doughboy, part 2

After posting yesterday’s Picture of the Day, I started to feel a little bad, because truth be told, there is another doughboy in my life. The Pillsbury one, of course. Here is that doughboy in today’s Picture of the Day, with Barnabas Bear and his new bear brother Chester. Chester came on Christmas day as a present from my brother William, but I digress. This story is about the Pillsbury doughboy.

This doughboy used to live at my grandmother Mimi’s house. When I used to go visit Mimi as a little girl, I would put that doughboy in a little stroller and push it around the neighborhood. We’d go off to feed the ducks or to drop leaves off the side of a bridge so that they went off to Never-Neverland because those were the kinds of things I did when I visited Mimi. Then, likely, we came back to the house and Mimi fixed us a cheese plate and some ice cream because there was always good eatin’ at Mimi’s house.

Mimi died when I was in the fifth grade, and it fell upon us to clean out her house. We took a fair share of stuff but there was no way everything could go. As my parents remember it, I said goodbye to the doughboy and put him in the pile to go to the dump. But dad said I didn’t seem quite convinced, and when he took that load to the dump he pulled that doughboy back from the edge of extinction. When he got home, he gave me the doughboy and said that he’d heard the doughboy saying, “Save me! Save me!” This is a situation where the written word really fails to convey the essence of the story because my dad does a perfect Pillsbury doughboy voice.

So legend has it that the doughboy can never be thrown away, because he will cry out and pierce your heart. And that is the tale of the other doughboy in my life.