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When I was five, my mother made for me the most gorgeous, wonderful wardrobe for a doll that any doll has ever had. Barbie, eat your heart out. This doll, Caroline, was about two feet high, and my mother bought a trunk for her clothes, the kind of trunk people must have taken on steamers and trains, that opened up to have a rod to hang clothes from and drawers. My doll had a suit trimmed in fur and an evening dress with a green velvet bodice and a spangled skirt. No one ever had such a doll. I still love to think of her skillful fingers, late at night, sewing the clothes out of scraps (we were perennially poor, and in that time, in 1947, poorer than usual, living in a crummy apartment in a new, bleak town, where we were all lonely for the home we'd left behind).

Amazingly, the message was not that women should be dolls, or that clothes were all and everything--what I learned from that doll was that miracles of beauty and imagination can happen. I learned that craft and dreams can create a wonder that money can't buy. And of course, that my mother loved me that much.