The cross she bears. The bear he crossed.

At the very height of the Cold War, my oldest brother, Chris, fought a Russian bear. My mother allowed it. She just wanted him to be happy.

This is a coming-of-age story. I think.

The hero is not the bear, who won in a technical knockout in the first round, even though he cheated. The hero is not the owner of the Hanover Mall in Massachusetts, who waved away the namby-pambies and permitted a traveling Russian bear owner to set up a boxing ring by the Orange Julius stand even though the whole undertaking was ludicrous. The hero is not even my brother Chris, the oldest of four, whose gutsy effort to prove his manhood ironically set him back several years.

No, the hero is my mother. On paper, maybe she failed to exercise the care expected of a reasonably prudent parent. But two things to consider. First, remember these were uncertain days — sword-rattling days. This was 1983. As far as we all knew, the Russians were preparing to knock the living tobacco juice out of us. How could my mother possibly discern the future would be in electrical engineering and Internet technology rather than hand-to-hand combat with Russia and her bears? The second thing, her eldest child was 19. It was time for a restructuring of the Carroll family politic — our own little perestroika. It was time to let go.

Wait. No, no, no. It was definitely NOT time to let go. Oh, good Lord, no! Don’t let that thing kill him — that THING … that tall, dark, unshaven thing. What kind of society allows its children to fight foreign bears when they don’t have to?

No, no, no, no.

Yes, as she watched a seven-foot-tall, 650-pound stinky-and-certainly-Soviet-steroid-addled brown bear lift itself up on its haunches and violently lunge at her firstborn to inflict lasting damage, she learned perhaps the most valuable lesson a mother could learn: While there comes a time to let go and allow your children to stand up on their own and make mistakes, there’s also a time when you must realize it’s definitely not time to let go. I wonder if that Russian bear owner was thinking, “What kind of society has mothers who allow their child to sign a Release of Liability, Assumption of Risk and Indemnity Agreement to fight a bear at the local mall?”

Chris announced the Russian bear was coming to town. He announced he was going to fight it. For him, it was simple — a matter of Good vs. Evil. We packed ourselves up in the family sedan to make a day of it. When we got there, a crowd had already gathered around the mall fountain. Big biker guys with leather vests and handlebar mustaches had signed up, wiping their noses with their sleeves, itching for a fight. The line stretched nearly to the perverts crowding into Spencer’s. But the line began moving surprisingly quickly for two reasons:

1. the fights were going very well for the bear; and

2. an inordinate number of tough biker guys had unceremoniously flaked off from the bear-fighting line to queue up at the Orange Julius line. (Men who wouldn’t normally be caught dead sipping hand-squeezed juice from a plastic orange had decided it would be better to not be caught dead under the weight of a very large mammal while yards away shoppers tried on new slacks.)

As Chris got closer to the ring and as more and more fighters were pealed from the canvas, my mother — prone to anxiety attacks — grew unnaturally pale. We all did. Her firstborn wore a pair of elastic sweatpants with gym shorts on the outside. He had on a wrestling T-shirt from his high school even though he never wrestled in high school (he stole the shirt). He had zero muscle mass at the time. A squirrel could have mauled him. Our day at the mall was beginning to look like a bad idea. We had originally imagined a fluffy bear, a couple bear hugs, good fun in the vein of a dunking booth. But Chris had unwittingly volunteered for gladiatorial combat.

“Don’t do this, Chris. Please,” our mother pleaded.

But he had to go through with it. She knew it. The biker cowards knew it. We all knew it.

Yuri Andropov was the Soviet leader at the time. And like the bear in the ring, he seemed neither interested nor disinterested in annihilating America, which made him a scary dude.

Was the fighting bear his idea? See what the Yanks are made of? A sortie into the cancerous heart of capitalism, beside a mall fountain where capitalist children toss pennies and wish for new bicycles rather than for collective ownership of the means of production?

Chris climbed into the ring. They put boxing gloves on him the size of his head and a full-face sparring headgear. The bear waited in his corner, his tongue flickering through his muzzle, tasting the air. The bell rang. Before my mother’s first born could say, “You’re crushing my ribcage, Comrade,” the fight was over. The bear had pummeled him with a left hook and then a right hook that knocked him down. On the canvas, Chris crouched like a baby in utero as the bear proceeded to gnaw at his stomach because the muzzle wasn’t tight enough. The cheat.

Like dragging a half-filled duffle bag, they pulled Chris out of the ring. My mother hugged him and told him he was an idiot, then hugged him some more.