When I was very little, I was given a little stuffed animal dog. He had a white tail, white front paws, white snout, white body, white forehead, light blue back of his head, light blue fur on the outside of the ears, light blue back, light blue back legs, black, plastic nose, and two dark brown marble eyes. He has lost some fur, especially in the spots that fold a lot. Around his nose, he has lost a lot of fur, because I like the way it feels when I push on his nose. I guess it’s because his stuffing is pushing against his nose while I am pushing on his nose. Now his stuffing is pushed to one side of his snout, so one side has a lump while the other has a depression. Before he had lost any of his fur, I had thought everything needed a belly button, so I took a pencil, and made a big dot on his fur where I thought a belly button might be. Now, where the “belly button” once was, the fur has fallen of so he doesn’t have a “belly button” anymore.
Since I didn’t speak English, and I couldn’t think of a name for him, so I just called him Gogo, the mandarin way of saying dog. After a while, I got used to calling him Gogo so I didn’t bother to give him another name. And even if I tried, I would just end up calling him Gogo again.
One time, while my family was driving back to San Francisco from our trip to Lake Tahoe, Gogo’s neck broke. My mom was driving and my uncle was in the passenger seat next to her. My grandmothers were sitting in the middle row of the car, while my dad sat in the back seat. Since me and my sister were little, and we needed to be able to move around, one of the seats in the back row were put up, and blankets were spread on the floor of the car for us. My mom was talking to my uncle, my grandmothers were talking to each other, and my sister was talking to my dad. I played with Gogo when suddenly, I bent his head too far forward and the back of his neck ripped. No one had noticed, and I was too stunned to say anything. I carefully put my dog between the blankets with his head sticking out as if nothing had happened and I sat down and did nothing. My sister finished talking to my dad and she looked at Gogo. She asked me, “Why is he there?” and she took him out from between the blankets. She was the one who had found that Gogo’s neck broke and had told everyone else. When we got home, my grandmother sewed him back together again.
Another time, when I was walking down the hall at home and I held my dog by his ear, his ear fell off, or should I say he fell off of his ear. I liked twisting his ear with one hand while he twirled in mid air. When I got to the end of the hall, I looked at my dog, but there was no dog, only the ear. I looked back and I saw my dog lying in the middle of the hallway. I ran to my dog and I took him to my mom and showed her what had happened. She sewed the ear back on, but now his ears aren’t matched up. One is higher than the other, but he at least still has his two ears.
Gogo, as any other stuffed dog, has a tag that says where it was from. But when I was little, when I slept with my arm wrapped around him, the tag would scratch me. So I cut off the tag and now there is only a small stub of it remains. You can hardly feel it because it has been washed many times and now it doesn’t scratch me. But now, I have no way of knowing where he came from.
I like him because I have been almost everywhere with him, I have played with him since I was very little, and he has been with me almost my whole life. Besides that, he is cute, others may think that he is just an ugly, old and worn stuffed dog, but to me, he is more than what I can explain with words.