This past week my girls and I have been spending some time helping my mom clean out my grandma's house. Grandma lives in a nursing home these days as she is in the advanced stages of dementia with some other fairly major health issues besides.
It's a sad thing to see someone who was once so bright and capable be in such a place in life. It's hard to talk to her face to face and realize that she doesn't have a clue who I am any more. It's hard to watch her say and do things that make no sense. Dementia is a cruel, cruel thing.
All sadness aside, it's been a bit of a trip down memory lane to go through Grandma's things. We all remember the candy jar that we were all tempted to open when no one was looking. There was the lamp that always stood on a certain table at every house she ever lived. There were lots of pictures of Grandpa....Grandpa who is only a soundless memory to me because he was so quiet and I was so young when he died that I just can't quite recall the sound of his voice. There were just so, so many other things to process. Eighty-four years of living all packed up and moved on.
My grandma likes (liked?) history. She wrote poetry. She liked carefully selected art work. She was a secretary at a college (that's where those Latin/Greek workbooks I did as a child came from!). She was a hard worker. She was particular. She liked to sew and was quite good at it.
In her sewing room she had a life size dress maker's manikin. The moms (my two sisters and myself) weren't a bit interested in trying to make room for it at any of our homes. Our daughters (my only niece on that side of the family and my own three daughters) were all enamored by the thing. My sisters won; it came to live at our house where it was promptly dressed in Maria's (19) clothes.
I can't tell you how many times I talked to that thing after it got to my house. Maria even overheard me talking to "Maria" on several occasions, thinking it was quite funny. I finally had to banish it to the basement as it was far too confusing to have it in the kitchen where it landed when it first got here.
Garth (13) had a brotherly inspiration. What would happen if....
He quietly put the manikin in Maria's bedroom and added the one thing that it lacked, a head. Since its new head was just a ball, he added a hat for better effect. He closed the door and tip toed out. Later at breakfast he asked her what happened when she saw it. He was gratified to know she nearly jumped out of her skin when she happened to see it!
When my brother and I were young, we spent some time at my aunt's house in Pittsburgh. She took us with her shopping one afternoon at some schmazzy mall. I don't know how old we were, but apparently she must've deemed us old enough to stay out of mischief long enough for her to get some shopping done while we looked around a bit. (She obviously had not compared notes with our mother about this!) I remember two things about that shopping trip: the escalator and the clothing manikin.
Our craziest childhood escapades were normally my brother's idea, and so it was with the escalator. Could you climb up a DOWN escalator? Our experiment garnered us an unequivocal YES. Could you skip steps? Yes. Could you jump to the bottom from six steps up? With some effort. Could you make the endless movement of the stairs stop? Ummm, yes....however we discovered that this summoned the security people.
The manikin, now that was a shock to both my brother and myself. We were walking through the clothing section making faces at the lifeless forms that were modeling the clothes. They looked real enough, plastic manikins interspersing the place, all decked out in 1980s apparel. We were strolling merrily along making comments to this dummy and that when something about the last one gave us pause. She was intriguing and especially lifelike.
"Think she's real?" my brother queried.
"Naw," I said.
Did her eyes move when we moved? We certainly thought they did, but then with some imagination they all seemed to do that. Was her chest rising and falling as if she were breathing? We studied her for a long moment. The hair on our necks prickled. Maybe she was real. Maybe she wasn't. We put our thumbs in our ears and wriggled our fingers. No reaction. We stuck our tongues out. Again nothing.
We performed our antics for a good little while when all of a sudden this dummy we were standing in front of us laughed! She just lost it, doubling over with laughter. Here she was a real live person posing as a manikin, hired by the store to stand there modeling clothes all day and we caught her. We sure had taken the boredom out of her day!
