What are Richie Bears? The obvious answer is that they are innocent little stuffed bears which love to frolic and play. Hippity-hopping along through life, they bring joy and a sense of contentment to all they meet.
That answer, of course, is dead wrong. Richies are indeed bears. They are stuffed. They are little. But innocent? Not a chance.
The first time I met a Richie, I knew something was not quite right. It's the smile that tips you off first. Look again at that smile: that pernicious, mindless, gleeful smile. It's the kind of smile that just gets under your skin; it makes you want to grab the wearer by the throat, slap him a couple of times and yell, "Wake up a smell the juju beans!", except you're afraid the wearer would begin to drool on you and it would get kind of messy. It's that kind of mind-numbing blissfully ignorant smile usually reserved for TV exercise show hosts, Jehovah's Witnesses, Barney, and those people on the Psychic Friends' Network. And the Richies have it. Which is not to say that Richies are eeeeeviiiiil. No no, not at all; they're actually pretty harmless. They're just stupid, and it gets on your nerves pretty quickly. Especially when they start to jump on you and gibber, which they like to do quite a bit.
The exact nature of Richies remains something of a mystery. They are after all stuffed animals; are Richies alive, in the traditional sense? When they start pleading with you not to beat them, or throwing themselves down the stairs in a lemming-like orgy of bouncing, you're hard pressed to deny their philosophical existence. "I U?, therefore I am", if you will. Still, whether they constitute intelligent life is another matter. With their heads stuffed with simulated fluff, Richies do not always seem to exhibit the sort of higher thought processes one would like to associate with intelligence. Here is an example of one of the more intelligent Richies, attempting to count to three:
One... um.. more than one.. more than one.. um... MOR THN WUN, MR THN WN, MR DEN MR DEN WUN, MUR DN DAT, MURDNWUNMURDNWUNMURDENNGA, NGANGANAGNGANGA--
..at which point we had to stop the demostration. I think you see my point.
The first Richie I met arrived at our house on Christmas day. His origins are still a bit fuzzy.. then again, Richie is a bit fuzzy himself, so perhaps that goes without saying. From what we've been able to piece together, Richies come from a wonderful, magical place known to them as "Richieland". Duh, imagine that. Where Richieland might actually be is a complete mystery, and the Richies haven't been much help - they can barely figure out how to get out of the closet. At first we suspected a polar origin; the white coloring suggested it, and a connection to Santa seems just right. But from their descriptions of the place, Richieland is certainly not near the pole. For that matter, it's not near anywhere else, either. Maybe the Richies simply dreamed up the whole thing, I wouldn't put it past them. But if so, that still leaves the question of where these Richies (and new ones seem to be appearing almost daily now) are coming from.
Oh.. oh, you mean THOSE Richies. Well, why didn't you say so?
One fine Christmas day, my next younger brother (who was quite young at the time) received a stuffed, white, mindless looking toy bear. While he was not altogether thrilled with his new playmate, my youngest brother was, and in sympathy took the poor bear as his new best friend. When the middle brother went to reclaim his gift (as young children are wont to do), the youngest became quite upset - he wanted his own bear. As fate and Richies would have it, the youngest's birthday was only three days later, and on that day our second visitor arrived. The youngest became quite attached to the little bear, pretending to have conversations with it (him?) and taking it with him everywhere. The middle brother, being older and so much wiser in the way of bears, liked to pretend spitefully that his own familiar bear was mean, and would beat up the youngest's companion. "Stop it!", he would cry out, insisting that the bear was being hurt! Richie was alive, he claimed, and shouldn't be beaten! The middle brother took to making up stories about the bears, using the personalities of some of their younger and more socially inept schoolmates as material for the voices and actions. As the stories became more and more ridiculous, even the youngest began to get into the act - and pretty soon, these bears had lives of their own. A few months later, a third bear entered our lives.. and then a fourth.. and a fifth.. and as time went on, we found that the spirit of the Richies could inhabit all manner of things. Why, Richies could even trade places with other objects (say, the ground outside where we were raking leaves) to make comments on what was happenning (OUCHS, STOPADIS, IHATDIS, MUS, MAKITSTP, ODEPANS, etc). These days, we've come to suspect that the community of Richies is much, much larger than we'd originally anticipated. We seem to be perpetually surrounded by the little buggars. Maybe you've even met one or two yourself...
