The Lonely Doll

When you collect as many things as I do, moments of self-doubt are inevitable. Do I really need another shopping list in my latest box of memorablia? Will I care ten years from now that I saved that Cody's bookmark with the names of English 1A/1B instructors whose syllabi I needed to post? Isn't one plastic bag full of brown fur enough?

Thankfully, there are also moments of divine compensation. Dare Wright's 1957 children's book The Lonely Doll is one. I picked it up for almost nothing a few years back, before I had a blog, before I knew what blogs were, even, because I knew that one day I would have the opportunity to share its strangeness with a receptive audience:

Come visit us in Tucson and we can sit on the sofa and read the whole book together!

Taken Aback

I just got off the phone with my sister. It was nice to hear from her, but I sure wish that our conversations were more regular and less dense with portent. Doesn't she know that having the ground pulled out from under me with her latest news reminds me too much of the last September that happened? The fact that she called me while staying home from her new job in Manhattan because of the RNC only makes the body memories that much more intense. Will her wake ever get less choppy?