Sugar Trolls

    And now for a much lighter memory of the day for day 154 of 2015! On one of the many nights when the girls, still about grade school age, and I were eating dinner at a fast food restaurant somewhere in town, I mentioned something about troll dolls. Well, troll dolls were totally unfamiliar to Sarah and Amanda! I had not realized before this void in their lives. I described troll dolls to them - naked beings with wild, standing-on-end hair – I said I always preferred the ones without the jewels in their navels and did not care for the fancy outfits the trolls came out with later. I also said that there are probably troll dolls for a quarter in the toy machines near the door of restaurants next to the gumball dispensers.

     But when we checked out the dispensers at the door of the place we were at, there were no trolls.

     It might have been that very night there was open house at the school, because trolls were very much on my mind and I remember telling one of the girls' teachers that my kids did not know troll dolls, and how sad was that? And the teacher responded she did not know what I was talking about either!

     The toy section of the grocery store yielded no trolls, and then a trip to the toy store itself proved fruitless also. How was I going to find troll dolls to show to Sarah and Amanda? – this was an era just before the internet had the entire history of the world in words, pictures, and any kind of bias you can imagine right in the palm of one's hand. There were no troll dolls in my possession at that time from my youth – who would have thought it was so critical to hang on to one or two of them?

     After that I determined that flea markets or shops with old stuff for sale would have troll dolls, and I was going to buy them and keep collecting them so I could give them to teachers. Sarah and Amanda would know trolls. And we managed to get a few!

      We had them in all sizes – some are gathered right now in Amanda's doll house which is still here. Some hang from our Christmas tree every year – with elf clothes or reindeer antlers. One was in the insulation of our old stove when we moved it out of the house – looking like it was suspended in mid-air – kind of reminding me of the movie Matrix – how the troll got there is a story for another time. I don't recall ever actually giving any trolls to the girls' teachers after all – and so the collection just grew at the house.

     Over time, some of the trolls have lost their hair, and I have not had the heart to get rid of them. What to do with a hairless troll? Well, the hairless look makes a statement in itself and certainly individualizes the troll. But even more individualizing is to take my long gray hairs that seem to be all over the place anyway and glue them to the head of a troll – you won't be finding any of those trolls in a gumball machine or flea market – only at Sugar's house.

154 20150603 Sugar Trolls