Department Of OK Right Now Everybody Drop What You’re Doing…
No; wait – first, finish reading my blog.
Then listen to this NYTimes The Interview podcast (or read the transcript) to learn the difference between bonding social capital and bridging social capital, and how joining a bowling league – or a running club, or hosting a regular games night – can save democracy…or just make us all a little less lonely and isolated…which we probably are. Even if we think we are not.
(And you know all the people – and by people moiself means Single Angry Men® – who call themselves Incels or join the Proud Boys and other extremist groups? They do this in part because they’re lonely.)
“The author of ‘Bowling Alone’ warned us about social isolation
and its effect on democracy a quarter century ago. Things have only gotten worse.”
(intro to “Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely”; The Interview )
In the dialogue between Putnam and the host there is an intriguingly pertinent question:
“Are we isolated because we are politically estranged,
or are we politically estranged because we are isolated?”
* * *
Department Of Adventures In Babysitting
I’m not sure what sparked the memory which sparked the ensuing stories in this department. [1] I think it was a convoluted chain, one that in this case began when I read an article about a climber/snowboarder who fell into the crater at Mount Saint Helens. Dude actually survived the 1200-foot fall, but died when he fell again as he was trying to climb out of the crater. Moiself was thinking about the poor guy, alone, in the cold….
Dateline: A Friday afternoon, early June, some twenty five years ago. KH and JJ, two eleven-year-old girls, lived in our cul-de-sac and were best buds. I had used their child watching services during the previous summer, paying them to play with my kids, at my home, three days a week for several hours, while I was at home working on whatever writing I was working on at the time. [2]
On that afternoon I got a call from KH, who proudly announced that she and JJ had, just that very morning, passed the final test in the Baby Sitter Certification training class they’d been taking. “We were wondering,” KH said, “if maybe you and MH would like to go out and have a date night tonight – maybe to the movies – and we could babysit for you?”
Although we hadn’t made any such plans, of course, moiself had to say yes. “This is amazing,” I told MH (and anyone I knew who would listen, for three weeks afterward). “Babysitters who call *you!*
I’d actually intended to look for a sitter for Saturday night so that MH and I could go to the movies; thus, we ended up using KH’s and JJ’s two nights in a row. On Friday we saw Titanic (I trust no description is necessary). On Saturday we saw, The Ice Storm, the Ang Lee-directed film wherein a winter storm is a metaphor for two upper-class Connecticut couples who use drugs and adultery as an escape from their bleak, dysfunctional, lives in the socially turbulent 1970s and whose children, while seemingly contemptuous of their parents, reflexively begin to mimic them. Not exactly the Heartwarming Family Drama ® of the year. [3]
After leaving the theater on Saturday evening, I told MH, “I never want to see a movie involving cold, and water, ever again. No cold in any form; no cold water, no snow; no ice; no ice water….”
Department Of Adventures In Babysitting, The Prequel
Way back when, like many teens and preteens (mostly the female ones), I made spending money by babysitting. I had a few regular gigs: the most frequent one was for the two little boys of a young married couple who lived two houses down the street from my family. I babysat for them once or twice a month, then it began to be a regular gig, as in every Friday night and sometimes Saturday night as well. This happened after the wife, whom I’d deemed the first time I saw her as she-married-way-too-young, [4] had apparently begun to feel that she indeed had married too young and had missed out on…certain rites of passage. She asked her husband to leave their house – which he did, with grace and patience, hoping she’d come back to him after she’d gone through her “phase” – and started dating on a regular basis.
I was thirteen, and really didn’t understand such things. All I knew is that that that was one of my favorite gigs: the boys were adorable, sweet, well-mannered, and amazingly clean (the mom was quite the clean freak, and bathed them every night, right before I arrived, so that they would be ready for bedtime). And just as my parents began to wonder aloud about the frequency and length of my sitting jobs with that family (I often did not get home until after 1 am), the husband came over to our house one evening to explain the situation to my parents. It was a move I found at once strange and unnecessary, yet also somehow….gentlemanly?
Most babysitting gigs came out of referrals from established gigs, or recommendations via my older sister and friends who also babysat, and who would pass along my name when they were unavailable for a certain jobs.
Three such referral jobs stand out in my babysitting career.
The first involved a family of five children. I never would have agreed to watch five children as the only sitter; frankly, I was lied to, by omission, when the father contacted me over the phone and I asked him about the gig’s parameters and rate of payment.
And the kids were horrible. Just awful. Ranging in age from about four to ten – yeah, those breeders barely took a breather between pumping out insolent brats – they fought amongst themselves, made a mess of the house, and mocked me when I tried to enforce the rules their parents had written down for the babysitter. After an hour and a half of that shit I did something I’d never had to do before when babysitting: I called the emergency phone number the parents had left me.
No words were minced as moiself told the parents about their children’s behavior. As I was on the phone, I saw by the expression on the oldest child’s face that she feared she and her sisters and brothers were going to be grounded for life. Yep, I’d called her bluff. When I’d warned her that I would call her parents unless she could help me corral her younger siblings, she’d replied, “Ha! Yeah, so what? I know you won’t!”
I sat sulking in the father’s car as he drove me home, counting my measly $1.50 for just over two hours (I thought I should have been paid for the hours agreed upon – and double, for the number of kids. But at that point I just wanted to get away from all of them, and didn’t argue about it).
The second memorable referral gig was actually three gigs. The referral came from another babysitter who lived right across the street from the four-year-old boy I came to think of as That Weird Kid Up The Block. On my first night as his sitter TWKUTB was described to me, by his parents, as “quite intelligent and very precocious.” While his parents were commenting to me re their son’s brilliance TWKUTB was arranging letters on one of those magnetized alphabet screens. His father proudly noted that, although TWTKUTB was only four years old, he was already composing stories on the board and writing complete sentences. “Show her,” the dad said to TWKUTB. The boy raised the magnetic board and pointed at the two “words” he had formed with five magnetized letters. “Pan Am!” TWKUTB said. He tapped his chubby fingers on the board for emphasis. “Pam Am!”
I was somewhat confused and just nodded, until I realized a response was expected of me. “Oh…uh…as in…air travel?” And the father confirmed that yes, the name of that (now defunct) airline was what his genius son had written. TWKUTB kept repeating “Pan Am,” insistently tapping the alphabet board in a way that made me realize that my reaction had unintentionally indicated to TWKUTB that I was not as impressed as he thought I should be.
After TWKUTB’s parents had left for their evening, it was just like any other night with any other less-than-gifted, entitled, grumpy, annoying child. I tried to entertain TWKUTB but he’d seemingly taken a dislike to me, and so I gave up and read my own book/did homework until his bedtime. It wasn’t the best babysitting experience, but his parents threw in an extra buck when they paid me, so I agreed to another gig.
On my third (and last) night babysitting TWKUTB, he was the one who answered when I rang the doorbell. TWKUTB peered at me through the screen door and snarled, “Oh, it’s *you* again.” His mother, two steps behind him, tried to hide her mortification…and later paid me double the hourly rate for what most parents offered at the time. [5] But it wasn’t enough to earn more of my time – I’d already decided that no compensation was adequate for a mere mortal having to abide her gifted spawn.
I’ve often thought back to how incredibly underpaid I was as a sitter (the going rates at the time were something like fifty cents – yep, $.50 – an hour, a dollar an hour after midnight). On the other hand….
On the other hand, after the kid(s) bedtime I got paid for being there and doing my homework… or after finishing the homework and being bored, I was essentially paid for watching TV and/or looking at the reading materials that the parents had in the house. It was amazing, what people would leave out on their coffee tables, end tables, etc.
Which leads me to Memorable Gig #3.
It started out like another other referral gig from someone-else-who-knew-someone-else: I got a ride, from a stranger – usually the dad, sometimes the mom – to whom I’d spoken on the phone, to their house. Today, in 2024, that’s an arrangement I can’t imagine the parents of a babysitter agreeing to.
But this is now and that was then, and then, after I’d put Gig# 3’s two children to sleep sans incident, I realized I’d neglected to bring my homework or any reading materials of my own. A quick check of the channels revealed that there was nothing on TV I wanted to watch. I sat in an armchair in the living room, harumping with anticipatory boredom, until I espied a large pile of magazines on the armchair’s side table. There was one of those “housewife” periodicals — BORING – atop the pile.
Underneath that magazine was another magazine, which – I can’t exactly remember the cover, but it had drawings on it that indicated to me that it was going to be some kind of comic book. Thinking I was picking up a cousin of MAD Magazine, I began turning through that pages, only to discover it was…gulp…my first ever glimpse of pornography. [6] I mean, way beyond erotica – that stuff was crass.
I cringed, gingerly slipped that magazine under the bottom of the pile, and looked for something else. Nope; it was porno after porno after porno, with a few of the smut rags pathetically and ineffectively “hidden” between months-old copies of Family Circle. I snorted and tossed the magazines across the room…then realized I was going to have to cover my tracks so the parents wouldn’t think I was snooping. I picked up the magazines and tried to arrange them on the table as I’d found them.
I was totally creeped out; I refused to sit back down in that chair, or on any of the furniture, and looked around the house with an increasing sense of dread, not wanting to touch any of the surfaces. My paranolia was problematic as I really had to pee, but *no way* was I going to use their bathroom. Fortunately, the couple soon returned home. The sound of the front door opening woke up their son, who called out from his room. The mother went to comfort her boy, first paying me for the evening, and the father drove me home. I remember scooting as close as possible to the car’s passenger side door; instead of making my customary chitchat with a babysitting parent about how their evening had been, I was silent, save for monosyllabic yes or no grunts in response to his attempts to make small talk. All I was thinking was, DON’T EVEN LOOK AT ME YOU PERVERT. I practically left skid marks jumping out of his car when it pulled into my driveway.
Never told my parents about it; never accepted a babysitting job for that family again.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [7]
* * *
Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I love it when I realize that moiself never, ever again has to babysit for strangers in order to earn money to go to the movies with my friends.
* * *
May you pay your babysitters (if you have them) well;
May you join (or form) something like a bowling/social league;
May you not develop a loathing for cold water movies;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I should have a rubber stamp with that phrase on it…or, a tattoo. The stamp might date me (at least, the reference does).
[2] including what would become The Mighty Quinn.
[3] That year, or any year.
[4] As in, the first time I met her, I assumed she was her husband’s younger sister or other relative, and not his wife.
[5] I later found out, from their former sitter who’d referred them to me, that the parents were having problems – surprise! – finding a sitter who would sit for them more than twice.
[6] I’d seen some of the neighbor boy’s girlie magazines. This stuff made Playboy look like Ladies Home Journal.
[7] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
