Singing the praises of Jane Doe ~ June 13, 1991

David Heiller

This is a true story about babysitting. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Babysitters. They come in all shapes, sizes, sexes, ages, and abilities, and we’ve run the gamut over the past eight years.

Some have been good with the kids and do some of the “extras” too, like picking up the house and keeping the dishes washed. Others have been good housekeepers but chained the kids to their bedposts. Then there are those who don’t even wipe the table and get chained to the bedposts themselves by the kids after falling for that fatal line: “Mommy and Daddy let us do this to them all the time.”

We’ve had some very good babysitters, including Jane Doe, who we have hired for the summer.

Babysitters... the good ones make
life so good, and the great ones fill us
with gratitude, even decades later.

Jane Doe watches Noah and Mollie one day a week, while Cindy and I put together this newspaper. Jane started last week. She had watched them before at night, but never for a whole day.

When we came home that first evening, Mollie raced down to greet us. I asked how things had gone. She said fine. Jane had played with them, had walked with them to the culvert to see whether Noah’s turtle egg had hatched yet, had fed them a good lunch and supper, had gotten them washed and brushed and “jammied” and up to bed, after reading a story (of course).

I noticed that the living room seemed brighter somehow. I looked closely at the windows, then stepped up to one and peered closely. “Did Jane clean the windows?” I asked with some disbelief in my voice. “Yes, and I helped,” Mollie said with a proud tone. That explained why all the paper towels were gone.

I looked at the carpet. It was spotless. “Did she vacuum too?” I said in that same tone. “Yes, and she swept and shook the rugs too, “ Mollie answered in a voice just a tad too righteous, one that said maybe I should have been the one who had swept and shook the rugs and vacuumed and washed windows.

(We are not slobs, and I really had been meaning to wash the windows at least, but this time of year, with the garden and biking and visiting friends and a dozen other excuses tugging, the house does get a bit shaggy.)

I walked through the house in a trance. Jane had cleared off the dining room table, a job that normally takes a front-end loader. She had washed dishes and baked cookies. She had picked ticks off the dogs and cleaned the outside of the refrigerator. She had taken the clothes off the line and folded them.

Jane had even cleaned the pantry. This is not a typo: SHE HAD CLEANED THE PANTRY, a place where fruit jars and paper plates and plastic bags and cookie tins and graham cracker boxes all get stacked on top of one another until they fall over and you pick them up and shove them back on the shelves again Now totally shocked, I turned on the switch to the water pump. It kicked in, then stopped, like a pump is supposed to. But it was unusual, because the pump has been waterlogged for a few weeks, and it usually doesn’t stop running until I hit the switch. I walked outside to the basement door and peered inside, half expecting to see a new pump which Jane had installed. Nope, no new pump. But somehow Jane had gotten the old one working. I figure she shamed it into submission. My mother used to get me to chop ice off the porch that way when I would watch football games on TV. She’d just grab the ice spud and start chopping, and soon I’d feel so guilty that I’d take it from her and finish the job. That’s what Jane had done to the pump.

I glanced out to the fields, half expecting to see a new pole barn which Jane had erected, and maybe a couple acres fenced in to boot, with some young stock and a 50-cow herd of Holsteins grazing on the hay bales which she had also baled, after clearing out the willows and hazel brush that have taken over the back 40.

Cindy was equally impressed. In fact, when she returned from Jane’s house and had a look for herself, she called Jane up and thanked her again.

Maybe this was all a fluke, like a guy who hits a home run in his first at bat in the major leagues, and then never hits another. But I don’t think so. We may have another Kirby Puckett on our hands here. If baseball were babysitting, this kid would be rich.

But hey, you parents: don’t get any ideas about spiriting Jane Doe for your own two kids and unkempt home. Like I said, her name has been changed to protect the innocent, and the parents who hire her. The Twins would never trade Kirby Puckett, would they?

Another chapter on growing up ~ June 24, 1993

David Heiller

It’s funny how children can grow up and you don’t even notice it. It’s like leaving your bare garden for two weeks in early June and coming home to see everything sprouted and growing like crazy.

That’s what we did last week. We came home and saw a garden full of young plants, and on the east side of the house, the yellow irises were in full bloom. Like Emily.

That’s how I felt after our family took a vaca­tion to Texas. We had been there six years earlier, and that was the last time I had really seen my niece, Emily.

Malika and Emily

Oh sure, we saw her briefly a time or two since then. We had seen pictures at Christmas, and heard tidbits in letters and from Mom, who keeps tabs on her grandchildren like good grandmothers do.

But we didn’t see Emily grow up, which is the way things go in this modem world of ours, where people move far away in search of jobs and security and happiness.

Six years ago in Texas, when Emily was 12, she took our daughter Malika under her wing. She shared her room, and watched out for her, and bought her a necklace and bracelet for a going-away present, and generally had the patience of Job, which she needed for that two ­year-old.

She impressed the heck out of Cindy and me. I even wrote a column about it, because she had brought back some fond memories of me singing her songs and reading her books and watching her grow up. That was when she was about eight, my daughter’s age now, before she had moved away.

I hope Mollie turns out like her, I thought six years ago.

I still think that, because we found almost the same Emily in Texas last week. She shared her room without a complaint. She bought Mollie a pencil pouch and barrette for her birthday.

Emily even took Mollie to the day camp where she works as a counselor. Mollie had a grand time, played all day, and made some new friends. It was the highlight of her vacation. Maybe it was Emily’s too.

But something was also different about Emily. I really discovered it when I took her to a deli on our last night. We had gone there six years ago, so it was a reunion of sorts.

The last time at the deli, we made small talk, the way you talk to a 12-year-old. This time though, we really talked. She shared her dreams, talked about her boyfriend, told me other per­sonal joys and sorrows. I suddenly realized that I was talking to a different Emily, a grown up one.

Yes, she’s got a lot more growing up to do. Everyone can remember how they owned the world at age 18. But here’s one kid that is going to make it.

My sister had told me how lucky she was to have a daughter like Emily. I didn’t tell Emily that. Hopefully she knows it.

This is a story that hasn’t ended yet. Six years from now maybe I’ll add another chapter. I hope it has a happy ending. I think that it will.

Under the sun and stars ~ December 3, 1992

David Heiller

When the sun and stars finally showed up last weekend, people stretched and smiled and went for walks under blue and sparkly skies. Eight straight days of clouds make you appreciate a bright November day and night a great deal.

I had to work on Friday, the first sunny day. When I got home at 3 p.m., my niece, Sarah, put her hands on her hips and said, “You’re late.” She had the deadly tone of a married woman.

A little Sarah loving.

Then she added, “Let’s go for a walk,” and I was saved, because there’s nothing that heals a nine-year-old’s feelings better than a walk down the road. Yes, nothing better than a walk with a niece you see about twice a year under a sun that you see about twice a month.

I cut up an apple as we walked, a golden delicious that Mom had brought with her. Some people bring a bottle of wine or a bag of pastries when they go calling. In Morocco, you bring a cone of sugar. Mom brings apples, which is good, because a walk wouldn’t be a walk without an apple to eat along the way.

So we ate our apple and waved to our neighbors, Rosie and Dorothy. Their two dogs came out to bark a greeting, and our dog nosed up to them for a quick hello.

I pointed out Binti’s grave in the field. “I planted flowers there but you can’t see them now,” I said. Sarah said she had been going to tease me about Binti, at her brother’s insistence. But the sunshine and the fact that she was holding my hand must have changed her mind. That made me smile.

David with one of our guinea pigs,
Olga de Polga, in his pocket.

And it led to Noah’s raising of a philosophical question: “What five animals would you bring back to life if you could bring five animals back to life?” I ticked four off quickly: Binti and two cats and a three-legged dog from my childhood. Noah rounded off the list with a guinea pig that died last summer.

That got me asking about what five PEOPLE you would bring back to life. I spoke quickly: two grandmas, my dad, and Lynette, my sister. “Lynette first,” I added before I could think.

Noah and Sarah couldn’t add to the list. Oh, to be nine again.

I looked at Sarah and Noah walking together. They are only thirteen days apart in age. Sarah has long dark hair and alabaster skin covered with freckles. She shows her mother’s Scottish blood. Noah is all blond and German and Norwegian.

I glossed over that. I saw how they smiled the same way, and for a second I wished that they were twins.

We passed and waved at Couillards, who were splitting a big pile of wood. Everybody was out enjoying the sunny afternoon. Even the animals. We discovered all kinds of tracks in the snow along the road: rabbit, squirrel, mouse, even a bird that Noah said was an owl. My guess was a grouse, but an owl sounded better, so I let that pass.

We turned into a field that held the remnants of a house and a chicken coop. Sarah crawled into the coop and retrieved a plastic egg. She pried up a rusty pail and an enamel pot with the bottom rusted out. She wanted to keep them.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked sternly.

Sarah visiting with Queen Ida.

“Put flowers in them,” she said. She had given the one answer that would make me happy, and she knew it. I carried them home for her.

We returned with the sun glowing long and red on the winter horizon. I pointed out the moon, a pale thumbnail setting high in the west. Sarah couldn’t believe that little sliver was the moon. She asked if people could see it by her house in Cottage Grove. I said yes, and that her mom and dad were probably looking at it right now and thinking of her. She smiled at that.

When we got home, Sarah showed Grandma Heiller her treasures. I thought Mom would roll her eyes and sigh and say something like I had said, what most parents would have said.

But grandmas don’t say those things. She admired them and said, “Well, look at that. Isn’t that something?” She told us that the egg was probably placed in the coop to get the chickens to lay more. The long skinny pail had been used for milk, she said. Why yes, she had carried one like that when she was a kid.

Later, after supper was eaten and the kids were in pajamas, I carried Sarah and Mollie outside. I guess it was the last leg of our walk, to see the clear Thanksgiving heavens. The winter sky never disappoints. We were smothered with stars.

“There’s Orion,” I said, gesturing to the east as best I could, holding a kid on each arm.

“And there’s the seven sisters,” Sarah added, pointing straight up. Seven sisters? She had me on that one.

Sarah left the next morning. She forgot her milk pail and rusted pot. My guess is that she won’t even miss them. Next spring I’ll plant flowers in them for her, to help me remember a sunny walk and starry, starry night.