This column, written by LVEDC President & CEO Don Cunningham, originally appeared in The Morning Call and on the newspaper’s website on Sept. 7, 2025.
I hadn’t thought about stuffed animals in three decades.
But now I was in the thick of them. Sprawled across the sofa bed in this children’s playroom were about two dozen species of animals. There were monkeys, giraffes, lions, a shark, and something I thought was a dolphin.
“No, it not,” said Jayla, my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter.
“Looks like a dolphin,” I said.
She shook her head side-to-side.
“Maybe it’s a whale,” I tried.
She looked disappointed in me.
“Na-wa,” she said, her crystal blue eyes meeting mine, pleading for me to understand the word her brain knew but couldn’t yet fully pronounce. Unfortunately, for her, my brain had a greater deficiency in sea animal varieties and the shapes of cartoonish stuffed animals.
“Na-wa!”
After a bit of a back and forth – reminiscent of me trying to communicate with a cab driver on a recent business trip to Austria – her soon-to-be five-year-old sister Josie stopped jumping on the bed in her effort to knock all the stuffed animals on the floor.
“Narwhal,” she said, then returned to jumping.
Jayla nodded her head up-and-down as if to say, “Yeah, Narwhal, Pop, what are you an idiot?”
Turns out, Narwhals are a species of whale that live in Arctic waters and have a tusk. Most importantly, they didn’t exist in the stuffed version 30-plus years ago when my kids were young.
This exchange occurred during a half hour period where I attempted to entertain my granddaughters while my daughter and son-in-law got ready for us to go out to dinner during my recent visit to their beach house in Margate, New Jersey.
It was the best 30 minutes of the summer.
With all the stuffed animals lined up on the bed, I told Jayla to pick out the ones she would like to be in a story. And just as I did back when her mom and uncles were little, I made up a story featuring the characters she picked.
As soon as the story finished, Jayla exclaimed, “‘Nother one!”
It was just what her mom, and her mom’s brothers, would say when I made up stories or read them books back in 1995. It made me feel 30 years old again.
It was a magic moment. The innocence and joy — and time travel — of it was overwhelming. All the stories had happy endings and the bad guy, the stuffed shark, always lost. The stuffed-animal stories ended spontaneously, just as they had begun.
At the end of one story, Jayla sat up, looked around and said, “Where mommy?” She then slid off the bed and headed downstairs.
Lightning in a bottle, came and went in a flash.
Life comes unplanned and unexpected. The good and the bad.
My wife Lynn and I have spent most of this summer mourning. Her oldest sister died unexpectedly in Bar Harbor, Maine. Six days later my stepmother — my dad’s wife of 43-years — died just as quickly and unexpectedly in Florida. It’s not likely that Josie and Jayla will remember their great nana. My dad is trying to make his way, navigating a changed life as he nears 80.
Change comes quickly.
On the first evening of my weekend in Margate, we walked to dinner and for ice cream. The effects of Hurricane Erin that primarily took place out in the Atlantic Ocean had made its way to the Jersey Shore. The ocean was nearly at the dunes and the bay had crested its banks.
After we got the kids back home, I headed back out to get a closer look. By that time, water was pouring up through the storm sewers, the fire department was rescuing some less-mobile people from flooded restaurants, and I had to remove my socks and shoes to wade through knee-deep water to make it home.
I thought of that summer camp in Texas. How those floods came and replaced youthful joy and innocence with devastating tragedy. In a flash, lives were changed forever. The pain of those families is unimaginable.
A few days after returning from my magic weekend in Margate with my daughter and her family, the daily turbulence of life struck again as a maniac with a rifle turned it on Catholic school children in Minneapolis inside a church.
Children inside a church.
I’m certain those children and teachers and parents don’t want our thoughts and prayers. They want a safer America, one where kids don’t fear getting shot at school and church. An America where children aren’t the foot soldiers for someone else’s unbending allegiance to possess weaponry of all magnitude.
I walked past my high school in Bethlehem the day after the shooting. The flag was at half-staff in recognition of those who died and suffered. It made me stop. Not once during my school days at Freedom, nor during junior high, elementary school or, even college, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, did I think that could occur.
And, yes, I thought of those children in Minnesota, their parents and grandparents, the schoolteachers, and administrators, and I said a prayer for them. Thoughts and prayers. I could do nothing else.
I also prayed that we could find our way back to the America in which I was raised — and replace this one we have now in which my granddaughters are being raised. I hoped for an America where every child’s story could be like the ones on that playroom sofa bed in Margate where the stuffed shark never hurt anyone.