My parents usually went off on a vacation once or twice a year
without the kids. They would go to Yellowstone, or Catalina, Europe,
Mexico, or Tahiti. If you have six kids it is hard to shoot off to
Yellowstone to go snowmobiling for a week because you need to find
someone to watch six hellions. We were a particularly wild bunch
because we so rarely had structure that when structure was imposed we
tended to balk a little. A lot-tle actually. This generally meant
that we would only have a baby sitter one time and a new sucker would
have to be tracked down for the next time. This time the sucker was
my mom's cousin who was to watch us for three days while my parents
were gone. She had two little girls and had recently remarried. Her
first husband had been a lifeguard and model of some sort, so she had
decided on this go 'round to pick some one just the opposite which
meant a nerdy little worm of a man. He was a officious, bespectacled,
balding, unemployed aspiring screenwriter. He was also one of those
type of people that even though they are unsuccessful assume they are
both more talented and smarter than anyone else and are therefore
condescending and patronizing to everyone. The babysitting was
beneath them, of course, but they were desperately broke and had to
have the money. They were so broke that before he took us to school
one morning he was carefully packing snow around his license plate so
cops couldn't see it was out of date. The week started off okay even
though our surrogate parents were quite a bit different than our
regular ones. The first thing I noticed was that my cousins husband
was always at home 'writing', which involved a lot more playing
'Othello' on the computer than you would think a unemployed writer
trying to make his break would be required to play. He did show me
how to play so that was cool. He also let me read his script idea
which at ten years old, I thought sounded stupid but he told me that
was because I didn't understand the screen writing format. Could be,
but I remember thinking that this guy could not write dialog very
well. My mom's cousin was a quite different maternal figure from my
own mother as well, for starters she loved to exercise. Not to
healthful levels but right on past there to obsessive compulsive
levels. She would workout for a couple of hours in the morning and
then again at night. She also was a house keeper of the lunatic sort.
She fist day she was over she pulled out all of our clothes from the
drawers and sorted them, ironed them and then folded them and put
them away. I had never seen someone iron a tee-shirt. She was
vacuuming twice a day and she still found time to go though the
kitchen and pull everything out from the cupboards and fridge sort it
clean it and throw away bad food. She even got a scraper and removed
grime from the ridges in the filigree of our plastic cupboard door
covers. There was quite a bit of grime, my mom was barely a
housekeeper let alone a deep cleaner. Continued in Part 2
