Monday Muses:

My favorite children's book is the Velveteen Rabbit. It made me cry so much when I was a child. It was probably more of a personal connection with the book that made me react like that. I also had a toy rabbit when I was a little girl. The rabbit that I had wasn't mad of velvet or anything special, just plain material. However, it was the way I obtained him and the memories I shared with that poor beaten up creature that make him special. When I was little, my mom used to go to church and she would take me along with her. We lived in a small suburban community back then and the church was mostly all russian speaking people. In their midst, there was a solitary shriveled up old german lady who could barely speak english. She somehow found out that I loved rabbits and one day she gave me this rabbit. The rabbit certainly didn't look like anything made in the modern world. It wasn't the cheap polyester, plastic bead filled, hardly animal looking things that were usually sold at Ikea or Toys 'R' Us. He was a wool rabbit with the quality of toys that could only have been made in the 1900s at a fancy toy factory. I loved him immediately. The stories and memories that I shared with that rabbit are endless. I remembered that I chewed on the string whiskers of his face. I remembered hosting tea parties for that rabbit. As a little girl, I would receive tons of dolls from my father's colleagues. But as the morbid and cruel child that I was, I would usually decapitate, undress, cut up the clothes and hair, and mutilate the dolls, or whatever was left of them at that point. The plastic carriage from the dolls though, I would keep and cart around the rabbit in it (at least until the day I got the brilliant idea of taking a ride in the carriage myself and broke it). You get the picture, I was obsessed with the rabbit. I refused to go anywhere without him. Once, the day before my seventh or eight birthday, I left him at a store. I refused to go to bed that night and stayed up until I nearly passed out from sleep deprivation. The next morning my dad drove out to that store and brought him back. It was the best birthday present ever that year. I guess the Velveteen Rabbit affected me so that I wasn't able to imagine my life without a rabbit.