dual personalities

I found my Steiff animals packed away in the basement. Now what?

This weekend the wee laddie wanted to play with “Tiggy,” the Steiff tiger my father bought for me when I was born and which I had kept from my own children because they might harm him in some way. He went upstairs on a mission to find him, even though he had been told previously that Tiggy was off limits.

But I let the WL take “Tigey,” as he insists on calling him, down from his place of honor in my office. Daughter #1 said it was a good choice. Tiggy, she said, had no doubt been waiting 40 years for that Velveteen Rabbit moment.

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

–Margery Williams

I am a great one for saying we should all use the good china and the linen napkins, so why are the Steiff animals different?