Saturday, May 14, 2011

I love you Ching!

My teddy bear Ching has been acting a little stand offish lately and I think he's a little scared. Recently, he's taken to hiding in the hotel bed with the hotel emergency flashlight. There's no analogies being used here unlike my previous post; Ching is my real life teddy bear. I think he is feeling a little threatened due to my ramblings in that previous post so now I have to let him know that I love him and I will never ever get rid of him!


Ching is in his twenties and has accompanied me on many journeys. He was with me when I went to Japan, he came on my honeymoon to Queensland and has been on many of my local camping trips. A short little panda with a slight hunch to suit my own bad posture, his once pristine fluffy white fur is now a matted dirty grey. He doesn't mind however, because it just means that he has been loved. One of my favourite passages is from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. In fact, I love this passage so much, it was one of the readings at my wedding, which is a little sad and ironic but that's life.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"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."

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