Tag Archives: essay

Permanent Bond for MVB

16 Replies

Permanent Bond

Today as I walked by a shelf in the studio, I read the glue label marked, “Permanent Bond,” and my mind flashed back to when my niece gave birth. It was very important to her that she and her husband be left alone for a few days to bond with their child. My mother, who raised three girls without once hearing the b-word gave the sidelong look but said nothing.

Then my mind flashed back further. I had been called from the porch by the wild cat I had adopted two months before and sat with her as, like a ditto machine, she pumped out three small copies of herself. After these two most intimate hours of my life, how could I have given any of the kittens away? Of these four cats, two are now long dead, but the others have been with me for 11 years and I now have a name for the warm fullness I felt for the three tiny gray kittens.

These cats who leave small piles of organs in doorways—who insist on curling up on my hip or my shoulder as I lay reading, in spite of my allergic reaction to them—who meow insistently at  closed doors and shower cubicles. “Now, now, now, “ they insist. These cats who bring in baby rabbits, fleas, ticks, and the disembodied tails of salamanders to wriggle out of sight under the sofa—who bring me their infected cuts and  ears torn half-way off in cat fights—who, as kittens, could curl up three to a flower pot leaving the flower intact . These cats who know how to form a beautiful still life each time they come to rest—these cats to whom, I must admit, I have become bonded.

When I try to imagine where I will be in ten years, I see myself living somewhere wild, getting to know the local animals, getting wiser. I know that much of what I’ve learned about humans, I’ve discovered through living with animals. You have to be calm. Quiet. Let them come to you. Don’t grab and don’t make swift movements.

Some might call people with the temperament to calm animals boring. But if you look closely, you might see through to the quietness that fills out their beings. They have let the calmness take over. They have ceased fighting it.

I feel what might be this calmness, but wonder if it is instead numbness. And my mind works out the answer. Numbness is filled with emptiness whereas calmness is filled with small details. The line of blue bottles on the shelf. The red leaves at the very tip of the otherwise green plant. The curl of the cat’s head thrown forward onto i’s stomach. The outflung paw. The dear face of this most beautiful cat that I saw being born.

The MVB prompt today is Permanent

Other People’s Children, May 7, 2023 (Journal Peek Dec. 6, 2004)

28 Replies

Other People’s Children

     I’m 57 years old and I’ve never had a child. No one would have predicted this.  I’ve always been absolutely gaga about babies.  When I was five, when my mother went to her Progressive Study Club, I’d spend the whole afternoon watching the babies laid out on the bed in the middle of a pile of coats.  I would barely take my eyes off them.  They seemed precious, beautiful and endlessly fascinating.  In any crowd, my eyes fell on the babies.  Whenever my much older sister had a child, I’d go to visit and the baby would sleep in my room.
     So why did I never have a child and do I regret it?   I never had a child because I was too busy living my life and somehow it always seemed that a child would interfere.  I was selfish, yes, and last night I had a dream that adequately depicted that selfishness.  In the dream, I was going to a concert.  I went next door to my neighbors, who had many children, and asked if I could take one of them to the concert. 
     “Take me, take me!” each indicated by raising his arms or coming into my view.  I took one of the smallest.  It wasn’t until after the concert when I was again home that I realized that I’d left the child at the concert and worse to tell, I couldn’t even remember which one I’d taken!  It was as though the minute I’d picked the child up that I’d forgotten it.  The guilt was crushing but I seemed more worried about how I’d admit it to the parent than what might have happened to the child. I wondered whether to return to the concert or to go to the parent, which I dreaded. In the end, I went to see the parent and the child was there with her so I didn’t even mention that I’d lost her child. Afterwards I thought that I should go to the child and apologize, but I never did. 
     This dream ties in to a lifetime of dreams where I forget to feed and put more water in the tank of my fish and go down to find them transformed into fake fish lying on the bottom of a waterless tank, or have kittens or babies I forget to feed.  It’s perfectly clear that this dream comes from some part of me that has always feared that I wouldn’t be an adequate caretaker over the long run.  And so in the past, I always confined my caretaking to a few weeks in the summer, when I have my niece and nephews to visit, or Saturday visits from neighborhood kids for painting or singing or games.
     Now at 57, I prefer to feed the child in the adults I find.  To nourish their missing parts, care for the untended places in their souls. It’s like I’m a delayed parent, making up for the lacks in their pasts.
     Twenty years ago, when I’d first met the man who was to become my husband, I went to a psychic to discover why he looked so familiar to me from the start, why I saw dozens of faces  when I looked at him, all of those faces familiar.  She took me back in a supposed past life progression, During that time, a little girl spoke to me.  She said she was meant to be my child in this lifetime, but that since I’d been a mother in so many of my more recent past lives that she understood why I might want to spend this present life entirely on my self.  “If you decide not to have me,” she said.  “I’ll come to you some other way.  So don’t worry.  Just enjoy this life for yourself.” 
     So every time I meet a little girl or see the little girl or boy in an adult who has never resolved past issues, I wonder if that is the little girl trying to find me.  And I try to respond.
     This is the full extent of my mothering, and I must say that I’ve really never regretted not having a child.  When I see a friend focusing her full attention and enjoyment on her daughter, I realize that I have that same relationship with my friends, and when I think of the friend whose son gambled away their retirement or the other friend who is raising her second grandchild, I know that life has turned out just right for me.  Yes, I have children, but I get to decide when I see and care for them.  And I get to continue to feed my own inner child.  Selfish, perhaps, but somehow I think I’m just filling the exact niche I was born to fill.
                                                                                                                      —Dec. 6, 2004

Note: In lieu of the rhymed and metered poems to prompts that I’ve written and put on my blog daily over the past ten years, I’ve decided to start publishing excerpts from the journals I’ve been keeping for the past 22 years, hoping this will prompt me to transform them into a book. I welcome your comments about whether you find these peeks into my past interesting enough to warrant that effort. 

Peaceable Kingdom

4 Replies

 

Click on photos to enlarge.

Peaceable Kingdom

Zoomorphic figures abound in the numerous sculptures and paintings on my shelves, tables and walls, and also around the pool where Morrie, Diego and Zoe take turns being the center of attention. Morrie’s stardom will always involve a ball being tossed—either into the water or down to the garden level below the pool. Zoe’s will involve rigorous play activities with either Diego or whichever human strays into her territory. Diego’s will involve interaction with Zoe, since she was thrust into his life suddenly upon my return from the beach two months ago.

We have formed a colony—Zoe, Diego, Morrie, my visiting cousin Kirk and I. The pith of our union is three-and-a-half-month-old puppy Zoe, who blithely goes about doing her mischievous business. Even the cats put up with her like saints. Her biting, chewing, jumping, yipping, purloining of cat food and general puppyness is tolerated by all. The cats have been known to join Zoe and me in bed. Diego watches her like a hawk, shielding her from dangers. Morrie occasionally yields his ball to her—a huge concession for his one-track mind to make. It strains credulity that he would surrender his most treasured object to anyone other than a human ready to throw it for him to retrieve.

For the last two days, I have been a martyr to amoebas and today I have finally given in and gone to bed. From my bed of pain, I can see their reflections in the pool and hot tub. Diego is positioned parallel to the edge of the pool on his stomach like a reclining Anubis, but with front legs crossed. Morrie is sitting on haunches on his grass throne in a large flower pot adjacent to the pool. He chews on his beloved tennis ball, not bothering to drop it into the pool for Kirk to throw for him as Kirk is for the moment absent—gone to liberate a pepperoni pizza from the oven.

Zoe lies on the thin ledge between the hot tub, its water still too hot to enter, and the cooler pool, which Kirk exited a half hour or so ago. If Kirk were here, he would worry, calling her away from the water that streamed  boiling hot into the hot tub from mineral springs twelve hours ago, but two months of observation have taught me that she knows its dangers—knows how to test its temperature with her nose without actually touching the water.

Now cousin Kirk momentarily casts his reflection into first the hot tub, then the pool, as he passes with pizza fresh from the oven, his plate held high to repel curious noses and hungry jaws. The canine and feline segments of our conclave were fed hours ago. The pizza is all his as I feel as though I’ll never want to eat again. The coral of the sunset sky is slowly fading to gray and the cicadas that the locals call rain birds are continuing their late afternoon/early evening chorus, signaling that the rainy season will begin in approximately 40 days. It will be Zoe’s first experience with rain. Will she try to chase each raindrop or to capture the circular swirl of water rushing down the drain on the terrace? Will she quake at the house-jarring bolts of lightning and cracks of thunder? Always a new thrill for a puppy just three and a half months old. And always a new center of interest for those of us who watch her.

The attitudes and responses of the cats five times her size when I first brought her home will be the topic of another conversation. At present, one curls to my side and the other one between my feet as I lie on the bed, knees bent into a vee to support my laptop. Suffice it to say that for the moment, this is a peaceable kingdom, a mutual-admiration society (except for the antagonism between the two bigger dogs and two cats) and I am well-pleased with all company present, hoping they are equally well-pleased with me.

For Day fifteen of NaPoWriMo, we are to write a poem about something we have absolutely no interest in. For some reason, I started out thinking that was what I was talking about, then strayed into the topic below which is exactly the reverse of the suggested topic. Since it is the first time in the nine years I’ve been writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo that I’ve strayed from the suggested prompt, I’m giving myself permission to stray this one time and instead using the five prompts from my usual prompt sites. I’ve been gone all day and now that I’m home, the electricity has been going off every few minutes for the past hour. Grrr. Gotta get this posted while I can.

Prompts today are colony, zoomorphic, credulity, pith and reflection.

And HERE is Kirk’s version of his afternoon. The dogs love him and it is reciprocated.

 

I Want to Go On

39 Replies

I Want to Go On

Lately, I have spent much time thinking about how far into my life I am.  I can’t believe that it is most probably 3/4 completed–if I am lucky!  I’m not ready for it all to be over that soon, but I am caught between enjoying fully what I am doing right now and finding yet another experience to round out my life.  What is important––the moment or the whole?  As much as I love writing all morning, reading blogs, taking photos, nudging my house into line and the serendipity of venturing out a few kilometers to see what life will present—what friends I’ll run into, what new friends I’ll make––I sometimes wonder if there are entirely new adventures farther afield that I should be investigating.  Is there another perfect place to live—people and friends who will bring me closer to a part of myself I’ve never investigated before?  Eight long years after Bob died—when I was ready for one more love in my life—I said that I would not look for someone like him but just be open to the amazing possibilities.  Perhaps some new love would open up an unexplored side of me as he had mined my artistic side. 

I tried to maintain an open mind as I was invited into the personal lives of men who urged me to explore sides of myself that I came to realize that, although titillating, I had no desire to explore.  I had no interest in becoming a second wife in a love triangle or in donning a leather mask or in being humiliated sexually.  I had no interest in being the “all” for any man.  I flirted with the idea of accepting an invitation to take off in a boat or a road trip down to the tip of South America, but in the end, was not desperate enough to take the chance of being stranded mid-ocean in a typhoon with a inadequate captain or riding as a captive sidekick to someone who proved to be more boring than his much-labored-over profile on OKCupid.

In the end, I made a very loving cyber-friend, and repeating a pattern, it seems that this friendship is a substitute that I have convinced myself is enough.  It fills in lonely hours and keeps me from yearning for that actual private touch.  My bed partner is my computer—two of them if the truth be told. One downloads episodes of favorite shows to binge-watch, the other provides a place to to read and comment on blogs I follow, to post new blogs and to read comments from those who have read my blogs.

They reassure me, these readers of my private life published daily on the page.  They applaud my gains in photographic prowess, ask about the adventures of Morrie, the little Scottish terrier left in the wake of a house sitter who first adopted and then abandoned him.  They give advice and seek advice—friends spread out around the world who are always there.  Almost all are supportive, non-combative, interesting, smart, liberal, funny and interesting writers themselves.  Some are outstanding.  They fill in the hours when friends go back to their husbands, dogs go into their beds to snooze—when the activity of the outer world ceases.  Those hours meant to be slept through but into which I cannot surrender myself, hating to give up anymore time to sleep than is absolutely necessary.

Perhaps some part of me is always aware of the very long sleep that awaits me. It is my fear of it that pulls me out of near-sleep into a panic where I cannot breathe—like a foreknowledge of my last gasping breath.  I bolt from my bed to struggle with the key to the barred grid outside my sliding glass door and screen—go outside for the air that escapes me, caught as it is within the room. That panic—that terror of no longer being––what should it drive me towards?  Acceptance? The quest for a new faith? New loves?  New adventures? What am I missing out on that drives me to want more life than I’ve already had? Is there some purpose, some journey, some task that would make me stop fearing the end of everything?  Is there any philosophy that I could convince myself to believe in that would calm my fears of ceasing to be?

Why is it that I have convinced myself that I, of all in the universe, should continue to “be” forever?  For this is what I desire.  I want a long life—longer than that of my mother who died at 91 or my grandmother who died at 96.  I want to go on having adventures, exciting friends of all ages, stimulating thoughts that I will continue to be able to convey to others.  I do not want my life to be three-quarters over. I want to go on.

Dreams

14 Replies

Dreams

My dreams always end before some big climax—the revelation of what is behind the wall or who is behind the spread cape, ready to turn around and solve the mystery. Dreams are a wonderland we dive into unaware—a little surprise some part of us produces every night. A vast world composed of images real and false. Bits from our past or present scrambled up with fantastic elements perhaps remembered from our youth. Dreams where we can fly. Sinister alleys and unknown streets we wander through, at first with a false assurance that they will lead to somewhere. It is with regrets or a heartfelt “hurray!” that we awaken from these dreams—either saved  or disappointed by the awakening—our lives somehow sorted out by the weird realignment of facts and fantasy that they accomplish, like shuffled cards, rearranging our past by mixing it in with the future or with fantasy. Dreams are a surreal world we enter every night, no less real than the world we live in every day. Just different, made up of different parts of ourselves. A second chance, perhaps. Or a sorting out of problems, worries, regrets.

Prompts today are dive,  wonderland, false, hurray, vast.

Dark Thoughts

14 Replies

DSCF1981 - Version 7

Dark Thoughts

At four in the morning, the old cat begins her morning crabby  high-pitched “wahhhhrrr.” The wind picks up and I go to pee. Open my laptop and with its very first light, a tiny beetle flies to the screen to wander back and forth, in search of what? Company or bugs even more miniscule? And where has it been in the interim? In what obscure corner of my world has it been waiting for light, like the old cat, barely able to restrain itself , seeking my company at my first sign of stirring?

Does the rest of the world wait for me like this, or is it death lurking in the shadows, waiting for its time? Has life slowed down to this one long communal waiting? My sick friend has left but leaves behind her some of her dejection. I cannot shake it. Return to it after each short departure into the world. I feel an eternity of the ills of the world around me. Optimist rebel in an enemy camp all my life, I now feel myself sinking into the ordinary world. My mood refuses to shift with the sunrise. Even the old cat, still unfed, leaves me alone to my dark mood.

I fear the power of sleep, not wanting to return to that half-remembered dream I woke from. Fear this new self I seem to be becoming. Suddenly, I fear eternity—feel it not my friend.

Prompt words today are camp, rebel, eternity.

Facing the Inevitable. Alone.

22 Replies

IMG_8364 (1)

Facing the Inevitable. Alone.

Tilting at windmills or slaying dragons is too retro for my taste. I’d rather just have a man who tickles my funny bone, or at the very least one who tickles my fancy. At my age, I am between vulnerable stages. I don’t need anyone to save me financially or ego-wise. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to house and feed myself for the twenty or so years I have left and unless I have a serious decline in mental and physical power, I will always have blogging to salve my ego–a few loyal followers who still want to hear what I have to say.

Whatever I have made of my life, it is a pickle of my own choosing. I have not been jinxed or done ill to—at least recently. What I have I deserve. What I don’t have, I deserve. I don’t look forward to that day when fate will serve me a bitter dish, but that part of me that has to binge-watch *”After Life” or listen to an Audible book to get to sleep at night knows it one day will. In spite of my niggling lifelong conviction that I’ve been left on this planet by some foreign species and that I’ll be picked up soon and whisked off to a life unending, that part of me that needs constant distraction knows that I am human and therefore vulnerable.

Those with partners may think my title here sad, but there is another way of looking at it. Those of us unmatched and “unespoused” have only one inevitable death to face. We need fear no phone call when parted or unwelcome discovery when together. The only death we need fear is our own.  We have half of the dread that the happily paired must face as they approach a certain age.

With increasing regularity, when with friends my own age, after we have hurriedly (I hope) gone over the ills of today—knee replacements and hip replacements and intestinal disorders and the ilk—we eventually get around to discussing various methods of insuring the end we desire over Alzheimer’s or stroke. I have a high bridge picked out. Various friends have pill stashes. Everyone knows which friends, in spite of their obituaries, have already made this choice.

What we fear most is waiting too long and forfeiting the choice and spending the rest of our days in some repository for the walking dead—those antiseptic storehouses where they partition off residents unlucky enough to have not experienced a swift death—those cursed either with an active mind trapped in a body turned to stone or the reverse. What living hell is this, that so many of the aged are now preserved in part who in an earlier age would have been afforded a dignified death?

There is something about writing to multiple prompts that takes us into a part of our brain where otherwise we might have not gone. So it is with this seemingly pessimistic rambling into the dark side of my brain. Although nothing I say is fiction, still, perhaps the balance is wrong. Here is no discussion of the birds outside my early-morning sunlit curtains or the components of my morning smoothie that await my hand in compiling them. It does not mention friends that still stimulate and amuse, relatives that still fill my heart.

It overlooks those twenty potential years that I hope will lead up to whatever end I face. These are just words that I shed during a side trip through consciousness. Do not call me or consult with mutual friends, worrying about my state of mind. I am in no way suicidal. I am not morose. I am simply wandering through a few alleys where I think we must all wander from time to time, and as we grow older, where we wander more frequently. For in spite of my title, I don’t really think I wander here alone.

* “After Life” is a new show on Netflix, written and played by Ricky Gervais. A bit dark, but worth binge-watching if you’re in the right frame of mind. Along with the four prompt words, it is perhaps what put me in the mood to write this piece. I have a feeling it is more Ricky Gervais’s attitude than my own.  Well, maybe a wedding of the two.

 

Prompt words today are pickle, retro, dragon and jinx. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/rdp-sunday-pickle/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/your-daily-word-prompt-dragon-march-31-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/jinx/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/03/31/fowc-with-fandango-retro/

Teaching Our Kids to be Violent

17 Replies

DSC08417

Teaching Our Kids to Be Violent

I’m in a very busy outside restaurant on the plaza in La Manzanilla, Mexico.  To the front and side of me are two long tables filled with 13 adults, children and teens who seem to be members of the same family.  When I first entered, the littlest girl in the family was sitting on the lap of her auntie or her mom, mugging for “sorta selfies” taken by her mom/auntie who was using some app to horribly distort the photos.  All were laughing uproarously at the monstrous images.

Then the child moved to the end of the table, where someone had removed the long cellophane-plumed toothpicks that had held their sandwiches together. Grabbing two of the toothpicks, she proceeded to jab the pointed end of one of them into the arm of one of the young women at the table. 

Waiting for chastisement, I was sorely disappointed, as what I imagine to be an auntie giggled and then grabbed the other toothpick and jabbed her back. Back and forth they went, all of the adults at the table smiling and laughing as though it was the most adorable little performance in the world.  In time, the child went down the table, jabbing with more enthusiasm each time, moving to the other table where eventually she jabbed so violently that the adult slapped her.  She slapped the adult back and a slapping match ensued.  Everyone watched, smiling, giggling. Such an adorable child! 

She moved away from the slapping match and sneaked up on a more elderly member of the party, approaching her from behind to take a hard jab with the point of the toothpick into the flesh of the woman’s upper arm.  The woman jerked away in surprise, slapping at the arm as though she believed it to be a wasp or bee sting.  This brought great peals of laughter from the other table and the child returned to it to take her bows.  

At no point in this crazy string of behavior did any adult ever censure the child or display any emotion other than enjoyment and approbation. I, on the other hand, was totally horrified.  What they were teaching the child was fairly obvious.  They  were well-dressed and sophisticated-looking, modernly dressed—like city folk come to the beach who didn’t actually want to get sand between their toes.  The voices of the seeming other half of their party at the nearby table were louder than theirs—very loud, in fact, to the point that even some Mexican customers accustomed to the general noise of Mexico were glancing over in surprise. But the table where the child sat seemed more refined–in the level of their voices if not in their surprising acceptance of the increasing violence of the formerly angelic-looking little girl.

Was she the heir to a vast cartel empire? Was this part of her education in ruthlessness? Was their glee at her monstrous appearance on the smart phone just a hint of the monster child they would raise to carry on the family business?  As most scenarios begun in restaurants and other public places, this is a story whose ending I will never know. I leave it to your imagination to come up with an ending for yourself.

But I could not help seeing it as a small metaphor for the violence in films and games and sports entertainment that our kids are submerged in every day.  It seems as though movies and TV are resorting to ever more violent and extreme cruelties to keep our interest. War and murder are not enough. Sadistic twists and torture are called upon to keep the audiences and thereby swell the coffers of production companies and advertisers.

Years ago when violence first reared its ugly head on TV, we were told that it was a fantasy that would have no effect on children, but if we look at the world around us, I think this is an assertion that has been proven to be false. As some in our society grow ever more affluent, we grow increasing more dependent on entertainment to distract us from the reality around us, and part of that reality seems, sadly, to be that we are teaching our kids to be more violent.

 

1913688_1136038087858_6027993_n 3

Lava

6 Replies

I saw this wonderful tirade by Audra Alexander on a friend’s Facebook page. I tracked down the author, who generously gave me permission to run it on my blog. Since there was no button on her blog to do so, I couldn’t “reblog” it, so here it is in its entirety. I hope you visit her blog, URL given below, to tell her what you think !!!! I think she’s captured perfectly and in an entertaining if irate fashion what is going to happen when Kavanaugh is confirmed:

Lava

Kavanaugh is going to get confirmed, we all know that. A lot of women will be very angry. Some might even take to the streets. But this won’t be the tipping point. There won’t be a tipping point, there never is. There will just be the subterranean lava flow of women’s anger – slow, blistering, savage and inexorable. We’ll go to bed angry, we’ll get up angry, we’ll drink our coffee and fix the kids’ breakfasts angrily, we’ll drive thru car line and to work angry, our male colleagues will ask each other if we’re on the rag, we’ll eat silent lunches with rage and we’ll pick up groceries on the way home with vengeance on our hearts. We’ll kiss our partners and our kids goodnight wrathfully. We’ll cry hot, silently screaming tears in the middle of brushing our teeth. We’ll go to bed angry. We’ll get up angry…

Nothing will seem to change for you. But the mother of a 32 year old man will suddenly snap at him to “Grow up!” when he complains that he’s pretty sick of frozen dinners lately. That quiet chick 3 cubicles down will show up out of nowhere and tell a gathering of dudebros that she’ll report them to HR if they don’t shut up. They’ll call her a bitch under their breath as she turns around, but she won’t care. The teenage daughter will ask her dad if he’d still find it funny if she was the punchline in his favorite joke. He’ll scold her for talking back and look at his wife, who will look back and say nothing. Another daughter will say nothing to her father – ever again.

The anger will shift, seismic but unseen. Before the lava used to burn us to ash on the inside. It’s bubbling over now. Enough of us have ripped open our bodies to let the boiling soil of our lives out that the heat itself causes fires. Sure, you can put one or two out at a time. A single flame is easy to catch. But the lava is elemental and everywhere. Kavanaugh will be confirmed. And in less than a generation he’ll be a petrified ash fossil, frozen in a rictus of agony in the new Pompeii. Nothing will seem to have changed, until it’s too late. The lava of our anger is going to cover the earth and bury you.

Here is her blog.  Check it out!  https://scarletvirago.com/2018/09/28/lava/

Play Date

14 Replies

Image

Play Date

 

My sister’s house has sold and they are cleaning out her attic. My niece and I make one trip more and I find my old dollhouse, collapsed, in the garbage can. I take the pieces out—some of them—and stash them in her trunk. I’d thought them gone forty years ago when the tornado took the roof off my parents’ house, but now, here they are like the leaves of memory blown miraculously back to me.

When she sees I’ve taken them, my niece asks what she should do with the dolls she found in the back recesses of her mother’s attic storage room—the one I hadn’t got to on my last visit—perhaps because of the roofing nails sticking through the wood which made reaching back behind the eaves a physical danger.

I find them where she has stashed them In a suitcase in her garage, and when I open the case and see the first doll staring up at me, I think it is a “find” from some antique store, like the dishes in my sister’s China cabinet or the tiny figures on her shelves. One rubber arm, sticky with age, has burst open and streams kapok like a froth of bleached and fermented blood. Other limbs have decayed to nothing but empty puddles of congealed rubber. Only the torso, held in place by a sagging pink fancy gown; and the face, stained red in places from some surface it’s been pressed against for too long, are still intact. As I lift the first doll from the suitcase, the other doll—the size of a toddler—stares up at me, one eye unhinged, her hair in pigtails sealed with rubber bands. When I lift her by one arm, her head turns, her legs pump and I realize this is my Ideal walking doll. When you raise her arms, one at a time, she walks toward you and her head swings, side-to-side. Hard and beautiful, she was not a doll to cuddle and she would not sit. She stood propped up against one corner of my room, rarely played with. What, I wonder, has happened to the bright blue dress she wore? Then I look closer and see that she’s still wearing it—faded to paleness even in the dark. What is here is original—her hair, her limbs, her dress, her petticoat—but her shoes and socks have been lost to another little girl, perhaps, or have jiggled off in some trunk and been left behind.

I’m 1500 miles away from home, yet I load the child-sized dollies into my boyfriend’s trunk: my sister’s doll in it’s fancy pink floor-length formal, my doll with her eye gone wild in its socket. They won’t make it home to Mexico in my suitcase this time, but it is impossible to leave them there in the suitcase to be thrown away by someone who has no memory of them. They are not collector’s items. They have been too neglected in their lives since they stood propped up in the corners of our rooms, then in the corners of our closets, the basement, my sister’s trunk and then her attic 800 miles from where they called us their owners and stimulated our imaginations to the extent they were able.

They’ll now reside in my boyfriend’s garage in Missouri until the time comes when I can carry them back in an extra suitcase or he can mule them down for me. If they were miniatures, I could include them in a retablo or a memory box, but each head is larger than the largest assemblage I’ve ever made. The closets of my house are full and overflowing, as are the wall-to-ceiling cabinets in my garage and studio and every area of my house where I’ve had room to build a closet. But I must use them. Give them some purpose for still existing other than to fill up room in some box on some cupboard shelf.

I imagine a memory box of gigantic proportions and suddenly, I have to make it, even if it takes up all the work room of my studio, and I start to plan how I could take my own doll back with me and what I’ll have to leave: the case of books that I’ve just had printed or my clothes or all the cartridges for my laser printer? If I wear a baby carrier, will they believe it is my baby, sound asleep? And what sensation will I cause when I try to stuff her into the overhead rack?

When I start to plan what else will go in the memory box with her, I remember the metal dollhouse sides and suddenly, I’m planning another trip back to Missouri, where I will make the mother of memory boxes—four feet square—and I wonder how my boyfriend will react to this and what I’ll do with it when it is finished. But somehow all these practicalities do not matter, because this dolly, relegated to corners for its whole life, is finally going to get played with!!!

This is a reblog from a 2014 piece. Since their prompt was “Play,” I’m reblogging it for the Ragtag Daily Prompt.