So… in thinking about this Walter Mitty syndrome — if that’s what it is — an image I drew on our first trip to New Zealand came to mind. So I got out our diary of the trip, finding this paragraph on page 66.
“At Awakino we left the Tasman Sea for good. The road becomes quite steep and the detour we were forced to follow most of the way to Te Kuiti was reason for alarm for a passenger with Kay at the wheel. Te Kuiti is the ‘sheep shearing capital of New Zealand’, whatever that means! They do at any rate have a large statue of a bloke doing just that as one enters the town. We stopped for a bit of lunch here before going on. Checking out the shops Kay found a cute little sheep doll with a curly wool bodybag coat that zipped off, leaving a skinnier version of the same sheep — Kute. She bought it for (our granddaughter) Sierra.”
That’s all that was written in the diary about the sheep shearer statue in Te Kuiti, but it evidently impressed me enough at the time to dedicate a drawing to the site that appears on the same page. As I recall, it really was a sheep — not Little Bo Peep. Nonetheless, the drawing depicts the shearer unceremoniously denuding Miss Peep, pocketa pocketa. Now was that really the sheep shearer from Te Kuiti’s dream, the statue’s sculptor’s dream, or the dream of the sketcher of the statue of the sheep shearer’s dream? It probably wasn’t the dream of Little Bo Peep. I guess I’ll have to go back Te Kuiti some day and find out.
Fortunately there’s an internet, and with the click of a key I found the answer I present here for similarity and contrast. Or did I? I see the feet; I seem to have gotten them about right. But the head is hidden. Is it Mary’s little lamb or Bo Peep? The dream lives on, the makings of a fairy tale.
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