The Doll From Japan

The few times we get to report from the world it always seems such a big place. So vast, so strange and foreign to us. But this time: A very different thing. A personal memory, Jim Gavido’s, of his mother, who was Japanese, and who gave him this doll before she died, so young.

He used to sit on his swing, at the back of the house, when she was ill, at the hospital, the doll propped up on a big tree-trunk his father used to chop wood on. He used to see the doll looking like that, into the distance, and he’d speak to it. Like he did with his mother. Just telling the doll what he’d done that day. The small insignificant things. The in-betweens that make up most of our time. He’d tell her about waiting in line for food, at school. About walking home from football-practice, alone, and seeing the street-lights come on, and flicker, and the flies gathering around them. Those things he’d tell the doll, who’d just look into the distance, mildly, listening one would presume, without making any judgments, like mothers do.

And when she died he kept on talking to the doll, crying, but still. Told the doll the things he wanted his mother to know. So she could see him, he thought. Maybe somewhere over Japan. Criss-crossing the spaces and thoughts he saw and held. He thought the clothes once belonged to her, as a baby perhaps, seeing they were too big for the doll, and how the doll didn’t mind wearing them that way.

Instead of going to her grave he still talks to the doll, to this day, sets her down somewhere where she can see into the distance. And then they talk. About what he’s done, so she will know, somewhere, maybe above Japan, or Finland or right here.