear Spencer, How I miss you! But it really was time for me to see the world.”
Neatly typed, two pages, it goes on to tell how the itinerant giraffe hid under the front seat of a Greyhound bus and feasted on dropped cookies for breakfast, before connecting with a truck-driver named Joe who sprung for doughnuts and milk.
The Turks have no idea where the next missive might come from. But they do know this: Somewhere out there on the American horizon, there is a giraffe in dire need of a bath, whose stuffing has seriously shifted south. With eyes of black, and a weight in mere ounces, he cheerily answers to Speckles. And if you ply him with smoothies, he will heed your every command.
He might even come home to a boy who now knows that to be missing means, sometimes, that you are simply off seeing the world.
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