How it all began

How it all began



"I don't know where it's at, I'm in front of Pat & Oscars, come find me. "  I gave my dad the address to the little Mexican restaurant in Temecula, California hours earlier.  As he's pushing 80 he doesn't seem to like to be bothered with looking up direction anymore.   So, the Mexican food idea went out the window and we had pizza instead.

When I pulled up to his beaten up little Toyota Tecoma pickup truck the bed was loaded and the front seat was as well with one thing, dolls.  We spent the next five minutes putting it into my beaten up SUV before lunch.   I was now taking possession of my late mother's doll collection.  This was a road I had been down twice before with yarn and quilting fabric.  "There's still more that I couldn't fit into the truck" is what he said before we headed inside.

So, I'm the dude with all the dolls.

 My mom was a math teacher.  Back in high school, she won a $100 scholarship from UCLA's Panhellenic Council.  In the article, it said she wanted to be a math teacher.  She eventually got her master's degree in Math from SDSU.
If my mom's mind was a motor it was a 24 cylinder turbocharged mind.  The problem is that being a math teacher only requires 4 cylinders, at most. When the school district gets desperate they recruit PE teachers to teach math. She always found the workload challenging but her mind got bored.  She would get into things to occupy her mind.  She loved crafts such as quilting, needlepoint, and knitting.    Her math council would get papers submitted by getting their Ph.D. in math.   My mom had to read the paper, do the math and figure out if it was legit or bogus.

Growing up in this house we didn't know poverty, but we went through periods without a lot of money.  It's different than today's poor.  You never saw homeless people with $1000 iPhones.  We didn't have "stuff"  otherwise known as material possessions.  Stuff was something the more affluent people had.  Over the years there has been an accumulation of stuff in our society which makes it much easier to come by.  We also have China turning out huge mountains of stuff every day at dirt cheap prices. Perhaps kids these days don't have the perspective of the scarcity of stuff.  But yes, it was very real.   My dad told me that when mom was a young child, perhaps a toddler her family moved from Minnesota to Arizona.   She had to leave behind her doll collection.  And, I think this is how it all got started.


  When my twin daughters were born she was over the moon excited for them.  When they were toddlers is when the dolls started showing up.   How and why?  We never got into that story, she just started collecting.  And though 15 years earlier the family was dirt poor my parents had two good incomes with no children at home.  Thus, most of these dolls showed up between 1998 to 2001.  She had her own craft room where 20 of these dolls were sitting out.  Though she thought about them from time to time as investments she wasn't so good about keeping track of the COAs and boxes.

In the last months of her life while she was on her oxygen tank she didn't bother talking about any of her possessions.    And this is something that I think a lot of people in my generation struggle with.   When we lose a parent we sometimes have to clean out their house.  Often this means flying in from other states and taking time off of work to go through a mountain of stuff.  I had my dad helping me with this project.  Otherwise, this mountain of possessions would have been offloaded quickly. I think most people look at possessions, get overwhelmed and dump it all at the Goodwill.

So, that's how it all began. . . I'm a dude with a lot of dolls.