"We'll be friends forever!"

When Donald, my youngest child, was 2 1/2 I built him a bedroom in the eaves of our house in Nashville. He's slept in our room prior to that. He never really liked sleeping alone and so I would lay down with him at night till he fell asleep and then I'd go back to my bedroom. During that time we acquired a toy cassette player and some children's cassettes. One of them was, "The Fox and the Hound", by Disney. In the story a young fox, Tod, and a young hound, Copper, meet in childhood and the story follows them to adulthood when their different lives leave them estranged from one another. When they are still youngsters the fox asks the hound, "We'll be friends forever, won't we?" and the hound assures him they will. The final scene in the film shows the fox, now wild, with his mate on a hill above the farm where the hound lives. The final words of the tape version are the narrator saying something along the lines of, "You could almost hear the voice of a young fox telling a young hound, 'Copper, we'll be friends forever." Donald loved this story and we would listen to it every night. One night he turned to me and he said, "Dad, we'll be friends forever." It was one of those wonderful moments as a parent. Well if you know us you know that Don and I are indeed still very close friends.
While I was at Disney I came upon a shop where you could have different characters from their movies drawn by a Disney artist. They also allow you to personalize the drawings. In the catalog of hundreds of different pictures you could choose from was one from, "The Fox and the Hound", of a young Tod and a young Copper. I had the artist draw it and then put the words above, "We'll be friends forever." Best souvenir I think I ever bought.