Baby Bubbles

'Allo,

Sometimes, I feel otherwordly, maybe in this case other-country-y. I hear myself in an Australian accent in my head. I think I am just trying to make myself feel more exotic than the boring Midwesterner that I am. Accents seem so much more exciting, offering an imagination to those around you. Ah, the excitement, the enticement of lilting languages and drawling diction. I do love illiteration. I think it's marvelous.

I recently made the drive to my grandmother's house again. This time to say goodbye to her things rather than her body. It is a daunting task to clean her house, for it is not a normal house. There used to be paths in the house, things piled to the ceiling, boxes filled with unknown treasures, but mostly unwanted junk. Everything could be used for a part, everything had a purpose to someone. However, logic fails when you have to find that perfect someone in the midst of the nearly seven billion people on the planet.

During this last trip I looked at dolls. As a child, I did not care for dolls and the imaginary play that accompanied them. For me, dolls were boring as they did not do anything. Unfortunately, they still do not do anything. Even more unfortunate, there were boxes upon boxes of them. When I left after a long weekend of peeking into boxes hoping something else would be found in them, there were 50 boxes of dolls. When my father finally finished going through all the dolls, they would total 78.

One would think this would be a child's dream, a doll collector's paradise, and it would have been. However, these dolls were the neglected children of the doll world. Matted hair, pen inked onto their peach bodies, not even done well enough to be considered cruse prison tattooes. Merely, ugly, sad, worn out dolls that one their owners were done abusing them, were left for dead. They were sold for a quarter, they were given away, and my grandmother was the one who scooped them up.

I remember getting these dolls from her when she would visit. She would hand one to me so happily, as if I were getting a grand gift. As soon as she left, my mother would make me throw the doll away and wash my hands. I would gladly dump it into the trash and feel dirty, sullen just touching the one arm I limply hung onto while my grandmother was in sight. A soiled doll, with crusty hair, and eyes that no longer blinked open and shut, just one open and one shut, a nightmare of a doll for a gift is something I did not understand.

These dolls are something I still do not understand. I don't know why my grandma would be so interested in keeping these, in buying them, and then throwing them into boxes. If she were wanting to love one, wanting to relive her own harsh childhood in which she had no doll, I do not know where these come into play. I merely know that they do not come into play with me, they did not then and do not now.

This daunting task haunts us. We wonder why she kept these things, not just the dolls, but other things. We wonder so many things and in these boxes, these piles we do not find answers. Just dust and someone else's memories.