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Much and many thanks from my heart to <codeboi> for bringing a dear thing back into my life
with a new context that is nearly unbelievable.

I ran some errands with Todd to the northland…my stop was a bookstore, to return The Velveteen Rabbit to my life. The odd thing…I knew before entering the store that The Giving Tree would accompany it as well…

In the vein of re-connecting to childhood things, I would like to bracket codeboi’s passage
as an allegory for my post-chemo sense of me…

“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else, For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

…

‘I suppose YOU are Real?’ said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the SKin Horse only smiled.

‘The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,’ he said. ‘That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.’”

I sometimes forget the brilliance of children’s stories…