all the neat houses, all the nice streets

CRAACK!--Thwap, BONK!! 

Something had slammed down in the Impressive Entry of the house where I baby-sat and house-helped in the Bicentennial Summer...

First -- is anyone hurt?
no
Second -- what's broken?
it was the unusual, exotic, somewhat intimidating statue that was part of the interior design scheme of the entry-way...the cute little One-and-a-Half-Year-Old had -- I don't know -- toddled into it, grabbed hold of it, something.

Thank goodness it only broke into three pieces, and we didn't have 16,000 death-dealing shards of sharp something-or-other pitched across that hard stone floor...

The mother had been getting ready to drive somewhere -- (the store?), bringing the little girls, and I was going along, to help -- so we were in that Step-by-Step, Chore-By-Chore Focused Push To Get OUT THE DOOR when we heard the crash-smash in the entry.

And when she rushed to see what had happened, she was immediately very distressed.

Was the statue that important?
Or was it just that it was One More Thing?
She was a pretty intense young mother who wanted everything perfectly clean, and to do everything perfectly right, and -- you know -- it's a lot of pressure that people put on themselves....

She started having a little bit of a mini-meltdown:  scolding the children,
"How could you?"
and
crying out to the expressionless universe --
"I -- Can't -- Have -- Anything!"

I was feeling the pain, thinking  ("Oh please don't be upset, no one's hurt, and -- and -- it's -- a thing...")
of course could not say a word...
I looked down,
patting one of the children, and a thought came to me and filled up my mind before I had any chance to edit, refine, design, define, or shine it up at all -- and it was
that
that statue was ugly
and the Impressive Entry was well rid of it. ...

[It felt like a subversive thought....]

======================  That was one of the -- I guess you could call it -- misadventures of the Summer.  One Saturday night when the parents were both at The Restaurant and the two children were asleep, I kept hearing noises -- the house was still unfamiliar, and so were the noises.  Sitting in the kitchen, writing and reading, I kept getting up to check the Impressive Entry, and the family room, to make sure no one was trying to sneak in.

Got tired of running back and forth, and still felt nervous, so I set some kind of
Burglar - Trap / Warning. 
I wish I could remember exactly what it was that I created -- I put stuff in front of the front door in the Impressive Entry and also in front of the family-room door leading out to the garage.

What was it?  Think it involved chairs, string, a couple of large plastic bottles of Coca-Cola which would not break or spill, but would roll....(why did I not study Engineering in college?...)...after that whole statue-fracas, I made sure it was stuff that wouldn't break, but it would --
1) make noise to warn me
and
2) startle and discombobulate the burglar / maniacal-killer so that maybe he would get scared and run away.

When the mom and dad got home that night, the
intensity of the mom and the
remoteness of the dad
slipped, just a little, because they thought it was funny -- when they -- walked in on all that stuff....

= = = = = And of course, one day, the baby (1 & 1/2 years -- the Enemy Of Ugly Statues) got down to the pool by herself....the parents didn't know the little one could open the sliding door to the patio -- seeing her down there alone was a stressful way to find out..
stress - fuss - hubbub

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And -- that pool!  Honestly -- one day both parents were home -- the mom was doing something in the house and watching the littlest one, while her husband had taken the three-year-old out to the pool; the mom sent me out, to be out there with them.

The dad was wearing his swimming trunks, and sunbathing on a deck chair with a magazine.  The little girl had gone in at the shallow end, wearing a life-preserver over her swim-suit and I think she may have had the round, air-filled ring around her, too, while she played on the steps, and by the edge.

It was bright and sunny and quiet, until suddenly the child started to whimper and then a whole crying - screaming thing erupted pretty fast, because -- she had drifted - floated out away from the edge of the pool -- she wasn't in danger of drowning, she was perfectly upright in her life preserver and float-thing, but she was scared, because she couldn't touch the bottom of the pool with her feet, or touch the side of the pool with her hands...

I waited just a few seconds -- looking over at the dad, I thought he would want to be the one to go into the pool and pick her up -- but -- couldn't see any movement over at that pool-chair, so I just walked into the water, in my clothes and shoes, and got her.

Up on the patio, fuss from Mom:  "Now, you're OK!  You're not afraid in the water!  Look you made the summer girl get her clothes all soaking wet...!"

["She was scared don't scold!"
So many sentences left unsaid.  I was such a diplomat (crazy person)...]

~~~ === ~~~ === ~~  And one time, that summer, in the late afternoon it was Mysteriously Scary...The three-year-old, accompanied by me, went next door to Jimmy's house to see if he wanted to come out and play. 

There was Robby across the street,
and Jimmy next door,
and these little ones had gone back and forth to each other's houses and yards occasionally, off and on, all summer, always with Hovering-Summer-Girls.

There was nothing different about that day when we went over there -- I was not "Expecting any Trouble" -- it was routine....my small charge rang the doorbell; after a few moments Jimmy opened the door; when invited  to come out, he said something like, "I don't know, I have to see" and left the heavy inside door open, with the screen-door closed.  The little girl and I standing outside.

...Minute or two later his mother came to the door at a fast pace and
yelled at us
a lot.

It was completely unexpected, and therefore unsettling. 

I certainly cannot remember now What she Said -- there was nothing to say -- we hadn't done anything wrong...She must have been upset about something else, God knows --

It really shook me up.  One thing I was so thankful for, anyway, was that "my" Three-year-old was pretty unfazed -- I guess if it was terror she couldn't understand, it didn't penetrate her awareness too much -- it was, maybe, "white noise" between two adults, far above her head, peripheral to her consciousness. ...

and it's a good thing, because I was scared enough for both of us.

We went home.

Now, recalling that incident makes me remember a scene in the film All The President's Men -- reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are on their way to interview Hugh Sloan; they're walking in a quiet residential neighborhood.  They're walking away from the camera and you hear their voices:

Bernstein:  "All these neat little houses on all these nice little streets.  It's hard to believe that something's wrong in some of those little houses...."

Woodward:  "No it isn't."

-30-