Treasure hunting
I wanted Barbies when I was a little girl. I didn't see the cheap fabric, the plastic shoes that Barbie couldn't even stand on, the gaudy use of glitter, the fact that Barbie was closer anatomically to a typical wasp than a woman. I saw the seeds of my own homemade theater instead, my beautiful actors packaged in cardboard castles. As an only child, I saw friends within the plastic molded plastic in the way that my grandmother never could be. She never was the type to indulge in my fantasy plays.
I remember asking her to buy them for me every time we went to the Galleria--we went almost every other day. I own five Barbie dolls and one Ken doll; not one of them are from her.
I don't know why she never wanted to buy them for me--my childhood best friend, Crystal, had a whole laundry basket full of them. She had so many of them that she couldn't even tell her dolls apart. She even had the Dream House and the red convertible. I was always a little jealous, but I never wanted to play with her dolls--somehow, I found it degrading, like a dog whining about the dining room table begging for scraps.
She never bought me dolls, but she did, on rare occasion, buy me books. We had a medium sized B.K. Toystore in the Galleria. It was on the far end of the mall with nothing but that department store, Robinson's or May before it became Robinsons-May, but we always stopped by there.
B.K. had a booksale one day, although I don't remember them selling books before, or ever again, for that matter. They had several makeshift cardboard crates full of books, all thrown together in careless disarray, selling for cheap enough that grandmother bought me a few. I don't know what drew me to it, but I ended up picking The Secret of the Old Clock out of the hundreds of books there. I ended up being a Drew fanatic for a couple of years after, hunting down her stories in the public library, sitting in the Waldenbooks to read the rest--Nancy was my heroine. You know what? I still adore her.
I can resent my grandmother for a lot of reasons, but at least I know that she gave me this.
I remember asking her to buy them for me every time we went to the Galleria--we went almost every other day. I own five Barbie dolls and one Ken doll; not one of them are from her.
I don't know why she never wanted to buy them for me--my childhood best friend, Crystal, had a whole laundry basket full of them. She had so many of them that she couldn't even tell her dolls apart. She even had the Dream House and the red convertible. I was always a little jealous, but I never wanted to play with her dolls--somehow, I found it degrading, like a dog whining about the dining room table begging for scraps.
She never bought me dolls, but she did, on rare occasion, buy me books. We had a medium sized B.K. Toystore in the Galleria. It was on the far end of the mall with nothing but that department store, Robinson's or May before it became Robinsons-May, but we always stopped by there.
B.K. had a booksale one day, although I don't remember them selling books before, or ever again, for that matter. They had several makeshift cardboard crates full of books, all thrown together in careless disarray, selling for cheap enough that grandmother bought me a few. I don't know what drew me to it, but I ended up picking The Secret of the Old Clock out of the hundreds of books there. I ended up being a Drew fanatic for a couple of years after, hunting down her stories in the public library, sitting in the Waldenbooks to read the rest--Nancy was my heroine. You know what? I still adore her.
I can resent my grandmother for a lot of reasons, but at least I know that she gave me this.