Dear Giant Rubber Duck,

I am supposed to detest you, but I'm having a hard time with that.

HenryDelMal, “Rubber Duck at Quinta Normal Park in Santiago, Chile (2017), used with permission and reworked from the original.

So I hear you’ve got a twin brother and you guys are going on tour! That’s a nice development considering you’ve been riding this circuit for more than a decade.

I know people get smokin' mad at you, mainly because you’re plastic. But they’ve got a point. It’s everywhere. How much plastic ends up inside of us? My daughter's sig other said that we each consume enough microplastics every week to equal a credit card. (I asked if eating a Gold MasterCard is better for one's general constitution then, say, a Discover card. They weren't sure, but I'll just take mine in cash, thanks.)

As a kid, the combination of water and larger-than-life things used to scare the daylights out of me. While I'd swim all day in the community pool, I was tentative in Lake Erie. As for the moving bridges along the Cuyahoga River, they were real dinosaurs that ate your legs as far as I was concerned.

We never had AC in the house or car, so during northeast Ohio's stifling summer days I'd gaze out from the backseat of the Vista Cruiser as we passed the mammoth water towers. They had names like STRONGSVILLE and LAKE COUNTY and BEREA and I waxed envious of all that cool water they held. But this was no community pool and if I were to splash and play inside the tower’s expansive privacy, I'd eventually get tired. And it would be so dark. And there would be no way to hang onto the smooth metal walls and my calls for help would turn into ghostly echoes … and … and …

And what about you?

You're hella bigger than a Visa card. (I should probably stop right now and try and figure out about how many credit cards one would have to amass in order to reach your hefty 30,000 pounds, but it's entirely too exhausting. You understand, dontcha Giant Rubber Duck?) At some 60 feet tall, you are most definitely a very large thing in the water, way bigger than the shark from JAWS. In a way, you and the bridges and water towers were like AI for me before there was AI: Giant undeniable entities foisted upon me by humans, but completely indifferent to my survival.

I mean, what if some little kid swam up to you and somehow got beneath you and found herself pushing against your endless bright yellow plastic, unable to find a pocket of air? What then,? Huh, Giant Rubber Duck?

Wait a minute. That’s not right.

I don't think you smother little kids. I don't even think you scare them. I think little kids love you.

In 2016, a local arts organization sponsored bringing a flock of the Cracking Art Group's plastic animals to Cleveland. Every night, some unseen merry band of artsters would relocate members of the "flock" and move them all around the city. The next day, giant snails would be creeping across the Eastman Reading Garden. A lime green meerkat would be peering out at our fair city from an obscure ledge. A giant blue bird would be standing sentinel on Euclid Avenue.

They were fun for everyone, but the little kids really loved them. They'd hug them and climb on them and push them around the interactive fountains on Public Square. Some might say they were better than a million Happy Meal toys and I would agree. Plenty of people did not.

Locals interact with an affable herd of plastic animals in Cleveland’s Public Square, July 2016.

Oh the irony: plastic is so safe for kids to play with and so dangerous for the environment those same kids depend on.

In lieu of being judicious about plastic and its use, we humans have opted instead to argue endlessly about your right to exist, Giant Rubber Duck. Said discussions are often had while participants sip coffee from a plastic cup (the coffee, incidentally, tastes exactly the same from a good ol’ ceramic mug, maybe even better). Behold an excellent example of human beings happily accepting two diametric opposites. It’s a thing with us. We have a word for it: hypocrisy.

For me, it all comes down to scale. And boy-oh-boy, didn't we just land in your wheel house. Scale is your whole thing, Giant Rubber Duck. It is your sole success. You inflate new life into the tired phrase "go big or go home." After all, you're the Giant Rubber Duck!

Take away your outsized proportions and you're just a regular ol' rubber duck. That is, until you break down into those yummy microplastics and then into something smaller than that and smaller and smaller and smaller.

Enter Mother Earth, boss of us all.

Now imagine her laughing at the idea of plastics and forever chemicals. Forever?

That term is only relative to us fragile humans and our Giant Rubber Ducks. The earth is five billion years old. In Mother Nature’s time frame, you and I are utterly negligible; we’ve been here less than a split second in celestial terms.

Once she gets sick of us (and you could argue she already has), she'll crush us both down into more useful building blocks such as molecules of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc. Then one way or another we'll filter back into her. There will be no way to differentiate which molecules were once a part of you or me or the Statue of Liberty.

I wonder what we’ll be part of next. I hope it’s something cool like a spaceship. With my luck, it’ll probably a grape or shoe. That said, I’ve got a lot of useful molecules, so who knows?

From 2004, your humble author, husband, and kiddo—and a cool lil’ rubber duck.

Time is the ultimate equalizer.

That concept equally disturbs and soothes me, mostly because I’m afraid of the interim, the time around the edges, the time between me being a whole Erin and you being a whole Giant Rubber Duck and that eventuality when both of us are reduced to our most granular components. Ten thousand years isn’t so scary, but what if it’s just 10? Ten years would mean a whole lot of fire and brimstone, my friend.

yeah, yeah

Until our great demise, Giant Rubber Duck, I’ll forgive you for being plastic and you can forgive me for being human. We can float around together, and watch as the sun scatters diamonds on the waves.

Love, Erin

ps: I tried to fit the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man into this letter, but it was a no-go. After all, he's a character in a movie made from some sort of ghost protoplasm or something. That said, if you had an affair with him, Giant Rubber Duck, I would not blame you.

pss: Inflatable lawn ornaments also felt germane to this missive, until they didn't. Those guys any relation to you?