K has a stuffed animal, a monkey, named Seymour. K’s mother gave her Seymour when K was eight, which makes him a minimum of thirty-three years old now, depending when he was manufactured.

K sleeps with Seymour almost every night. She leans into him, wedging him into the crook of her arm and resting her chin on top of his head. If Seymour were a real monkey, he would quickly suffocate from this. Indeed, there’s probably no better way to suffocate a monkey than what K does to Seymour.

Seymour has an enormous head; in fact his head is bigger than the rest of him. It’s covered in finely-woven terry cloth and is firm without being too firm to sleep on. Miraculously (a word I do not use lightly), Seymour’s head doesn’t smell. None of him does, although he has spent more than ten thousand nights (I did the math) jammed into K’s armpit and has never been washed. It’s much like the miracle of Hanukkah.

The only time K sleeps without Seymour is when she’s away. She says she does this because he’s too big to bring anywhere, and I suppose that would be true if K went on backpack trips, but K doesn’t go on backpack trips. In fact a few years ago, K put a large magnet on our refrigerator that shows a smiling woman reclining in bed under the words I love not camping. So I think it’s something else that keeps Seymour confined to our bed. Perhaps it’s embarrassment. Perhaps it’s the idea of a forty-two year-old woman who can’t sleep a single night without her stuffed monkey. It’s not that people would know this was true about K; it’s that K would know.

On the other hand, K did bring Seymour to college. However, as she explains it, most of her college roommates had some ridiculous thing like Seymour, so it didn’t really matter.

After college K lived for a year on a kibbutz in Israel, during which time Seymour remained at home (in a box!), I suspect because K didn’t want to be ridiculed by the hardcore kibbutzniks – no-nonsense types trained in the use of automatic weapons.

A confession: Sometimes, when K is away, I sleep with Seymour. I use the same method as K. It’s a nearly prone position, which normally hurts my back, but with Seymour’s head propping me up, I wake without pain.

Also, when K’s at home and I happen to get into bed before her, I sometimes hide Seymour under my body. Often K doesn’t realize he’s missing until she’s about to turn off the light, at which point she’ll sidle up to me in a manner indicating affection or perhaps even desire, then suddenly go for the monkey, crying, “Seymour is mine, my mommy gave him to me!”

When I asked K what people should know about Seymour, she said, simply, “That I love him.” I love him too, in my way. He’s a survivor.

Although Seymour was lovingly made, in a way few things are these days, his manufacturer had no way of knowing he would be suffocated all night, nearly every night, for thirty-three years. Because of this, and because time is kind to no one and nothing, Seymour is falling apart: his ears are split open; the paint of his pupils is chipping away; his goofy smile, a modest red thread, has been sewn to his face to prevent it from breaking (K: “I can’t make him frown anymore”); and he has dozens of small tears, many of which K’s mom repaired with dental floss.

The worst, though, is his paw pads. Seymour’s brand name was Corky because his hind legs are stuffed with tiny bits of cork. Unfortunately his hind paw pads are prone to small tears through which the cork slowly leaks. In recent years K switched from dental floss to duct tape and then finally gave up and wrapped Seymour’s leakier paw (the left) in a piece of fabric cut from an old sheet. The paw still leaks but the fabric contains the cork. Eventually K intends to cut open Seymour’s paw pads and remove all the cork. This will solve the problem but at the price of eliminating the squishy crunchiness of Seymour’s hind legs.

Such is life, I suppose. You do what you can, until you can do no more. In the best case, you succeed in bringing some joy and comfort to others, even if your own smile is permanently sewn to your face.