Etymology of Comfort

This is Schnooky. Maisie got him from somebody when she was a baby, and she never took to him, so he sat in the animal bin in the closet. When Liam and I flew back from India, Maisie met us at the airport with Schnooky under her arm, and she gave it to Liam. "I'm your sister," she said. He stuck his thumb in his mouth, and held Schnooky to his chest.

Schnooky shows up in every photo. You see his material thinning--the fuzz disappearing, the woven threads of the fabric exposed. He looked underfed. When we left him by mistake in a store in Virginia, and realized it when we hit New Jersey, we turned around and went back for him. That's how important he was.
One day we performed a radical transplant surgery. Took the body of another unwanted animal from the bin, severed Schnooky's head, and stitched them together. My hand shook when I cut his head off. Liam wept.

Then the head wore out, too--stuffing spilling from holes in Schnooky's cheeks--and so we severed his ears and antlers, and pried off his nose, and sewed them to a creature that we made from flannel Liam picked out at the fabric store. And in the new stuffing we inserted the round rattler from the old body: Schnooky's heart. That transplant was easier to take; Liam was used to transplants by then, and he'd localized his attachment: the antlers and the heart.
School began, and fear of ridicule--the most powerful motivator on earth--took over. And Schnooky took to a place of honor--a special box, sort of like a coffin with a window. Turns out--now that we've got reasonably sophisticated language to describe it--that the goal was the thumb suck: that one can't get a good thumb suck going unless there's something--oh, an antler, say--in the sucking hand, and that the thing that distinguishes a good thumb suck from a great one is the presence of a certain kind of material on which the free hand can file. Its nails.

Turns out that cotton batting for quilts works just fine, too. Which is good, because you can stuff a piece of it in the pocket of your winter jacket, if you want to. And it has no telltale jingly heart.

There are no babies around here anymore.