However, lately I’ve decided that I did something even more important: As a child, I played. Growing up in the 1950’s I played with dolls I named Ginny, Cindy, and Saucy. I cut out Betsy-Tacy paper dolls. I took stuffed dogs named Lady and Tramp on long walks, holding their red plastic leashes tightly in my small hand. I spent hours with a family with six children who lived in a tin, two-story dollhouse.

And, it was through this act of playing that I practiced and learned the most valuable skill of all: I developed an imagination. I developed my innate ability to form stories in my mind, an ability to create.

A year after I was born, the American Character Doll Company introduced Tiny Tears^®, a rubber doll with a hard-plastic head and molded hair. Tiny Tears had a round face, blue eyes with thick lashes, a pinched button nose, and an open hole in her tiny red mouth. The diapered doll came in a box with a baby bottle, pacifier and bubble pipe. In addition to drinking, wetting, and blowing bubbles, Tiny Tears could cry real tears.

No seven year-old girl was ever happier than I when Santa Claus left a ‘crybaby’ under our family’s Christmas tree.

Tiny Tears

Tiny Tears was just one of my many dolls, carefully selected by my mother. My mother loved dolls; she kept her own until the end of her life. No doubt I will too.

Tiny Tears wasn’t my first baby doll, but she and her predecessor, a cherub-like infant named Susie, were, and still are, my favorites.

Susie-doll

Like the hand-sewn, sentient sock monkeys in The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea, my dolls were well-loved. Wear and tear from squishy hugs and frequent handling are evidence of that.

Tiny Tears now has a break in her head and a fissure crack above her faded blue eyes. Her left arm is loose in its socket. Susie-Doll’s once soft and rubbery body feels like wood. Her right arm is crumbling, her left arm long gone. Meant to look like real human beings, these toys willingly assumed the endless variety of voices and personalities and roles that my young imagination assigned them.

Eventually another baby doll came into my life, one I’d most likely seen in Wish Book, the Sears Roebuck annual Christmas catalog. At first glance, Baby-doll was perfect every way. She had a pink bonnet, a ruffled pink party dress and pink slip and bloomers. In truth her perfectly formed plastic body was too large to carry, too hard to snuggle with, too cumbersome for quick and easy wardrobe changes. Her eyes seemed too blue and sparkly. She was a doll to be looked at, a doll who was difficult to love.

Baby-doll

A few weeks ago, the importance of play in the development of creativity was brought close to home when I spent a week in New Jersey with my granddaughter. Like all young children, her imagination is wild and fearless. The lines between the real and the imaginary are wonderfully blurred. She invites giraffes and dinosaurs to tea parties. She scrubs down Rody, a play riding pony, with a vegetable brush in the kitchen sink. She diapers Pippa, a stuffed rabbit, with paper towels.

Knowing my history, it should come as no surprise that soon after Ofelia’s birth I started thinking about the kind of baby doll I was going to buy for her. When I shared my desire with my daughter, she promptly said, “No, Mom. No baby dolls.”

Luckily my daughter has changed her mind. For my granddaughter’s third birthday in May, my present will be a custom-made Waldorf baby doll. My daughter found the doll maker on Etsy.com. We co-selected our desired eye color, skin color, hair color and style, as well as the colors, fabrics, and yarns for the doll’s first outfit, making me a very happy grandmother.

Waldorf dolls

My own precious dolls and our endless hours of play left an indelible mark on my heart and memory. In ways both conscious and unconscious, our long-ago time together leaves its mark on the kinds of stories for children that I’m trying to tell.

In early September, at the time when Hurricane Irma was thrashing coastal South Carolina, I read for the first time one of Conroy’s later works, South of Broad, set in Charleston. Ironically, the climax in South of Broad takes place during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. I also rediscovered one of my favorite cookbooks, a signed copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, a gift from my daughter. Not only does the cookbook feature one of our family’s favorite recipes, “Summer Chowder,” but also includes a collection of personal essays by the author about the art and joy of cooking good food.

“A Recipe is a Story …” is the title of the cookbook’s seventh chapter, and I include, for readers and writers alike, a few of his observations from pages 96-97:

Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I’ve led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses . . .

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Alertness is the requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life . . .

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But sometimes stories hide themselves from writers like trolls under bridges. Then the writers of the world must keep their bodies attuned for the sudden appearance of the story that is powerful enough to change their stories and their lives. They must train themselves to recognize the divine moment when a great story reveals itself.

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I was so saddened when this great author passed away on March 4, 2016, my 67th birthday. But still, I thank him for his compelling and beautifully written stories, for signing my copy of his cookbook, and for sharing his recipes and life wisdom.

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SUMMER CHOWDER

From: The Pat Conroy Cookbook

6 slices smoky bacon, coarsely chopped
1 cup minced red onion
¼ cup finely diced celery
3 cups fresh corn kernels (about 5 ears, or 24 ounces, frozen)
3 cups whole milk (maybe a little less, the frozen corn will create some liquid)
½ pound new red potatoes, washed but not peeled and cut into ¼ inch cubes
½ cup heavy (whipping) cream
1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives
1 pound sea scallops, rinsed and patted dry
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper

1. In a medium stockpot over moderate heat, cook the bacon until the fat is rendered and bacon is almost crisp, 5 to 8 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, removed the bacon and reserve. Drain off all but 2 tablespoons bacon fat, reserving the extra in a small bowl for later use.
2. Reduce the heat to low, add the onion and celery to the stockpot, and cook in the bacon drippings, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to soften, 12 to 15 minutes. As the vegetables begin to exude their moisture, use a wooden spoon to scrape up any browned bits clinging to the bottom of the stockpot.
3. Using a food processor fitted with a metal blade, puree 1 cup of the corn kernels with 1 cup of the milk. Add to the stockpot and stir well. Add the remaining corn and milk and the potatoes, stirring to combine. Lower the heat and cook until the potatoes and corn are tender, about 35 minutes. (If using frozen corn, I would cook the potatoes for about 20 minutes and then add the frozen corn)
4. Stir in the reserved bacon, heavy cream, Tabasco, and chives and simmer until chowder thickens, another 3 to 5 minutes.
5. While the chowder is thickening, place the reserved bacon fat in a small heavy skillet over high heat. When the fat is hot, sear the scallops until golden brown on each side but still slightly opaque in the center, about 2 minutes on the first side and 1 minute on the other.
6. Season the chowder with coarse salt and ground white pepper to taste. Ladle into deep bowls and float scallops in the center. Serve immediately.

Serves 4 as a main course or 8 as a first course.