Flattery Gets You a Meme

Beach Bum got me this time. He tagged me with the following statement:

"Because her beauty and intelligence is only exceeded by writing and culinary talents."

Well, shucks, how can anyone say no to that? Although he did direct me to "cough up some inspired crap." The physiology of following those particular instructions would yield some really unpleasant results, I'm afraid.

The rules of this meme involve opening the fourth file where I store pictures and then chose the the fourth picture in that file then write an explanation of that photograph, so here it goes.


This particular picture is not in fact the fourth picture in my fourth folder because I did this very meme a long time ago and sort of followed the rules. I still have the same folders in the same order from that long ago so I am just picking the fourth picture in my most recent folder. Ok, so that wasn't very interesting either. When have you ever known me to cooperate with meme rules anyway? You want that sort of mindless lock step behavior you came to the wrong blog. I'm sticking my head out the window and shouting my unwillingness to conform! "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!"

Ok, sorry, didn't mean to get so riled up there. A blogger could have her head explode getting worked up that much over something as silly as a meme. And by golly, isn't that the perfect segue to the story of this picture of such a lovely little doll? It's so sweet and innocent you may wonder how exploding heads (which seems like it would be a darned fine name for a rock band if it weren't so close to Talking Heads, but maybe they could suggest it means toilets that go boom. Oh, I dunno, now I am thinking of the Boom Town Rats and Bob Geldoff and good grief, if he gets a hold of this story he may go out and need to do a giant benefit concert for kids with no dolls or dolls that got blown up in mine fields...and gees, I have really digressed. Does any of this sound like inspired crap or just it just strike you as some drug induced stream of consciousness? Really, it's just a little peek inside the mind of Lime. Scary, huh?)

Ok, so exploding heads (of dolls, not toilets). Once upon a time, my mother was a little girl. Once a year she had to help her mother clean out the attic. Every summer during this ritual my mother and grandmother would come across a little china doll that had been my grandmother's when she was a child. Every year my mother would ask to have it. Every year her mother would say, "You're too young, you might break it." This went on up until the year my mother turned 10. Again she was told she was too young, she might break it. However, Christmas morning of that year she came down the steps and found the much longed for doll under the tree with her name on it. The next day she broke its head.

My grandmother had the head replaced and my mother eventually came into possession of the doll after she had grown up. Many years ago Mom was cleaning out her own attic she brought it down and showed me and told me the above story before handing it to me and telling me to be careful. I had never seen or heard of the doll before. Mind you, at this time I was a grown woman and had already come into possession of Hepzibah, the doll my other grandmother had inherited from her grandmother. I had an appreciation for how delicate these things can be. My mother handed her doll to me. I reached out to take its head in one hand and its body in the other. The doll's head immediately exploded in my hand and a shower of delicate china shards fell to the floor. The thing literally popped like a balloon when I took it in my hands. I looked up completely mortified by what I had done and my mother burst out laughing.

She put what was left of the doll away. A couple years ago she showed me a new china head and set of hands she had found that would be the right size and that looked like she wanted them to look. A few weeks ago she put them on the original body and sewed a new dress and bonnet. This weekend she came up for a visit and brought the doll to show me the finished work. Some day when I am a little older I look forward to inheriting it, telling the story of it to my own dear daughters and letting them demolish the head in their own fashion before I have it replaced for them to pass to their children who can destroy it and so on and so forth through the generations.

Tradition is so important.