"Veronika," Pippa said, "Billy said someone was naughty and damaged something at the house next door."
"I wasn’t the one who did it," she said, "but it made me worry."
"What were you worried about, Pippa?" Veronika asked.
"I was wondering," the smaller doll replied, "how you can tell when you’re doing something wrong. I don’t want to be naughty by accident."
Veronika wondered for a very quick moment if Pippa might want to be naughty on purpose, but then she figured out that what Pippa meant was that she might do something wrong because she didn’t know it was wrong.
"Why don’t you tell me," Veronika suggested, "what happened next door, so I know how to explain it."
"Maybe you can see it from the window," Pippa suggested. "You know the 'for sale' sign they put up a few days ago?"
Veronika remembered. The neighbors had just finished repairing their front porch, and when it was done, the sign appeared. She nodded to let Pippa know that she was aware of the sign.
"We’ll," Pippa said, "when we went out of the house this morning, it was standing there in the front yard, looking the way it always did."
"Then," Pippa explained, "when we came back, the sign had been painted all over. You couldn’t read what it said anymore."
Pippa climbed up onto the windowsill and pointed down to where the sign was. Veronika joined her at the window and looked. Sure enough, the "For Sale" sign in front of the house had been painted over so you couldn't read it anymore.
Veronika thought for a moment. It made no sense for the people next door to have done it. They needed to sell their home, because they were moving to another state. They wanted to buy a new home there. They needed people to be able to read the sign. Whoever did it must not have had permission to do it, so it was wrong to do, because it belonged to the the company that was trying to sell the house for the human people who lived there, and it was in the yard belonging to the people who needed to move.
"Billy was right," Veronika told Pippa. It's a bad thing to damage something on purpose that belongs to someone else."
"Sometimes," Veronika continued, as the two dolls sat down again, "we can cause damage to something by accident, and if that happens, we should try to fix it, or undo it, or pay for a new one, but this isn't the kind of thing that is damaged by accident. This was done on purpose. That's why Billy said it was naughty."
"Who did it?" Pippa wanted to know.
"Well," Veronika began thoughtfully, "it had to have been another human person. A doll would have had a hard time doing it. You see, that kind of painting is done with a spray can of paint. It's like the can of cooking spray Jolena uses, only with paint inside instead of cooking oil. She has to use two hands to make the spray work, and a doll couldn't climb up there and paint the whole thing without using their hands."
"A human person was naughty?" Pippa asked, astonished. All the human people she knew seemed to know what was right to do. Of course, she didn't know that many human people, just the ones she lived with, their family members who came to visit, people who came and did work for them, Pauly's family and the real children who came to the door for trick-or-treat with their parents.
"Almost all human people are naughty some time or other," Veronika replied. "You see, it's easier for dolls to want to be good because we're made to teach human children about caring for others. It's caring for others that makes human children want to do what's right."
"I guess," Pippa suggested, "that means it's very important for dolls to know how not to be naughty."
Veronika agreed. "So what do you already know about how not to be naughty?" she asked.
Pippa thought for a moment. "Well, you said it's wrong to damage something that belongs to someone else, unless it's an accident, and then you should try to undo the damage if you can, or buy them a new one, but there are other ways to be naughty, aren't there?"
Veronika agreed again. "There are lots of ways you can do something you shouldn't," she said.
"So how will I know?" Pippa asked.
"There are lots of other things that we just know are wrong to do," Veronika agreed, "like taking something that belongs to someone else, even to borrow without asking, or saying something that isn't true, but there's a rule I like to follow if it isn't one of those things."
Pippa listened closely, because she had a feeling this was very important.
"If I want to do something," Veronika explained, "but I don't know if it's OK, I ask myself who else is affected by what I do. Will anyone be hurt by it, and that includes hurt feelings."
"Then," Veronika went on, "I ask myself how I would feel if I were this doll and someone did this thing. Would I be upset or hurt or angry about it? I always try to treat other dolls the way I want other dolls to treat me."
Pippa thought about this for a bit. She sort of tried it on for size. She thought about how it would work. "You know," she said, "that makes sense. We have lots of rules at school, and when I think about each one of them, I can see that if you break that rule, someone can be hurt or upset or angry about it, even if it weren't a rule. Sometimes if you break the rule you could be the one hurt, but that would upset your friends and the teachers."
Then she had another thought. "Whoever damaged the sign," she said, "must be a very bad person!"
Veronika shook her head sadly. "No," she said. "Whoever damaged the sign must not ever have learned how to be kind and to respect what belongs to others. They must be very unhappy inside. It looks like an angry thing to me. It's very sad to be angry and not know what to do about those feelings."
Pippa thought about this. "Maybe they never had any dolls to teach them," she suggested with a sigh.
Veronika climbed back up to the windowsill to look out at the damaged sign, with Pippa right behind her. "I think," Veronika told the younger doll, "we should tell The Writer about the sign. Maybe the neighbors don't know. They will need to get a new sign, if they want to sell their house."
"Let's go do it now," Pippa exclaimed. She wanted to do something to help. She knew it would make her feel better.
When something bad happens, it always makes us feel better if we can do something about it.
Veronika: Götz Classic Kidz Vroni
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
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