Thursday, January 8, 2009

Cheerful Childhood Delusions Dissolved

Once upon a time in a little place in southwestern Ohio, there lived a five-year-old girl. She and her family went on a vacation to Washington, DC, and she brought her baby doll along. It's name was Ria Baby. While in Washington, DC, Ria Baby was lost on the subway. The little girl was absolutely devastated. She got a cat (whom she named Ria Kitty and who would one day become her closest animal friend), but her excitement about her new companion could not efface her grief over the loss of Ria Baby.

Several months later, a package came in the mail for the little girl. Inside was her Ria Baby! Oh, the joy! Her mother told her that someone must have found it in Washington, DC, and known to send it back to her. The girl believed this wholeheartedly.

For years, the girl believed what her mother had told her. As she grew older, she began to wonder how on earth it could possibly have happened, but she retained a shred of her belief in the old story until one day when she was seventeen. On that fateful day, the conversation somehow turned to Ria Baby. The girl's mother was shocked to find that her daughter had not gotten to the bottom of the fantastic story. In reality, the mother had written to one of her cousins and asked them to send a Ria Baby. Ria Baby had merely been a McDonald's Happy Meal toy and had been replaced by an impostor for years.

2 comments:

Thorvald Erikson said...

I am glad you mother knows how to order her duties, even if we are not Kantian absolutists here.

Speaking of ordering duties, I notice you wrote this at 2:00 am instead of making art. Brief distractions do wonders for sanity, don't they?

maria said...

I'm not sure this actually helped my sanity at all in the long term, but I like to pretend it did. It certainly helped short-term.

I didn't really write it at 2:00 am, though. I saved the title and an opening sentence, and after school I actually wrote it out.