The Doll With the Yellow Dress

      When I was young, I didn't have a lot of toys, but I did have two special dolls. The first was made of rubber, soft and smooth. There were two special holes in this doll. One, in its mouth, was a point at which it could drink from its own bottle. The second, on the other end if you get my meaning, allowed it to wet diapers. This was high-tech for dolls in my childhood years.

Aunt Jay

     This doll could easily be dressed because her one purple outfit was very large, unlike the Barbie outfits that kids struggle with so much. Getting the dress on was so easy that keeping the dress on was the problem. It needed to be tied around the middle with an old shoelace for security. From my point of view, the doll and her dress were perfect.

     My Aunt Jay didn't see the doll the same way. She noticed what the doll didn't have. While the lack of hair didn't matter to me, Aunt Jay saw it as a flaw. The doll's large dress was also seen as a problem. Aunt Jay said that the real problem was that the doll had only one arm. The lack of an arm was, I supposed, why that doll ended up in a trashcan where my father was able to rescue it and allow it to become my doll. How could that be bad?

     The Christmas when I was six, Aunt Jay decided that she would solve my doll problem. She came to the house with a large, wrapped box. Inside the box there was a doll so beautiful that I couldn't even see other people in the room once I opened the package. The doll had curly, dark brown hair, a yellow hat and dress with blue ribbons and white lace, and even underpants with lace! There were shoes and socks and the smell of new cloth. What a doll!

Elaine in her father's lap

     This doll could also drink and wet and, listen to this, when she was placed on her back, her eyes closed and when she was picked up, she said, "Mama"
I couldn't get over it.

     My mother scolded Aunt Jay for giving me such a doll saying that I would mess up her hair and lose the socks and shoes (all true) but my aunt said that she had no daughters and my mother should, quite simply, "Hush up." I was shocked at such an argument but knew that with that last command, the doll would stay with me.

     It was wrong to keep it since there were no gifts to give my cousins. Still, every second that I looked at it, my little hands tightened their grip. It was just too much to believe that I would have a new, still in the box, never used by another child doll, just for me.      

     Barefoot with hair awry but full of memories of Aunt Jay, it is in our cedar chest now with its one-armed sister and Rick's old Davy Crocket hat.

My New Red Shoes

      I have new red shoes. Okay, so in the scheme of things shoes aren't important no matter the color but these shoes are part of a story.  

    When I was a small child, there wasn't much stuff in our house because my family didn't have a lot of money. Actually, we often didn't have enough money for important things, so the less important things were second-hand. Lots of our toys were broken, dented, rusty castaways from other families and our clothes were shared and patched.

     Since our family didn't have a lot of money, my mom thought that a good way to save was to have her children share clothes. She would buy new clothes for my bigger, older brother and then, when they didn't fit him, she would give them to me to wear until my little brother needed what was left.

     As reasonable as this may seem, in the 1950s it was a serious problem.  At that time, girls wore dresses. My brothers clothes were pants, striped pullovers and, worst of all, winter hats with earflaps. 

One photo of me shows a small face surrounded by the dreaded earflap-hat, sitting in Santa's lap. Though it was years ago, I remember that since I was dressed like a boy, Santa called me Sonny and gave me a bow-and-arrow set. I cried.

     An important element in this arrangement was that my brother had really big feet so I always had new shoes just for me. Usually they were sensible shoes - plain, brown, Mary Janes or maybe saddle shoes. 

     They fit okay and looked okay. but they weren't anything like the shiny black shoes that other little girls wore to church with their fancy socks. They didn't make me want to dance or skip or smile. They were ordinary walking shoes for ordinary feet on an ordinary girl.     One time though I had a pair of shiny red shoes with yellow straps, blue patches and golden buckles. I felt like the queen of the school in those shoes. It made me feel rich just to own them. My feet would smile up to my knees. 

These aren't the red shoes
but there are few images of me
available.

     I walked around with my head down just to see those shoes move. I loved them so much that I would sneak them on at night and wear them to bed. Now and then, in honor of those wonderful shoes, I purchase footwear in red without regard to their being sensible or useful and that's why I have new, red shoes. 

CHICKENS ON HERTEL

      We have a family story about Jay and his encounters in Kuala Lumpur with the man we named The Chicken-Plucker. Memories of chickens in my childhood include a Chicken Man on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo in the 1950s. 

     My family lived in a group of three houses next to a car dealer and across the street from the dry cleaner/bookie. (Was there really a bookie? My father said so because he saw people go in empty-handed and come out the same. Sensing it was crime related, I wasn't allowed to walk in front of that building.) 

     Sometimes my mother sent me past the other two houses and the church parking lot, on the good side of the street, to the brick building that held a car repair shop and a chicken coop on the ground floor and apartments above. 

     Entering the shop was strange because, on the inside, it didn't look, smell or sound like the city. The floor was covered in sawdust.  

     This Chicken Man walked through the mist of odors, leading with his enormous belly, wearing a blood-spattered apron over his long-sleeved white jacket. The sawdust on the floor behind his counter was not fresh but mixed with chicken droppings and feathers. 

     The back of the store held cages and a chopping block. The wire cages held chickens, sometimes more, and sometimes fewer, but always noisy. The birds would pompously strut with their darting beaks. Their combs proudly dressed their heads, and their bead-like eyes sparkled in the light of the bare bulbs hanging from black wires. 

     The man sold eggs in gray, cardboard boxes tied with a string that spun from a spool on the counter, traveled through a wire loop above and came back down to his flying hands to be wrapped around the carton, tied and snapped, the small sound of which was lost among the clucking.    

     Placed in my hands, those eggs were carried, cautiously, back to the kitchen at 1101. 

     Sometimes I was not an egg customer but a chicken customer. The chickens knew the difference.    

     "My mother would like a nice, fat chicken please, but she doesn't want any feathers. She hates finding feathers."

     When he went to the cage to select a chicken for butchering, the noise was deafening. Shouts of chicken kinship or chicken fear were far more hectic than those of egg loss. 

     His counter was too high for me to look over though I could peek around the side. I didn't see the business that so fascinated and shocked Jay in Malaysia because my Chicken Man stepped outside the back door to do the serious stuff. After there was the thunk of blade into wood, there was chicken silence for a feather's worth of time. 

     When finished, he would hand me the chicken wrapped in paper and tied with his flying string. It was okay to skip, run or even roller skate with a package of chicken and, when holding a dead chicken, moving faster seemed like a good idea. 

     There were always a few small feathers, and my mother would burn them off with the flame on our gas stove before she washed the chicken and started dinner. 

     The man and his chickens were gone by the time I was ten and could walk all the way to the corner drugstore or ride my bike around the whole block. 

     I remember stopping once to look in his dark window. The cages were empty, a few feathers were on the floor in the dusty corners and the quiet, so unusual for that store, was eerie.      circa 1956