I really didn’t care much for dolls, but there were a few I really loved: my Drowsy Doll (which I’ve written a poem about), a little black doll who was blind in one eye (her plastic eye was missing) named Betty (named for my Mamaw’s sister who gave her to me), and my beloved Baby Crissy. Baby Crissy was a big baby, and her limbs were soft plastic. She was fashioned to look like she had real baby rolls of real baby flesh. She was a stout girl, and, when I got her for Christmas in 1975, she seemed to weigh almost as much as I did. Carrying her around was hard work. I loved her because we had the same name, even though she spelled hers wrong, and I remember telling her that every night when I sang her to sleep and placed her in her own baby bed that sat in the bedroom that I shared with my mother at Mamaw and Papaw Little’s house.
She had gorgeous auburn hair, not red like Ronald McDonald, and there was a piece of hair in the top of her head that connected to a ring on her back to pull out into a full ponytail. It was luxurious! Her eyes were large brown glass circles with the most fabulous eyelashes… I constantly cleaned things out of them because they were like bristles on a tiny little brush, perfectly arching over her eyes. She was magnificent. She didn’t eat and poop in her diaper like a later doll (Baby Alive) would do. She didn’t walk on her own and talk on the phone like a doll I coveted but never would have (Baby This-N-That). And she didn’t sway her little bottom as she crawled away like the infamous Baby That-A-Way. But that magical ponytail and the slightest show of the whitest smile in all of Toyland made her my favorite, in her little pink dress and matching elastic-legged bottoms. She was my name-twin and my very best friend. We did everything together until I started kindergarten and put baby dolls away to play with Barbie dolls full-time.
She met her demise in a bad storm that turned over the little metal building where my old toys were stored in the backyard. The building was turned upside down on its top, and everything inside went washing down the creek or was trapped in the flood waters underneath. She was one of toys of latter fate. By the time she dried out in the sunlight for a couple of weeks, her ponytail ring had rusted out and broken, and her supple skin had dried out and started peeling back (an early lesson in aging I should have taken better note of with my own skin). But Baby Crissy reigned supreme during that year or so she was my baby, my name-twin, and my best friend.
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