Petunia's Dresses

Petunia.

She's the only doll I ever kept safe.

I wish I could have a picture of her. She outlasted even the one hundred Barbie Dolls from Auntie Rose. Now she's sitting in a display cabinet in our home in Aguinaldo Street, next to Elizabeth, who is a 4-foot walking doll who used to belong to one of my dad's sisters. I don't know who Petunia belonged to. I just know she and Elizabeth have always been there.

This is a picture of when my dad was a young man and that's Elizabeth on the display cabinet behind him.


Elizabeth was much taller than me when I had her. When I held her hand and swung it, a series of wheels and knobs would turn inside her and make her extend a foot as if to take a step. They don't make dolls like her anymore, I suppose. But then, WWF happened and became available on rented Betamax and Allan and Emil figured they could make a wrestler out of her, so now she's just standing in the old display cabinet with her now-removable head balanced on what used to be her neck. If Sonny was a doll, he'd be in that display cabinet too, with a perpetual splint on the arm that broke like a pencil when Elizabeth was finally useless and the next best thing to practice the Sharp-Shooter on was the then-youngest brother.

Petunia is probably around a year and a half, and eternally so. She doesn't do much except look real and stare at you unblinkingly with those large, glassy brown eyes. You can make her hair grow longer by, well... pulling at it, and she has a string to her back that pulls it back into her head when you want it short again. But other than that, she just basically sits there with her perpetual infancy and forever smile.

What makes Petunia special is her wardrobe. I used to have this little case with her shoes and brushes. Nothing special there, except that I later discover that aside from the dress she came in when she she was first bought, everything else in her wardrobe once belonged to me.

Mom has this tendency to keep all the clutter until otherwise given away, and there was a time when she wanted to give away my baby dresses to my new cousins. I fought for a few of the dresses, for sentimental reasons, and put them on Petunia. She's been wearing them since I told myself that one day, I will have a daughter who will wear them too.

I know it sounds like a silly thing, but what the heck.

Now, I do have a daughter who fits perfectly into Petunia's dresses.

... except that I now have this guilty feeling that I'd be robbing Petunia of what has been rightfully hers all these years.

Besides, it's not like Promise is ever going to run out of clothes, thanks to Auntie Rose and her older cousins who keep sending in lovely little outfits she can parade in whether or not there's an occasion of any sort. So just for posterity, I took the pictures.

And just for posterity, I stared long enough to consider what it was really about...

And it wasn't about Promise or Petunia or the dresses at all.

I think it was more about the memories...

... There was Allan climbing up the roof when we played "Langit-Lupa" . He was the only one limber enough and old enough to pull such a ploy.

...and the ghost stories under the blanket on All-Souls Day.

...and the time we all sat on a wooden blackboard and slid down the staircase with a crash, over and over again, until somebody had to threaten us with Uncle Toto's walis ting-ting..

We had our own version of the Amazing Race back then, I forgot what we used to call it... but Allan stuck a clue into one of the ducks', uhm... behinds. I don't remember how we got it out of there, or if the grand prize was anything worth the chase, but I could never forget wondering how he managed to stick it in there in the first place...

We also used to play baseball with a tennis ball and a broken-off leg of a dinner chair. Somebody bought us an actual bat and an actual mitt and an actual baseball, but we just couldn't give up the, uhm... actual (hehehe) wooden leg... I remember mom and dad would drive us to Tita Auring's place near the beach where we played baseball all afternoon or until we lost our ball into one of the fishing ponds. I even remember horses that belonged to the Ortizes, galloping us by while we played. Now the ponds have been filled and the entire place has been developed into a posh residential subdivision. Auntie Rose even has a house there now. Our old playing field is lost forever to three-storey mansions and concrete driveways.

Ah, but the sunset!

The sunset is still there. It can still be ours again if we want it.

And Baybay. We still have that.

We used to play Ins in Baybay. My cousin Renan and my eldest brother Allan would be the team leaders, picking out the players. Needless to say I was always picked last. My cousin Annie was no doubt the faster runner. But none the less, it was always a fun game and it always ended with all of us racing into the waves to wash off the sand from our bodies before squeezing into our ride home.

And Daddy used to wake us up at three in the morning and drove us to Baybay to see meteor showers and, I think, Haley's Comet when it shot past our milky way (1987?)...He taught us how to spot the Big Dipper and Orion and Scorpio and Taurus. I remember one time when we went night swimming and he showed me planktons that glowed when the water was disturbed, and I truly believed daddy was giving me starlight in my hands.

Although I don't know what he'd think if he found out that it was when I pointed out Scorpio to Tope that he found his opportunity to, uhmm... seal the deal (hahaha!)!

Anyway, what I'm actually driving at, is that perhaps it's not Petunia's dresses that I wanted for Promise, but the kind of childhood that I had.


You know...

Playing in the rain...

The exhilaration about Ferris wheels and cotton candy...

Running in the middle of a rice field, heedless if the mud in her shoes or the grass on her face...

Being able to gaze up to the stars and know their names by heart...

Sincerely wishing on a falling star...

Waking up on her birthday and knowing the first gift will always be from her daddy...

Climbing a mango tree with her name on it...

Riding a carabao for the first time and screaming with delight...

Diving into a swimming hole without a swimsuit...

Sitting under a waterfall and shivering with happiness...

Learning how to ride a bike and the beautiful, beautiful freedom that comes with it...

Being able to hold a piglet by the tail the way my brother Sonny did...

And knowing what it feels like to be given starlight in her hands...

...

Haist...

That stuff...

...

But for now, I promised myself I would enjoy every moment! Every smile. Every spot of drool that comes with that smile. Every giggle. Every coo. Every ooh. Every aah. I will take my heart's fill of her because she will never be a baby again. And it's amazing how she keeps pulling us tighter together like the drawstrings in a pair of PJs.

I still can't believe we made something so beautiful...



P.S.
Needless to say, Petunia can keep her dresses after all... (wink-wink!) :)