Tony

[Welcome to this week’s edition of “Saturday Stories.” Every Saturday I take a break from the regular Scripture-based daily devotional and write a story from life. Sometimes there is a moral to the story and sometimes it’s just a story. I hope you enjoy today’s “Saturday Story.”]

There is an age at which having a “babysitter” care for you when the parents are away is unnecessary. Still, even when a child has matured beyond needing a babysitter, there are times when it is still wise to have adult supervision. I’m not sure what the appropriate name for this person is. Calling a person who is supervising an 11-year-old a babysitter is offensive to both the child and the person hired to watch the child. But what do we call them? Watcher sounds like a creepy freak out of a dystopian future world. There is probably a name for this role, but I’m ignorant of it and chose to remain that way.

My siblings and I had this kind of supervision a few times when we were children but had moved beyond the babysitter stage. Most summer days, if Mom was working at the plant nursery, we were left on our own. We had assigned chores. My sister, Brenda, would clean the house. My brothers, Charlie, and Bob, and I would hoe the garden, feed the chickens and pigs, and clean out the barn as needed.

We were allowed to get out of bed when we wanted, but we had to have our work done before the folks got home. I liked to sleep in. Charlie liked to get up and shoot pool on the pool table in the den which happened to be next to my bedroom. The clacking of the Bakelite billiard balls crashing into each other became my morning alarm. After a bowl of cereal, we would get busy with our chores because we wanted to finish before Batman and Gilligan’s Island were on.

We did alright by ourselves. Yes, there were regular fights and times when Brenda would lock us boys out of the house. Understandably, she didn’t want us dirtying up her newly cleaned house. We would find things to get into mischief over. We rode the pigs, or at least attempted it a few times, played ball, and rode bikes. And we managed to take care of ourselves just fine.

Nevertheless, there were a few times when Dad and Mom were going somewhere for a weekend trip, and they weren’t comfortable leaving us alone overnight. It was then that Dad would employ someone to be our watcher. It was typically someone who worked at the car dealership where Dad worked. Tony was one of the guys.  

Tony was something of a hippie. He drove a small truck with a camper shell on the back. I think it might have been a Datsun, but I can’t be sure. Tony liked to drink Boones Farm Strawberry Wine and smoke cigarettes. He was fun. Tony was the guy who taught me how to turn my hand into a rubber band gun by hooking the rubber band onto my little finger, stretching around the back of my hand over my thumb, and then placing the other end of the loop onto my extended index finger. Once it is properly placed, you relax your little finger and shoot it at your intended target. This is an ability I still possess all these years later. I have Tony to thank for teaching me this valuable life skill.

Once we learned how to shoot rubber bands, Tony would have us move the couch out from the wall so we could use it like a shield from which we could pop up fire at each other. Mayhem was the order of the evening. Boones Farm Wine and cigarettes for Tony and rubber band wars for us.

One evening when Tony was supervising us, he ran out of cigarettes. He said, “Come on. Go get in the truck.” Well, it was a small truck, so Tony opened up the hatch of the camper shell, some of us climbed over the tailgate and into the bed of the truck, Tony shut the hatch and turned the latch while we figured out how to sit hunched over with our rears on the wheel wells of Tony’s truck.

He took off, not too concerned about speed or cornering smoothly, down the driveway and onto the gravel of 104^th East Avenue we went. After the first sharp careening maneuver by Tony, we discovered that there was a large toolbox accompanying us in the bed of that truck. It was like being on the deck of a ship in a storm at sea without the cargo having been fastened down. That toolbox slid this way and that and we blocked it from smashing into us the best we could.

Finally, Tony arrived at a small store. He pulled to a stop and got out. It was a cold Colorado night. By the time we arrived at the store, the windows of the camper shell had fogged up from all of that hard breathing we were doing back there.

I still vividly remember Tony walking to the side window of the camper shell, peering in with his hands cupped to the side of his face, checking to see if we survived the trip. Then, he blasted a shot of his warm breath onto the window to create an even heavier fog. Having his passengers' attention, he proceeded to take his index finger and draw a peace sign into the fog of that window. Then, he smiled, turned, and went to the store for another pack of cigarettes.

We made it back to the house alive. We survived the weekend with Tony just fine. I think that must be what we told our parents when they returned home. While I don’t remember for certain, I don’t think we told them all the details of our time with Tony until we were much older. I’m not sure what the proper term is for what Tony was, but I think “memorable” is as close as I can get.