Lilli-Bunny was always looking for a real friend, and finally he found him. This was Lilli-Bear. Lilli-Bear was a kind of teddy bear, but even more educated and polite. You

might say that lilli-bears are not very talkative and tend to fall on one side. This is true. This Lilli-Bear also always fell on his side, trying to fit himself to benches, sofas, armchairs, or, generally speaking, to everything it was possible to lie down on with a reasonable degree of comfort and peace. But one couldn’t call him "not talkative" or "untalkable." That just was not true. He kept silence here and there, now and then. But all of sudden he’d start talking, and God witness, it wasn’t easy to make him mute. At such moments, Lilli-Bear tried to say everything all at once, and one would think he heard a chorus of lilli-bears. So far, conventional science hasn’t found any reasonable explanation of how it is possible for one lilli-bear to sound like many, though this is not the only thing conventional science finds difficult to explain.

Lilli-Bear talked especially much if he sat on something wet. It also occurred in the pond or the bath. Then he became so chatty one could make friends with him as much as one wished. That’s why Lilli-Bear avoided towels after a bath—he didn’t want to lose his capability to complete the sentences that he might start once he was wet. I must say, it was even worse when Lilli-Bear sat on something cold, like a bench lightly frosted with snow. Then he could go so far as to write verses of songs. Here is one such song. Lilli-Bear wrote it for Lilli-Bunny with help from all the fellow inhabitants of the Lilli-Bunny

house.

We love Lilli-Bunny and both of his slippers

And this nice household that we gladly possess

Because Lilli-Bunny is the one who can feed us,

Two parrots and an armful of cats.

He always works hard, but he never gets tired

He shoots any trouble, once and for all,

You can’t find a person who’s equally kind

Such goodness may save our world.

Keep walking with courage in your furry slippers,

And always with an armful of your stupid cats,

We cannot express our love any deeper,

We love you as much as it possibly gets!

Lilli-Bear looked at his poem and thought, "I like it, but if I can use French to speak of my love for Lilli-Bunny, why don’t I?" French is the best language for expressing love. Even if you order French fries in French, it sounds like erotic talk—Je voudrais. Lis-ten

to the sound of this word: v-u-u-d-r-e-e—the "r" sounds like the roaring of a sleepy tiger. Does it turn you on? Well, try it again, and eventually, you’ll get there. Without distinctly knowing whether he should use French to express his love to Lilli-Bunny, Lilli-Bear decided to take the chance and wrote the following song:

Nous aimons beaucoup notre lapin

Et notre maison que nous possédons

Parce que notre lapin nous traite avec le bouillon

Et parfois il nous donne même du vin!

Il travaille toujours dur, mais il n’est jamais fatigué,

Et quand il travaille, c’est un plaisir à voir,

C’est vrai, depuis que ce vieux monde s’est créé,

Il n’y a pas pour lui de meilleur espoir!

Marchez avec le courage vers un meilleur l’avenir

Nous t’aimons et nous aimons tes chats

C’est si important encore pour devenir

Le meilleur lapin que le monde possédera.

Lilli-Bear didn’t quite know what this poem looked like because he didn’t exactly know French, but successful writing of the song in two languages encouraged Lilli-Bear. So he tried to write it in Russian, as well. He knew those nice guys who call themselves "new Russians" and speak Russian in New York and London exactly as they speak it in Moscow. They think if they speak Russian louder and slower, people will understand them. Anyway, Lilli-Bear wrote the poem in Russian, just to make his friend Lilli-Bunny prepared for such a pleasant invasion.

It is so educational to live in the United States, Great Britain, or Canada in our day! You don’t need to travel the world to meet people from distant corners of the Earth. They are all here. You can save the money you’d spend on expensive tickets and tours. And you can calm your fear of falling victim to a terrorist attack while you are in the air. They are all here too! And French is not that bad after all. Look at you, what you are going to say when we all have to learn Chinese? I already did. You don’t believe me? Well, here I go:

"Wo Schan Yao Chi" and "Wo Schan Yao He!" This means "I want to eat and drink."

One of my friends told me that he knows how to say "Hello" and "Good-bye" in Chinese. We decided to act together in case the world turns all-Chinese soon. He will be my "public relations department." He will say, in Chinese, "Hello" (just to make the conversation more polite), and I will say, "I want to eat and to drink," and then he will say "Good-bye." I think this is an excellent plan for survival. Don’t you think so? It is much easier than trying to make more children and teaching them to work hard, the only way Chinese know to work.

"Wow," said Lilli-Bear to himself. He always was saying wow to himself, just to make himself feel better. But he didn’t say "wow!" with an exclamation mark, as everybody else does. He said it with period in the end, like this: "wow." Lilli-Bear was confident that wow with a period on the end sounded more convincing.

When Lilli-Bear read all three poems to the fellow inhabitants of Lilli-Bunny’s house, they made pale efforts in the beginning to applaud him; but these efforts were too hopeless to be persisted in. The inhabitants of Lilli-Bunny House didn’t know many languages. Only Lilli-Bunny clapped his hands loudly and kissed Lilli-Bear on the nose. Lilli-Bunny loved his friend, because only a real friend can write you a poem in three languages he doesn’t quite know. The truth is you don’t have to know a language in order to use it. There are so many ways to express yourself without employing any language at all. Lilli-Bear had many other things that could do the same trick: giggling, clapping, coughing, sneezing, yawning, and even farting—Oh, I am sorry; I wasn’t supposed to say that. But too late. Lilli-Bunny’s left slipper likes to look over my shoulder at what I am writing, and when he saw the word "farting," he went crazy, proclaiming a new slogan: "Freedom of Farting! Freedom of Farting!" and I didn’t have much way to stop him. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—How could I use such a vulgar slang in my noble piece of writing? Well, there’s still some hope that the editor will delete the whole passage. You know, deleting is much more creative than writing. Because when you write, you don’t have much choice what to write. You are just expressing your heart, exactly as Lilli-Bear did. But when someone has the power to delete— oh, that is a hell of a power! One might say that deleting is, in a way, more influential than writing. So, if you still can read all this, blame the editor, not me. After so much linguistic effort from Lilli-Bear, how could Lilli-Bunny not consider him a best friend? He even gave Lilli-Bear a present: a ring, a cute little ringlet with writing on its in-side: "For Love and Friendship." Lilli-Bear was so happy he put two sticks in the ground in his backyard and started to throw the ring, trying to get it on a stick. He labeled one stick "Luff," and on the other, he wrote "Phrent-Sheep" (Lilli-Bear’s way of spelling the words "Love" and "Friendship"). As a direct descendant of the Honorable Winnie the Pooh, and like all his descendants, Lilli-Bear suffered from slight difficulties in spelling. Once I thought that spelling would die out by the next generation, but computers saved it with their "check spelling" option. Now we don’t have to remember the exact spelling even of simple words to get them right and be considered a well-educated person. Shakespeare didn’t have such a luxury. Poor thing! Once a computer does the spelling for me, I can allow myself to become a strong supporter of the conventional way of spelling. Can you possibly imagine how many generations of teachers’ kicks and slaps the word "enough" carries on its bloody letters?

Regretfully, teachers don’t beat up their students anymore (they found more elaborate ways to humiliate their students. We must admit that this constitutes substantial progress in the educational system), but it doesn’t make the word "enough" any less bloody.

Its Old Germanic origin caused a lot of damage to young souls in their unhappy years of schooling, maybe even more damage than the German military machine did to Great Britain and the English-speaking world. Well, I guess we had enough with the word

"enough." We must let it rest in peace.

So Lilli-Bear always followed Lilli-Bunny and tried to fit himself on anything it was possible to lie down on. Lilli-Bunny kept telling Lilli-Bear, "You lay around too long," or "you sit too long." But Lilli-Bear didn’t argue. He always agreed saying, "right," and then staying where he lay. When Lilli-Bunny baked pancakes for him, Lilli-Bear would lie down on a small gauzy bench that Lilli-Bunny put in the kitchen for him. When the pancakes were ready, Lilli-Bear always started to philosophize. So specialists promptly dubbed this sort of philosophy "Kitchen Philosophy."

Lilli-Bear’s Kitchen Philosophy:

1. Pancakes are better than buns.

2. Pancakes are better than buns, particularly because I ate all the buns yesterday, and I’m eating pancakes today. If I eat waffles, that means that they exist, whatever Descartes has to say. "I think, therefore I exist." —Not true. Waffles do not need to think in order to exist.

3. Nietzsche is an idiot.

That’s it. Lilli-Bear, of course, had new thoughts sometimes, especially if he was given semolina porridge with raspberry jam, but these thoughts were so short that Lilli-Bear wrote them with his spoon directly on the porridge, and porridge is not a very reliable material for preserving eternal ideas. So, humanity shall have to be satisfied with the three lines of Lilli-Bear’s Kitchen Philosophy that we have already respect-fully presented.