Henrietta Hay's Column

Nostalgia: "a longing to go back to one's home, home town or homeland; a longing for something far away or long ago or for former happy circumstances."

We all feel nostalgic from time to time, but personally I have no desire to go back to my home town very often or, Heaven forbid, my childhood. Of course, I like to think about the people that I knew then and wonder where they are - realistically, whether they are - and it is pleasant occasionally to remember the way it felt being a kid in simpler times. But a longing to go back? No way.

All this lack of sentiment is brought on by a story in one of the Sunday papers about Raggedy Ann. I was much too busy playing baseball as a kid to worry much about dolls, but I did have a Raggedy Ann. She is one of the few dolls that I can discuss with today's children on equal terms, since their edition and the one I had once look just alike.

Raggedy is 75 years old this year and still looks just the way she did the day she was born. She has aged better than most of us. She is - as everyone in America surely knows - a stuffed doll with red yarn hair and a wide smile.

Barbie probably does not think much of her. After all, Raggedy is completely covered in a pinafore, has only one outfit and is not at all stylish. Her big black feet flop around and could never fit into Barbie's 5-inch stiletto heels. Her smile is warm and lacks Barbie's pouty little lips. I'll take Raggedy any day. That's nostalgia.

Raggedy Ann grew out of a book written by Johnny Gruelle in 1918 and kids are still reading his books. The first dolls were manufactured by hand by Gruelle and his family. Each of the early ones had a candy heart implanted in her. I know that for a fact. I have to confess that I was a skeptic even then and cut her open once to see if it was true. It was. My mother was not happy.

In my nostalgic moments I never can come up with stories as funny as those which other authors tell. I strongly suspect that they make them up, but I read one recently that surely nobody could have invented. Bailey White has a little book of essays called, "Mama makes up her mind." In one of them she tells of a group of ornithologists who had discovered a wild turkey nest and were camping in the woods protecting the mother bird from predators. At the same time the author, then six years old had a severe case of measles. She had a high fever and was not too much aware of what was going on.

On one particular night the birdmen knocked on the door and inquired about the little girl's illness - not her health, but her temperature. When Mama told them what it was, they trooped into the house with a cardboard box, pulled the little girl's covers down, patted her and said, "A hundred and two--can't miss if we tuck them up close and she lies still." The next morning she felt better and "when I pulled down the covers, there staring up at me with googly eyes and wide mouths, were sixteen fuzzy baby turkeys and the cracked chips of sixteen brown speckled eggs."

Turns out that the mother hen had been so disturbed by the protective measures that she abandoned the nest on the night the eggs were due to hatch and the ever practical ornithologists came up with the next best thing to an incubator. Now I ask you - could anybody make up a story like that?

Once in a while something happens which tosses you back into your youth without warning. I was having coffee one day with a woman whom I had just met. We got to talking about Denver in the "old days, and discovered that, in our childhoods, we both had often eaten at Bauer's. Then I said, "I don't suppose, by any outside chance, that you can remember eating their ---," "Deviled crabs," we both shouted together and reveled for a while in the past. It's a very small world.

Nostalgia is pleasant - if you don't get carried away by it.