When the better part of a Loblolly pine fell on my head in Grandmother's yard one August afternoon, my mother bought me my first doll. To ease the pain after visiting the emergency room, Mother offered a stop at Toys-R-Us. There I chose a handsome Boy Scout doll named Steve. I was not a boy scout, nor did I wish to become one. I didn't even know any Boy Scouts. All I knew was that they liked to go camping. Something else I did not wish to do. Sleeping under the stars, in the woods, with bugs, and snakes, and bears held no interest for me. What fascinated me about the Boy Scouts were their accessories: The ubiquitous Swiss Army knife and the endless assortment of colorful patches, insignia, and emblems. The tooled leather belt with the antique finish. The animal tracks bandana, with illustrations of common woodland footprints, the easy-to-take-along reference guide for Scouts who may need to know whether they are being pursued by a raccoon or a grizzly. The felt "Campaign Hat" with leather hatband and chinstrap. Like the tooled leather belt, which could accommodate a dizzying choice of buckles-the Flying Eagle buckle, the Arrow of Light buckle, the Boy Scout Fleur-de-lis buckle-the Campaign Hat was an accessory among accessories, which invited yet further accessorizing, in this case, with the "Universal Boy Scout Emblem Hat Pin."

At eight years old, I could not have understood Scouting founder Robert S.S. Baden-Powell's ideal of "muscular Christianity" that linked physical fitness and moral rectitude at the end of the nineteenth century. But as a confirmed sissy-boy, I understood that I was not, nor would I ever be, Boy Scout material. My interest was not in nourishing my spiritual and moral character through love of the out-of-doors and an earnest vigor in working with God. Rather, I loved to accessorize.

Sporting a swath the size of a dollar bill shaved from my scalp, and a dozen fresh, prickly-black stitches holding it together, I held Steve in my arms for the first time. Along with Steve, came several accessories: a "Scouting Booklet," badges, an "Official Scout Uniform," shoes, and a jaunty red neckerchief. But this would be only the beginning. Once I had secured Steve, he would need a tent, a sleeping bag, the "Steve Scout First-Aid Backpack," the "Steve Scout Campfire," and the "Steve Scout Snowshoes." This endless collection of accessories would find homes in what toymaker Kenner described as "adventure sets." The "Fire Fighter Mountain Medic" adventure set, with its thirty-six inch forest fire lookout tower of plastic logs would be perfect for scouting blazes under Grandmother's Sasanquas. The "Avalanche at Blizzard Ridge" adventure set, with its snow theme, might catch Santa's attention later, I reasoned, on my Christmas list. In preparation for a Steve Scout white Christmas, I would begin saving my weekly allowance toward an essential accessory for this snowy adventure set, the "Steve Scout Porta-Power Rescue Cycle."

In spite of the riches my allowance provided him, however, by Christmas it was clear that money had not bought Steve Scout's happiness. He sulked about the living room, sore with envy of my sister Darlene's brightly colored psychedelic 1971 Barbie Camper. And that was just the beginning of Steve Scout's melancholy. Steve was not only envious; he was lonely. But Ken was out of the question, as he spent all his free time with Darlene and "Happy Go Lightly Barbie," later known as Chemo Barbie after her unfortunate run-in with Mother's pinking shears. My brother Jim's GI Joe, with his thick, burly beard and AK47, was much too butch, sharing none of Steve Scout's interests. While Steve spent after school hours in our backyard tending my three-legged box turtle, Mr. Stubs, GI Joe was busy blowing up squirrel carcasses dropped by my brother's BB gun. Jim's angry troop of Planet of the Apes Gorillas was similarly unsuitable companions for Steve Scout.

When my lesbian Buddhist aunt arrived from San Francisco on Christmas Eve, I was certain that Steve's gloom would soon be lifted. Aunt Jean would bring an exciting new adventure set from the West Coast. It would be one we could not find at the Midtown Mall of Alapaha, Georgia, where the anchor stores were a Post Office at one end and a laundromat at the other. I was confident that Aunt Jean's Christmas gift would be as exotic as she was. And she was. That she was from California would have been enough, but, to a boy growing up in the rural Deep South, that she was both lesbian and Buddhist was intoxicating. What's more, Aunt Jean worked as a DJ, announcing song titles on the in-flight radio stations for several major airlines. Her voice was smooth, with a hint of smoke, washed clean of the Southern accent of her Georgia kin. Her dark hair and eyes, her sharp, square chin, these could have been my father's. But there the resemblance ended. Unlike her primitive country relations, whose fashion sense was dictated by the Sears catalogue, Aunt Jean was sophisticated, glamorous. In her rich, ginger-colored Ultrasuede shirtwaist dress and black knee-high boots, to me, she was like one of Charlie's Angels. From time to time, Aunt Jean sent great boxes packed with record samples. Each cache of forty-fives was so new that her lucky niece and nephews became privy to the latest hits long before they made the charts. Longer still before our jealous friends could hear them on our small-town pop radio station. Not only, according to Mother, had Aunt Jean burned her bra, but she and her girlfriend Barbara also burned incense, much to Mother's horror, in Grandmother's Wedgwood egg-cups while they chanted before a makeshift alter in the guest bedroom: "Ohm - Ma Nee - Pod May - Hummmmmm." A Southern Baptist of self-righteousness befitting Boy Scout founder Baden-Powell himself, my father embraced his little sister, if reluctantly, with Christian duty. He was visibly unnerved by, as Mother put it, Aunt Jean's "peculiar" interests, spending most of her visit grinding his teeth and clearing nothing from his throat whenever she spoke. "Uhn, uhn, uhn, uhn, uuuhn." At the same time, he welcomed his sister's return home as a chance to coax her to Christmas services at First Mount Zion Baptist Church. If he just could just get her in the door, maybe the Holy Spirit would lay a hand on her. Maybe she would give up girls and The Eight-Fold Path. Maybe she would cancel her return flight to Sodom. Mother was certain that Aunt Jean's influence would poison us all. She understood that California was peopled by nuts and fruitcakes, and as far as she was concerned, Aunt Jean-God bless her-was both. When Barbara leaned in to receive a peck on the cheek from Aunt Jean after the Christmas blessing, I watched beneath the table as Mother's nails dug deep into my father's thigh. Later, I heard her angry whisper in the kitchen: "I won't have my boys exposed to her and that Barbara making out at my dinner table." Whenever Aunt Jean came to visit, the air in our house was charged, and I eagerly drank in her electricity.

But my heart sank on Christmas morning when all Aunt Jean pulled from her tiny carry-on, her only piece of luggage, was a small, shrink-wrapped basket of dried apricots, with a gift tag addressed to "The Hall Family." My mouth was as long as the Mississippi. They weren't even chocolate-coated. Seeing my disappointment, Aunt Jean explained that Buddhists don't give Christmas gifts. Then she added quickly, "It won't be a Christmas gift, but you and I could go to the mall tomorrow." I was elated. Christmas gift or not, at the Toys-R-Us day-after-Christmas sale, Steve Scout's loneliness would finally come to an end.

The next morning, Aunt Jean borrowed my father's red VW Bug, and we raced to beat the crowds of post-holiday shoppers. When she offered, "Now you can choose one toy, anything-anything you want," I made a bee-line for Bob Scout. But when I laid his box on the counter, Aunt Jean hesitated. She seemed to be doing a quick calculation in her head. I thought of the paltry dried apricots. Maybe I had overshot. I could feel Steve's emptiness in my own stomach. "It's only $12.99," I pointed out. "You said anything." But Aunt Jean was not searching her wallet. She was making a different sort of reckoning, one I would not understand until much later. Aunt Jean recognized that toys like GI Joe were "action figures." Steve and Bob Scout were not. They were dolls. Like Barbie dolls and Ken dolls. Aunt Jean sensed that Steve and Bob's idea of "action" was gossiping about Ken and Chemo Barbie's clothes. With his red flocked hair and bulging muscles, "Sea Adventurer" GI Joe captained perilous ocean voyages. By contrast, Steve and Bob preferred sunbathing beside a makeshift swimming pool, a discarded flower pot saucer covered with scraps of blue plaid wallpaper glued with Mod Podge. Aunt Jean could also plainly see that Steve Scout was white and Bob Scout was black. Not only was her Deep South, white, sissy-boy nephew playing with dolls, but now he wanted a black doll. "Are you sure that's the one you want, Sweetie?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "I've already got Steve. I just need Bob so he'll have someone to camp with. I've got the forest fire observation tower all set up." Aunt Jean still looked uncertain. She tugged at her crocheted vest. "Well you get Bob, then," she said, "and let's put out some fires."

The house was quiet that afternoon as Steve showed Bob around the campsite, artfully staged under Grandmother's baby grand piano. The only voices in the house were theirs, from a backpack filled with prerecorded camp-talk, activated by a pull-string. "Let's make camp, here," Steve and Bob Scout repeated again and again. "I'll roll out the tent, and sleeping bags. You cook the fish."

Later that evening, I overheard more angry whispers in the kitchen. Afterwards, Aunt Jean told us, as she and Barbara quickly gathered their things, that their visit would have to be cut short. Mother followed with an announcement that my sister's spring break trip to visit Aunt Jean and Barbara in San Francisco was canceled. Soon after Christmas, Steve and Bob Scout were burned beyond recognition in a mysterious crash while joy-riding in Chemo Barbie's corvette. The only witness appeared to be GI Joe-and he wasn't talking.

There was nothing to do but grieve, something I was good at. Along with chatting by the campfire with Steve and Bob, my other favorite pastime was writing and conducting elaborate funeral rites for dead pets and neighborhood road-kill. The far corner of Grandmother's rose garden was packed tight with animal corpses. When no pets were available, I scoured the neighborhood on my bicycle, looking for flattened squirrels and the half-eaten remains of Scrub Jays. I composed loving obituaries and transformed surplus garden pavers into artfully Tempera-painted headstones. Having officiated at the memorial services of a dozen guinea pigs, two Easter chicks, a Scottish terrier, and assorted vermin, by the time Steve and Bob met their untimely end, I was expert at making final arrangements. From this experience I knew that Pringles cans make the best caskets, grey rainy afternoons the most solemn for a graveside remembrance. Only days after my mourning period began, a package arrived from California. A note from Aunt Jean told how sorry she was to hear the bad news. She had liked Steve and Bob very much. In her neighborhood in San Francisco, called the Castro, she said, there were lots of nice guys like Steve and Bob, and when I was older, maybe I could visit her and Aunt Barbara to see the Castro for myself.

Aunt Jean had also sent a gift, a giant pink flamingo marionette with long blue silken eyelashes sprinkled with gold glitter, a graceful neck swathed in a great neon-green feather boa. Instantly, my interest turned from scouting to puppetry arts. I would collect puppets. I would build a stage. I would perform-for birthday parties, for money. To bide my time while I waited for Jim Henson to call, begging me to join the invisible cast of puppeteers on The Muppet Show, I would learn to sew and make my own puppets. I would win the state championship in the arts and crafts division of 4H, demonstrating how to fashion puppets from old socks and scraps of felt. The judges would compliment my presentation skills. But what would impress the judges most about my puppets would be my artful-one called it "glamorous"-accessorizing.