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Why We Love Things

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 8, 2008

Like a tiny time capsule, I held the baby in my arms and played with its delicate fingers, traced the line of its chubby jaw, nuzzled its soft eyelashes and sniffed the essence of childhood. Then, with a damp cloth, I carefully wiped away the mildew that stained its rosy cheeks.

No, I was not holding a new grandchild. I had found the long lost doll of my childhood, the Dy-Dee Baby I had bought with my own money when I was 8 years old.

Buried in the wasteland of my garage, this much loved artifact represented the sum total of my life's savings when I entered the toy store near the library in southwest Washington where I grew up. Even today, 59 years later, I can remember longing for that doll and saving up the dollar a month my grandmother sent me from New York until I thought I had enough.

Then, on a day when my family made its monthly journey to the library, I persuaded my parents to stop at the toy store. I can remember looking up, way up, over the glass showcase at the salesperson and handing him every cent I had in the world.

"You don't have enough money," he told me with real regret. I looked from him to my parents, pleading with silent passion. "But you can have it for what you gave me," the man said with a smile. And so my long journey into parenthood began.

She was a modern miracle at that time, a doll designed to drink a bottle and deliver the biological consequences from a tiny hole in the rubber of her round, shiny bottom. I loved her with all the intensity an 8-year-old brings to the relationship with a favorite toy. She slept with me, ate with me, and went shopping with me - in cars, on trains, in buses and trolley cars.

Back in the garage, her plaster head had rested on her rubber body, carefully preserved by the bunting my mother had made for her. In the bottom of that bunting was an even greater treasure: the clothing my mother had made for the doll. This was no Barbie with anatomically adolescent anatomy and a wardrobe to break a bank account. This was a baby of a different kind, one who needed diapering, who wore flannel pajamas and a red and white checked baby dress.

Fingering the three outfits my mother had awkwardly hand sewn in 1949, I felt a great tenderness. My mother died 13 years ago at the age of 82 and this was a nugget of the unspoken love we had struggled to express to each other.

As silly as it sounds, I kissed the cold plaster head of this childhood memory and silently thanked her for giving me my first chance to practice loving and nurturing something outside myself. Before placing her, mildew-free and snug in newly soft pajamas, into a drawer for another 59 years, I showed her to my daughter.

"Can I have her when you're through?" she asked, moving the squeaky rubber arm. "For the children I'll have some day," she added after a pause.

I nodded, knowing full well that I would share the doll whenever she wanted it, but that I would never be "through" with this part of myself until I cease to breathe.

Judy Kramer can be reached by e-mail at JudyandOz@tampabay.rr.com.

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