The Adventures of Pete the Raccoon

Pete the Raccoon liked to eat apples. Or at least that’s how I remember it. When I was a little girl, sharing a bedroom with my younger sister, our father would make up stories involving our stuffed animals and Pete’s adventures were always a favorite. Since he was a nocturnal animal, it was only natural that Pete would go off and do things while we slept. Then, the next night, my dad would tell us where he went.

The house we lived in then was on Riverside Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey. There was a highway (NJ-29) between our street and the Delaware River, and luckily the highway was a buffer from any potential flooding. This neighborhood was part of a historic district called Berkeley Square, and our house was built in the late-Victorian style, with a large, wrap-around front porch commonly found in that era. As a kid it was a great house to grow up in, but we only lived there until a month shy of my 6th birthday, so my memories are few and far between.

Pete, on the other hand, was a busy little raccoon, exploring the neighborhood afterhours. In the story I remember best, he found an apple, and as raccoons like to do, he needed to wash it before he could eat it. With the river so close, he wisely used the pedestrian bridge to cross the highway and made his way down to the water. Once there, he held the apple tightly in his paws and dipped it into the river, rubbing it to make sure it was clean.

As I’m writing this story down, I thought, do raccoons really wash their food? I’m sorry to say that the answer is no. However, I learned a lot about raccoons just now and they are often observed as dipping their food into water. Their paws are like a second set of eyes, and because they do not have opposable thumbs, they need to roll food or objects between both paws in a motion that looks like washing. Wetting their food also helps them get it into their mouths, rather than acting as a cleaning agent.

Pete had the advantage of being cute, unlike the raccoon at the end of one of my children’s books. I can’t track down the title, but as I recall, the story involved two or three bears who couldn’t sleep because they heard noises in the night. What was the culprit? You turned to the last page and there was a picture of a raccoon in a tree! It probably wasn’t meant to be scary, but I know I was scared to the point of being afraid to turn that last page. Perhaps that was Pete’s purpose, to make raccoons less scary. Whatever the case, he quickly became a treasured toy.

From Trenton we moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and of course Pete came with us. By now there was a third child for him to delight with his adventures, and my brother enjoyed them just as much as my sister and I did. Maybe it was some kind of magic, or all those apples he ate, but in Lancaster Pete gained a new ability to help him explore. We would often be lying in our beds when a whirring sound would come through the door from my brother’s room. Who could it be but Pete? His tail became a helicopter to take him from room to room to wish us good night.

As we grew up Pete remained part of our stuffed animal gang, losing his nose somewhere along the way as our imaginations took over from our father’s. We held school for them, put them in political office, and acted out real life scenarios like drunk driving. Years later I took him to college to sit beside me as I took a final exam, not that he knew anything about psychology (and as it turned out, neither did I). Today he’s here with me in Cleveland, offering some much-needed company as I worked from home during the first month of the pandemic. I’m sure he still gets around when I’m not looking though, and maybe I’ll buy him an apple the next time I go shopping.