my childhood friend norman and his soft toy siggi

emptiness on my blog. here's a little story to keep you entertained....

when i was little, i lived across the street from a boy my age called
norman. we used to play together a lot, from the age of five to ten
maybe, along with my little sister claudia and sometimes also his
older sister katja. it was quite simple: in the afternoon, we'd just
walk over the other house, knock on the door and play until dinner
time.
i think it's fair to say that i was quite shy as a kid and maybe
therefore mostly well behaved. my friend norman was the opposite - he
was a wild boy! when playing hide and seek, he'd hide in unusual
places like the rubbish bin, where i would never find him. he'd come
home and be so impatient to be let in the house that he threw himself
against the entrance until the glass door shattered (the entrance was
not only made of reinforced glass, it also had a metal grid in front
of it. yet he still managed to break it). when doing our homework, he
just wouldn't stay on his chair, but run off and climb onto the
kitchen cupboards to hide from his mom. he'd even jump down the middle
of the staircase or hang down from the poles of the landing until they became loose. since he could never sit still, the material of his seat at the kitchen table had been completely rubbed
off. i would often be in awe watching him do things that i would
never ever dare to do. when being told off, he'd not only continue
whatever he was doing, he'd even sing a song made up
especially for this occasion. i was fascinated with this degree of
insubordination. obviously, his mother less so....
she had a really hard time controlling the child, as he seemed to
respond to almost no form of persuasion. apart from one: norman had a
soft toy cat that he'd named after his uncle's real life cat siggi.
soft toy siggi would sleep in his bed every night and had been hugged
so many times that there was no fluff left on the fabric (the fabric
had once been white and was now grey and beige). what was left of the
material had been reduced to a thin mesh of strings through which you
could see siggi's insides. its neck had already been reinforced with
new material, but even that had almost rubbed away and was
now a floppy ring of cloth dangling around an even more floppy neck.
even though siggi was almost indistinguishable from a cleaning cloth,
norman loved it like nothing else. hence siggi was his only weakness...
when the last measure of disciplination* seemed necessary, his mother
would threaten to "hurt" siggi. most times, the threat alone would lead to norman
giving in, but on several occasions it came to the worst:
siggi became one-eyed and its tail showed clean cuts in four
different places. he'd even been slit through the throat and had a
whole paw cut off. unfortunately, any injury to siggi would cause such
a flood of tears in the boy that the cat would be sewn back together
the same day by a very sorry mom ...until the next time it became
necessary to go to the extreme.

when i met norman last summer, he seemed like a very quiet and polite
man. he stood still throughout the entire length of our conversation.

i wonder whether stitched-together siggi is still around and whether it is missing any
body parts... ;-)






* i think i made up this word but i like it.