Big Doll 

     Big Doll was given to me at Christmas when I was around 4 years old. She was not new even then, but I didn’t know or care about that. She was a large sized baby doll, 20 inches long, clunky and heavy; the biggest version of the Betsy Wetsy doll produced during that time. Being ‘preowned’, she came with no box or packaging or tags, and through all the years I’ve had her I was never able to figure out her odd construction—she was made to ‘drink from a bottle’ and there was clearly a hole in the back of her mouth for the water to run through, but with no hole in the area where one would presume the diaper would be wetted, and she had a tube inside her body that ended about halfway down into her midsection—you could see this tube when peering into a small hole on her back that, thanks to some online research in more recent years, I determined to be the place where a squeaker would go, which would have rendered a soft ‘waaaa’ sound as the doll was squeezed and air flowed through it.

     

     Anyway, Big Doll would never pee after being bottle fed, would only leak the water back out from her mouth, and eventually Mom got me one of those disappearing-milk, clear-sided doll bottles for her, so that when I fed her, tipping the magical bottle, the colored liquid inside would mysteriously seep away to a place unknown, inside the bottle, and then my young self was satisfied that she was getting a proper feeding. 

     

     Big Doll never had an extensive wardrobe of fancy doll dresses, dolly shoes, or cute pajamas. Outfitting our dolls took a back seat to clothing real babies, and in those years in our big Catholic family there was always a human little one in baby clothes. But Mom didn’t mind my using a few of the more worn out clothes and blankets for Big Doll. The legs on the footy pajamas dangled like long noodles on her little dolly legs, the diapers sagged and bunched, and wee sweaters ended up on her with triple folded cuffs, hanging in loose folds around her little doll body, but even so - I loved dressing her and then pushing her around in a cardboard box in lieu of a doll buggy, and she was well loved and often played with, not only by me, but also by several other sisters through the years. 

     

     The Ideal Toy Company, producer of the Betsy Wetsy line, made good, solid, limb flanges—that area where the arms and legs fit into the sockets—and to this day Big Doll’s limbs are secure and tight. Interpret that as ‘hard to turn’ for a small child, and so because she did not always have an arm raised for holding, and also because she was also quite heavy—she was frequently dragged around unceremoniously by a foot or arm, and even quite often by the hair, and it’s a testament to the Ideal Company’s thick, strong hair they ‘wigged’ into their dolls—that after all those years she is missing only a couple of scalp lines of hair that my brothers cut off purposely, because, BOYS. 

     

     Big Doll tagged along through my childhood for three household moves, and survived a vicious cowboy/Indian attack by my brothers who, with their new jackknifes, cleanly cut off both of her thumbs, a few fingertips, and as afore mentioned—a couple rows of her hair, (an incident which made me so mad I told on them to Mom, who then yelled at them, a common punishment at our house and easily shrugged off after a quick showing of sad penitence to the yelling parent). Somewhere through the years, most of the eyelashes on Big Doll's open-and-close eyes fell out, and a film appeared over her crystal eyeballs—something like doll cataracts. Her finger and toe nails have been painted and repainted many times, and the polish has darkened and congealed over the years to a thick, drab red. And at some point my sister and I gave her pierced ears by poking a straight pin though each of her earlobes. She has marks and discolorations here and there, and scratches all over, but for her current age— about 55 years or so—she looks pretty good. Ideal produced their dolls with a nice, thick vinyl—hollow inside—which made them somewhat pliable, (and thus more ‘realistic’), and this heavy vinyl construction has held up quite well over the years. 

     

     I left Big Doll when I eventually moved away from home, but she turned back up in my life later on when Mom gifted her back to me, having sewn her a pink gingham and lace dress, bonnet, underpants, and a tiny pair of socks—the only outfit she'd ever had that actually fit her to true to size. She was displayed somewhere in my house for a while, then, as time passed, was relegated to a storage closet where we kept the Christmas decorations and the window air conditioners in the cool seasons. She was packed up for a 5th move when I bought a house after divorce, and then, finally, for a 6th move when I moved in with my partner Warren. I came across her a couple years ago when unpacking some boxes stored in the basement, brought her upstairs, and set her by the bookcase in the dining room, in a perfectly sized, 60’s vintage, dolly high chair I'd found at a thrift store. 

     

     My feelings for Big Doll, sweet a memory as she may be—are largely ambivalent now that we’re both in our mid-fifties. As a very young child I loved her, and as I grew slightly older I was perfectly okay with passing her along to my younger siblings to play with, and some short while after that she had mostly disappeared from my world altogether, and in fact, if she had not been kept around our house for all those years and then had never turned back up in my life when she was re-gifted to me by my mother—I would not now be wondering what to do with her. How does one’s old childhood toy, especially a doll—with it’s tiny humanoid features, and once so loved by a child—go off to the great toy beyond?

     

     My first inclinations were quickly eliminated: Old (and damaged) toys are not wanted in donation drives, and none of my siblings or younger relatives wanted to keep her. I thought (only briefly) about putting her into the trash, but the idea of Big Doll rotting away in some landfill for eternity (those old plastics and vinyls may have a finite lifespan but this doll, much like a hotdog, showed no real signs of breaking down yet, 

possibly ever). The idea of a small doll burial in the backyard also flitted through my mind. We even have a tiny pet cemetery on a weekend property where she could be added to the row of small, departed, loved friends, her name etched with a stick into a wee slab of wet concrete gravestone. Or maybe a funeral pyre. Or just let her go in a big bonfire blaze. But I just couldn’t see myself dropping my dear old doll into a fiery blaze. And both burial and bonfire cremation just seem to be borrowing needless morbidity. This is just my little old childhood doll, after all. I could barely understand why I was in a quandary over it at all.

     

     My sister and I, many years ago on a carefree, sunny Saturday, went with Dad to a local country auction, something we did on occasion just for fun, and we wandered the grounds around the outbuildings peering at someone’s life’s accumulations, possessions, or parts of, laid out on tables and lawns, and piled upon hay racks. Clothing, ancient firearms, canning jars, old broken down furniture, sad old floor lamps with smoke stained, brittle, plastic shades, an old handmade violin, a box of rocks, rusty plows and farm equipment. People. A man with a long white beard that hung down over his belly. He didn’t look friendly, but not crotchety either. I realized that he looked deeply sad. Dad said he was the son of the old man who had died and whose property was being sold. The tumble-down house was to be auctioned off last. My sister and I went inside to look. At an auction everything for sale is open to look at. The floor inside was a multi-colored patchwork carpet made up of those rectangles of carpet remnants you can buy at Home Depot to use for a shoe rug near your doorway. They were pieced together like large bricks to make up the whole of the carpeted floor. The rooms smelled like a hundred years of people smoking indoors. I used to enjoy an auction like a country fair—just taking it all in—we all three did, but being inside the house left me feeling uncomfortable, like I didn’t belong, was snooping in people’s knick knacks, and decor, and in the ghosts of their lives—people I knew nothing about otherwise, and we exited more somberly than when we’d gone in. My sister grew quiet and when we were seated back in the car for the short ride home, she said, “When I die I don’t want my things lying around on a hay rack for people to rifle through and bid on.” 

     

     And as I remember that day, and my sister’s remark, it does occur to me that my dilemma was not only about Big Doll, but about mortality. My own. Loved ones’. About eventual death, which weaves it’s way more frequently through the course of our lives as we age. 

     

    I don’t know about your family, but mine, certainly including me—is a bunch of sentimental old fools. We all love old things; vintage, broken down, worn out, parts missing, remnants of way-back-when. One brother buys and fixes up old time radios, collects vintage metal toy cars and trucks, and a group of plastic Johnny and Jane West dolls and horses, dating back from the years of our childhood, marches in place around the ledge of his family room.

     

     My youngest sister had in her farmhouse kitchen for many years, a heavy, hulking, old piece of furniture known in our family as The Buffet, that had been a fixture in Grandma’s house until she died. It had never been an expensive piece, and wasn’t lovely, but held great sentimental value. We’d grown up seeing it as a fixture in Grandpa and Grandma’s house above the store where Grandpa sold live bait and groceries/sundries in our small town. The Buffet held a variety of Grandma’s trinkets—tiny china figurines that wobbled and threatened to fall and break if we were horse-playing around in the house. On a high shelf of the Buffet sat a small, stuffed, real alligator. Also a plastic burro that would poop out cigarettes when loaded up with paper and tobacco. Drawers were filled with special doilies and silverware brought out for special occasions. The Buffet had been painted over many times, and the color choices all seemed to fall into a grouping of a weird-salmon color, an odd brownish-red, or pinky-beige of sorts, dooming it forever to be not-beautiful. The mirrors were timeworn with splotchy dark areas, and some of the fancy ornamental bits had broken off and gone missing. But it wasn’t until some of the drawer bottoms began to break apart, however, that my sister began to give serious thought to (those dreadful words…) GETTING RID OF IT. The Buffet was offered and re-offered, then re-offered again, to everyone in the family and anyone else who might be remotely interested, but there were no takers. No one had room for it, and did I mention—it was big, cumbersome, heavy to move. As it was again offered all around one final time, assertions were clearly made (or thinly veiled threats)—“Well, if no one wants it, it’s going into our next bonfire.” Ouch. It was sad to think of Grandma’s old buffet coming to it’s final demise in a big blaze of glory, but after I mulled the idea around for awhile, it actually seemed okay. I thought maybe Grandma, up in heaven, would be perfectly fine with it. I guess. So you see, I struggle—we struggle, not so much with the letting go part, as with the how-does-it-end part. Anyway, it turns out that bonfire burning of The Buffet never happened, which I found out only this past summer (several years after the event was supposed to have taken place) when I mentioned something about Grandma’s old buffet being bon-fired to its end, and my sister said, “Oh. No. We never ended up burning it.” At the last minute, Charles (another brother) took it home, where his neighbor, a furniture restorer, spied it and bought it from him on the spot. And so—Grandma’s buffet is still out there somewhere, with a new family, quietly, hulking still, happily, living out it’s life, hopefully in a more suitable color or wood stain. And Grandma would certainly be perfectly fine with that. I think.

     

     But still, getting back to that conundrum—just what is one supposed to do with a much-loved, but not terribly valuable, item of treasured sentiment, when the possibility of passing it along to (or forcing it on, or guilting it to) a new owner is not an option? I haven’t found a solution for the end-of-life for Big Doll that I can live with yet. Last week I took her out of her little wooden doll chair and cleaned her up, giving her a hair wash, bathing the sticky dust residue from her vinyl limbs. I cleaned the plastic orbs of her eyeballs, and spent way more time than I’d like to admit removing years of nail polish from her little toes and fingers. I got out an old doll clothing pattern that was passed along from Aunt Jeanne (yes, I do have the knack of being the receiver of other peoples’ old things, I just don’t have the knack of finding others who wish to take ownership of MY old things…) and I sewed her a couple of new outfits. I’m still sorting through ideas of how to (well, I don’t care to use the word ‘dispose’), um, disappear her forever, but for now she’s looking quite darling in her new dolly outfits. A tiny vintage rattle or a couple of old toys would look adorable on her tray, and I’m pretty sure I saw some for sale on eBay. 

Mary Ellen Seidel 2019