Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer
You may already know about my doll-collecting mania. You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves. But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.
In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California. It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either. We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come. Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls. Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own. So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.
The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother. She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine. I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.
Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands. My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead. He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in. He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.
The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to. She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.
These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians. I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children. (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)
Here’s a view of the front of that same TV bus as it sits between Miss Wortle’s place and Eggbert Egghead’s Egg House. Dabney Egghead is the boy in the sailor suit showing off his brand new velocipede.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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