Not long ago, as my son gathered his bean-bag bear and stuffed rabbit to him—his "pets"—scrunching blankets around him on the lower bunk, he looked up at me and in that clear, slightly too loud five-year-old tone asked me: "Daddy, do you have a pet?"

I do not.

But there was a brontosaurus.

Nearly thirty years ago, my parents moved away from Nebraska for my father to attend graduate school. I was nine years old, the eldest of my siblings. We had moved to my mother's hometown when I was a year old, a town also inhabited by my grandparents and several sets of aunts and uncles. I can remember my parents asking me—and I honor them for this—what I thought about the potential for a move. I did not want to go, to leave our extended family and the neighborhood and home I knew and loved. But in my eldest-child sense of duty, I told my parents it was all right, because I could discern however dimly that it was something they felt we needed to do. My father had been laid off from his job, and graduate school seemed the best path to find work that could provide for a family of six (and later seven, then eight).

We sold our home and moved to central Iowa before my tenth birthday. Somewhere in the move, I lost a toy—a hard blue plastic brontosaurus, from the days before the brontosaurus was abolished. In the midst of the packing and the garage sale and the loading the Ryder truck and the drive to Iowa and the settling into a new, smaller house in a strange and unfriendly town, my brontosaurus disappeared. Near-continuous searches—which must have exhausted my mother as she tried to care for four small children and move into a new house—turned up nothing. I wept in rage and loss every night for weeks, insisting my parents must have sold my dinosaur at the garage sale.

Eventually the gusts of grief died down to zephyrs. The brontosaurus never appeared. We unpacked my other toys. I was reconciled to my parents, who reasonably concluded that my weeks of tears were not, really, about the dinosaur. I wandered our new yard, met the neighbors.

My parents concluded, naturally enough, that my sorrow was not about the dinosaur—for which I had not previously shown any special affinity—so much as it was about the move itself. A nine-year-old sublimating loneliness and fear of change into a longing for a toy.

But if my affection for that particular dinosaur was new, intense love of my toys was not. My brother and I shared a collection of stuffed animals and action figures. Each had a name. Even my childhood self sensed that I would eventually grow out of this affection for stuffed animals, and this knowledge gave my love much of its strength and desperation. I knew I would not love these stuffed bears and giraffes forever, and so I was determined to cling to them all the firmer.

I was correct. I cannot recall now many of the names or shapes of these toys, nor do I recall at what point I ceased to play with them or abandoned them to younger siblings or the reaches of our attic. In adolescence I simply moved on. I have seen few of those playthings again.

I cannot now see that teenage abandonment as anything other than a sort of callousness for, a disregard toward, my childhood self. And I suppose such disregard is to be understood in a boy striving to show he is almost a man. As a man, though, I regret it. I wish that I could have been tender toward my past selves then, so that I might be more tender toward them now.

Over five years in Iowa, I made friends and enjoyed the town we lived in, a place undeniably more attractive and with better amenities than my hometown in Nebraska. Then, when I was fourteen, my father finished his PhD and got a job back in Nebraska. We moved back, improbably enough, to the very small town we had left. My blue dinosaur never reappeared, but a homecoming I hadn't expected did, at least for a time.

Today, my son, his pets, and I live far from Nebraska and our family there. As I put him to bed every night with his pets nearby, another homecoming seems a vanishing possibility. I wish now that I had a pet.

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