apple!

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When I was a teenager I babysat on Saturday nights. The mom of three boys across the street hired me for around $1.50 an hour. They were good boys who played hard and fell immediately to sleep when I tucked them in bed. The oldest boy was busted up badly when hit by a car while riding his bike on our quiet street one day, but not on my babysitting watch, thank God. The image of his mother running down the street with terror freezing her face, toward him lying on the pavement next to his curled bicycle is a permanent negative image in my mind. Thankfully he recovered fully from all those broken limbs. Oh, cherished little ones we entrust to babysitters! It's almost too frightening to think of it. How fragile, and how life changing a minute can be. Such responsibility.

One mother I babysat for managed to get me to watch her two energetic kids, plus feed a third - a baby in a high chair - and do the ironing for that amount. I think I only worked for her once. The money wasn't much, but it gave me a small amount of cash for a movie or a vanilla phosphate at the drug store (otherwise I raided my mom's wallet - brazen!). There was something else I hoped for at the houses where I watched kids. The parents were always nice and said what was in the cupboards and fridge was mine. (You might know by now that I love food.) Oh I remember babysitting my nephews Todd and Eric once, after my sister Nancy had made fried rosemary chicken for their dinner. She made enough for me, and I can still taste the bliss on my tongue. Usually I wasn't quite that fortunate, but the one snack I did hope for was a good apple. You see, my dad was as frugal as they came. This meant that he bought boxes of overripe fruit from under the counter at Horrock's, our local produce market. They'd put apples under there that were starting to soften and bruise, and they were cheap. Dad would put them in the fridge's crisper drawer (hopeful!), and within a few days the whole fridge started smelling like fermenting apples. This was my life. Me. A lover of a good apple, doomed to smell bad ones and never eat them. Except when I went to babysit. I might get paid eight bucks for the night, but if a good, crunchy, fresh apple was given as a bonus, I felt I was very well compensated. That frugal father of mine, bless him, had plenty of cash in the bank to loan us when we needed a down payment for a house - I'm grateful! But I just wanted a good apple.

By the way, I just made the shift from a PC to a MacBook Pro. Fresh!

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