mutilated monkey mien*

When I was about three years old I received a monkey stuffed toy for Christmas. Here's a shot of me and "Monkey Do," as he later came to be named:

Over the last thirty years, Monkey Do has been my constant companion. He was always in the pile of stuffed toys in my room, eventually acquiring one of my old t-shirts and a pair of my old underwear for the sake of modesty. When I went to college, Monkey Do went with me, and there he acquired a black bucket hat with a giant sunflower pinned to the front. He managed to survive 30 years of rough handling with only one problem - his eyes fell off. They were the plastic kind that were somehow glued or attached on the inside of his head, and eventually they loosened up to the point where I could take them out entirely.

This was cool when I was a kid and in college, because I could adjust his eyes so that he was cross-eyed or looking over both shoulders at once. But now that I have a kid to whom I'd like to give Monkey Do, all I see when I look at those eyes is a choking hazard. The eyes had to go and be replaced with something that wasn't going to fall off, a task I've been putting off for years.

Yesterday I finally opened up Monkey Do's face so that I could fix his eyes. You have no idea how hard it was to take a seam ripper to his forehead - it was like how I imagine it is for medical students when they have to make the first incision to dissect their first human corpse. A few months ago there was a slight incident involving one of my old stuffed animals dissolving in the washing machine and ruining most of the rest of them, so Monkey Do is really the only one I have left that I care about. Sticking that sharp thing in between his eyes almost caused me physical pain, that's how hard it was. It didn't help any that when I was telling Jason about how hard it was, he commented that "it must have been hard to give him a vagina in the middle of his face." Insensitive as the comment might have been, he's got a point:

So now I have to spend the next few nights with my hand inside Monkey Do's head, embroidering new eyes on his face. Hopefully he'll look decent when I'm done, and hopefully I'll be able to sew his forehead back together and leave him looking less like Frankenstein's monster and more like his old self. If not, I guess he'll have to wear my old fencing mask or something.


*the title refers to a song we used to sing as kids, which went: "Great big globs of greasy, grimey gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, little birdies' dirty feet. Ten gallon pails of all-purpose porpoise pus, hanging on the outhouse wall." Yes, we were sick, sick children.