March already, and no stories for February!

Here's one that Grandma's been remembering.

Bunky Bean

An Enid McCaffery Ritter story, as told to Erica Ritter

Bunky Bean

When I was a girl, I was forever throwing my dolls around and breaking them. I played with my dolls long after everyone else was tired of them. My brothers decided to make me an “indestructible doll" out of concrete. It was shaped roughly like this:
. . . . . .___
. . . . ./ ó ò \
. . . . ||. o .||
. . ._-“'. .o. .'”-_
. .//. . . . . . . . .\\
. .|| . . . .o. . . . ||
. .|| . . . .o. . . . ||
. .||___________||

Someone with a good imagination might have said it was a baby doll in a baby dress. Someone else might have described it as a lump with a smaller lump for a head. The boys made the eyes, nose, mouth, and buttons by pressing dried beans into the concrete.

My mother said the beans would fall out, and of course they did. But by that time the name, “Bunky Bean,” had stuck. I was delighted with him.

Mother never did like Bunky Bean. She especially didn’t like it when I would throw him down the stairs. ("Bunky" was for the noise he made bouncing down on his head.) Mother said it "agitated her nerves."

It didn’t bother her nerves at all, later on, when I tap-danced on the stairs. But that was a different story. I only came dancing down the stairs when Florence was already playing the piano. I suppose, since Mother was in a dance band, she had more sympathy for music and dancing even when she was trying to rest up after a late night.

Most of the time, Mother wanted quiet. I don’t know how she expected it to happen in a two-family house, full of six of her own kids, but she wanted quiet nonetheless. As the youngest, I didn’t get much of her patience or energy when I wanted to play my games.

One day Bunk Bean disappeared. Mother said I had lost him. I suspected she had "lost" him herself. I never did find him, despite looking in all the places where he had been "lost" before (such as on top of a trunk in a storage room, last time Mother was cleaning).

My brothers took pity on me, and started making me another Bunky Bean. After they shaped him, they set him in an empty watering-trough to dry.

Then someone ran fresh water into the trough.

The stream of water poured directly onto the wet concrete “doll,” and spattered him everywhere. The boys had to spend a long time cleaning out the trough so the cattle wouldn’t get sick from drinking the concrete mix.

They never did try to make another one, so that was the end of Bunky Bean.

...

(My ASCII art is based on a little pencil sketch on a post-it note. Grandma drew it for the neighbor Jean, to illustrate this story. Then she put it down in the kitchen. When she finds it, as often as not she tells the story again, and then puts it down again in nearly the same place. When I've heard any given story enough times, I type it up. Perhaps, when I'm done refining this version, I will quietly file the little post-it note among the other things Grandma is allowed to forget.)

....

Now, of course, both Grandma and I can see her mother's point. "Bunky-bunky-bunk" must have sounded awfully sumilar to the sound a young child's skull and shoes would make in tumbling down the stairs, (guaranteed to agitate any mother's nerves). And the concrete lump must have put some hefty dings into the hardwood floors. Enid like everyone else in the family was proud of the smooth, elegant floors her father had installed in the house, but that didn't stop her from missing Bunky at the time or after.