Polar Bears and Princesses

A Story by TisWit

I wrote this mostly to entertain myself. Maybe it'll entertain you, too.

I'm half polar bear, and it's okay.

Being part polar bear these days is a pretty good deal. Mostly you get to reap the benefits without having to worry about any of the negatives, like discrimination. No one judges me when I stand out in a freezing Wisconsin winter or because I look do darn cute when I tilt my head ever so slightly to the side. Personally, I think I look cuter when I tilt to the left instead of the right.

However, it hasn't always been this way. My mother was 100% human, my father 100% polar bear. Human-polar bear relationships were severely frowned upon back in those days. When my mother finally brought my father to meet her unsuspecting parents, an already sticky situation became further complicated by the fact that my grandfather was a world famous polar bear hunter.

Back in the '60s, a relatively large group of misguided and misunderstood polar bears began kidnapping human princesses. A small human contingent tried to calm the others of their kind down by explaining the precious princesses weren't being kidnapped at all. In fact, they believed the opposite to be true; the princesses were falling in love and running off with the polar bears. But history is written by the victor, and since this is in a way a small history lesson, we'll have to go with the kidnapping theory...despite the evidence.

Either way, the number of princesses gone missing in the company of polar bears, rather willingly or not, far outnumbered the number of plumbers available to save them. So a call went out for anyone willing to help restore sanity and stability to the unstable and insane world where polar bears and princesses are together. My grandfather, then a criminal justice lawyer seeking redemption, heard the call and immediately enlisted in the Save the Princesses Corp, a branch off the United Plumbers Union.

There he trained under two overall-ed, Italian brothers with mustaches and quickly rose to the top. In his prime, my grandfather was reputed to have been saving a princess and half a day. Even now, there exists boxes upon boxes of newspaper clippings of photographs of my grandfather posing with the princess (and a half) he saved that day. My grandmother claims to be the very last princess her husband had saved.

Which makes sense since they met in the '60s and as the '60s faded out, so did the Great Princess Kidnapping Crisis. Aided by radical new legislation passing through Congress and the swaying of public opinion after the revealing of the then-Head Plumber's extreme fruit fetish, people came to become more accepting of human-polar bear relationships. My grandfather retired and never came across a polar bear again.

At least until he unexpectedly came face to face with my mother's new snow-furred boyfriend. His training came to the forefront and, after grabbing the double-barreled shotgun he kept by his rocking chair for just this occasion, pressed the business end of Ol' Bessy into the black, moist snout of my future father.

It was in this moment, when his kicking and screeching daughter was being held back stoic wife, that my grandfather had what some would call an epiphany, but he would refer to as “a dawning of divine intervention.” For in the eyes of the polar bear that his daughter had brought to him to declare their intentions, my grandfather saw the very human emotion of fear, a fear that he connected with his own fear.

My grandfather's fear came from a source buried deep in his past. As a boy he had been digging in the newly fallen snow, scooping up chunks of it and tossing it about. Once, while not paying attention to what he was doing, he reached down, grabbed a chunk of what he thought was snow, and instead came up with a handful of polar bear hair. The ground beneath him shook and roared, in that order. The formerly passed out polar bear pushed out from underneath the snow, knocking my grandfather to his backside. He caught a whiff of boozy air before the polar bear took one disoriented swipe, missed badly, twirled around, and fell on top of my grandfather. He was stuck underneath for a good six or seven minutes before someone came along and pulled him out.

So as he looked down the barrel at my polar bear father, my grandfather realized that the two weren't very different after all. He lowered the gun and placed it back in its place by the rocker. My grandfather extend his big, burly hand and shook the big, burly paw of my father.

A year later, my parents married. Five months after that, I popped into a world where polar bears and people got along like peas in a Green Giant can.