Do you remember your first favorite childhood toy? That little stuffed something or other that was your constant companion? I imagine that for most people it's teddy bears, although these days there's such a staggering variety of stuffed animals out there that it could be almost anything.
Mine was a stuffed lamb with a wind-up music box inside it. Apparently I was a harsh music critic as a child because I took every opportunity to playfully beat the living daylights out of my lamb against any available hard surface when the music was playing, so the mechanism very shortly stopped playing, after which my toy and I were inseparable.
And boy did I knock the stuffing out of that thing. Repeatedly. I loved it to death and carried it everywhere on every trip as a little kid.
Funny thing though...
I remember being told that the music box had been removed at some point, which didn't make an impact on me at the time, but it did mean that somewhere along the line surgery had taken place. Presumably someone with a good eye and tolerable sewing skills made sure that I never noticed the stiches.
Not that scars mattered much to my lamb. I remember now that the outer skin was getting pretty thin and not so soft at one point, so one of the handy ladies in my family went out, bought some fabric in the same basic colour...and maybe a bit softer and fuzzier, cut a pattern and gave my lamb a new brand new skin, and I remember being very happy for it...
And we'd sewn on a new mouth with red string because the old one had been printed onto the material and had worn off...
And of course the stuffing started getting pretty squished, so one year we 'operated' on it, took the old stuffing out and put the new stuffing in (I seem to recall that the new material was rolled up beige nylons, isn't that strange?) and made it huggable again...
Then the eyes eventually came loose and we made new ones and sewed them on, and even made them out of a beautiful blue-black velvety material.
We had the technlogy. We could make him better, faster, more...huggable.
It appears that in retrospect my favorite childhood toy went through the human equivalent of a complete plastic-surgery makeover, complete with facelift, liposuction, tattooed on makeup, and laser eye surgery among other things.
But don't worry, it's still the same doll inside... I mean, it isn't... not really... not inside itself, since it's now stuffed chock-a-block with girly socks (and yes, I'm fairly certain my mom washed the nylons beforehand, because my lamb never smelled of feet). And, if you think about it for a second, there's not a single original part of that lamb left, inside or out.
But inside me it was (and still is) the same doll. And isn't that where it counts? I'd like to think so.
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