Too much monkey business.

The other day, I gave into a bit of temptation and, feeling furtive and somewhat depraved, clicked through to see what’s up at The New York Post.

What was up was an article on a middle-aged couple who, having lost a Beanie Baby monkey, were trying to cope with their grief:

"It's heartbreaking," [Jack] Zinzi told The Post yesterday. "It's like losing a child. We take him everywhere we go, we talk to him. We even love to stand him up and make him dance and come alive."

It’s like losing a child.

Spoken like someone who apparently doesn’t have the imagination or empathy to consider what it might be like to actually lose a real child, or even a real, animate, honest-to-goodness pet.

Are these folks – Jack Zinzi and his partner, Bonni Marcus – for real, or are they, perhaps, performance artists?

Apparently they do have some sense of reality. The reward they offered for the return of Bongo was “only” $500. I suspect that if this had been a living, breathing child (or even a pet), the ante may have been upped.

Still, there’s that disproportionate statement: It’s like losing a child.

Personally, although I don’t have any children of my own, I do have children that I love deeply, and letting myself even toy with contemplating their loss is completely, unfathomably painful. Unimaginable. Too big for the mind to hold. Like trying to imagine nothingness. Only worse.

So what must it be like for parents?

Having grown up in a home where the specter of our family’s own lost child lurked perpetually in the shadows, I find that someone’s comparing a missing stuffed animal to a missing child stunted, perverse, absurd.

Not that I can’t still conjure up the pain at losing my First Communion rosary beads – dropped on the filthy floor of the Plymouth Theater in Worcester when I was eight or nine, and not to be found even after the kindly usher played his flashlight over the beneath-the-seats detritus of crushed paper soda cups and empty packages of Black Crows and Junior Mints.

But it was only a thing. And things, unlike human beings and pets, are completely replaceable or at least more easily livable without. Or at least they should be, no?

I have a stuffed dog, Sniffy, that I’ve had since my fourth birthday.

I wouldn’t say that we’re attached at the hip or anything, but we are, after all these years, attached. Sniffy “lives” on top of a chest of drawers in our bedroom – at least that’s where I think he lives; he may actually be in the bookcase – and I’d say that, maybe once a year or so, I have commune a bit with the old boy, mostly thinking about my childhood and my parents. I can look him in the eye and remember the steel eyes he came with that, when they were lost, my mother replaced with jet button eyes. I can examine the scar on his tummy, where my mother replaced the stuffing that had been leaking out and flattening Sniffy, with a bunch of cut up nylons. I can look at his worn “fur” and remember the thick pelt he came with. I can still se the box he came in: a long cardboard carton with a cellophane window, much like the cartons that a half-dozen powdered sugar donuts came in.

So, yeah, Sniffy and I go back quite a ways. And, if I don’t exactly love him as I must have earlier in my life, I have a soft-spot for him in my heart, and do have feelings for affection for him. Errrr, it.

Still, if Sniffy went missing, there would be no $500 reward for him. If my home were burning down, Sniffy might make the “top 100 things to save”. But maybe not.

He would be gone, but not forgotten. But he would be gone, baby, gone.

But I guess when it comes to inanimate objects, I’m just the shallow type. Unlike Marcus and Zinzi:

Marcus, who teaches at a Manhattan private school, Rennert Bilingual, says she and Zinzi have a "spiritual connection" with Bongo and that losing him put a strain on their relationship.

She said Bongo's three siblings -- three Beanie Babies identical to Bongo named Doe, Ray and Me -- are also suffering. "The head of the family is gone," she lamented.

Is this what ‘theater of the absurd’ means?

Somewhere along the line, I read that Zinzi and Marcus raised Bongo like a son.

Am I repeating myself here when I ask about the meaning of ‘theater of the absurd’? If this isn’t what it means, then it should be.

Raising a Beanie Baby like a son…

I suspect that Bongo never cried out for them in the middle of the night. Never squirted either of them in the face when they forgot to toss the diaper over Bongo’s wee thing when he was lying there on the changing table. I don’t imagine there was that painful first day in day care. Projectile vomiting. A first step. A lost tooth. No debate over whether his first word was “mama”, “dada”, or “binky”. No panic when they realized that Bongo’s stuffed monkey was nowhere to be found, and how were they going to get him to sleep without it?

Did they ever have to say “indoor voice” or “use your words”? Explain what those two doggies in the park were doing? Talk about how sometimes grownups fail you, and sometimes other kids are mean? Pushed on the toe of the sneakers they’d just paid $60 for and realize they no longer fit? Agonized over how clumsy their kid was at tee-ball? What a mess he was when he ate ice cream? How proud they felt when he was kind to the runny-nosed misfit kid in the park?

Did Bongo ever hug them back?

I may not know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies, but I do believe it’s a bit less physically, emotionally, and spiritually taxing to raise a kid than to “raise” a Beanie Baby. On the teeter-totter of life, the real kid keeps you grounded; the Beanie Baby’s up in the air.

I do hope that Zinzi and Marcus find Bongo – for their sakes, and for the pathetic fallacy sakes of Doe, Ray, and Me. They’ve clearly invested a lot of emotion in Bongo, and this little stuffed monkey is obviously a proxy server for a lot of what’s going on in this couple.

Still, it seems a bit over the top to have this kind of reaction to the loss of a stuffed animal.

Not to mention it raises a grave question: if Bongo were so all-fired important, why was he placed so carelessly in a bag that he could (and obviously did) fall out of? Shouldn’t he have been swaddled in a Snugli? Or at least secured in an inner, zippered pocket.

Anyway, this is what I get for giving into temptation and reading The New York Post.

Never say never, but (maybe) never again.