BAD BABYSITTER

My mother worked for awhile when I was a child and she spent a great deal of time trying to find a reputable babysitter for my siblings and me. It was very important to my mother that this woman be a "licensed" babysitter, the license, I guess, being evidence of training, experience, and some sense of ethics.

That's why it was so odd that this babysitter was probably one of the worst babysitters on the face of the planet. When I was five, for example, we were unsupervised enough that her eldest son taught me to eat the entire core of an apple--seeds and all. Furthermore, my little brother fell off their bed during a nap, injuring his head. But when my mother found out about the bowling alley, she pulled us out of that woman's house and, not long after, stopped work for good and spent the rest of my childhood as a stay-at-home mom.

My mother wondered why I kept talking about going to the bowling alley. Before long, she discovered the truth: Our babysitter had been taking her kids, my brother, sisters and I, and all the other children she watched, ditching us at the nursery of The Bowlero, the local bowling alley, and going off to work ringing doorbells in her second job selling cosmetics as an Avon lady.

On the surface, it seems like a horrible abuse of her job, the children, and my mother's expectations. Deeper down, it still seems that way.

And it was.

But the truth of the matter is: I liked the nursery at The Bowlero. It was clean, there were toys, and the ladies who ran the joint were nice and offered lots of "warm fuzzies."

But more importantly, there was music.

Among other great popular songs of the late sixties an early seventies, I remember hearing Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Puff (The Magic Dragon)" in that bowling alley nursery for the first time. It was a beautiful song to my five year old ears, and it became one of my earliest memories of a "favorite song."

One of my other earliest memories of a "favorite song" is "Lola" by The Kinks, an upbeat rocker about a man who falls for a transvestite.

But that's a story for another time.