Another new one...

BIG DOGS IN SMALL NEIGHBOURHOODS

I got my babysitting licence from St. John’s Ambulance after taking their half-day course when I was thirteen. I don’t remember now what was taught, but I got a certificate out of it, and it made my parents more comfortable with me staying home alone with my younger sister. Soon after that, I got a regular job, staying with my neighbour’s children every day after school. They were three and six years younger than me, and I would wait for them after school so that we could all go home together. I would stay with them at their house until one of their parents got home from work, and then I would go home.

My only other babysitting position was for friends of my parents, who lived one street over from ours. The Fergusons had four kids. Two each from their previous marriages. They also had two Newfoundland dogs, named Ben and Rudy.

Sam was the oldest of their children and she was only three years younger than me when Mrs. Ferguson asked me to stay with them the first time. Matt, Leah and Kelley were all younger and I guess they weren’t ready to make Sam responsible for the other three yet. So I went over on the evenings when their parents went out, and we hung out, played games and watched movies. I would make them a snack and get them to go to bed by ten; or sometimes ten thirty.

The dogs were a little more difficult. They were both huge. About three feet tall and over a hundred pounds; which at that time, was more than me. The kids fed them, but after they went to bed, it was up to me to let them out into the backyard. Fortunately for the dogs, the backyard was larger than most typical suburban yards. The house was on a court, just to the left of the middle; giving the lot a pie shape that extended back twice as far as the one next door. So if the dogs had felt like running – they were actually quite lazy – they could have gone more than three strides before running into the fence.

There was a deck in the backyard, which you stepped out onto from the sliding glass door in the kitchen. The deck sprawled off to the left, up to the Jacuzzi tub, to the right and up to the pool deck and straight down to the grass. The rest of the yard was empty save for a few tall pine trees that surprisingly had not been cut down when the subdivision was built in the late eighties.

In the summer, Ben and Rudy mostly hung out in the basement of the house, because it was coolest down there. They could lie all day on the exposed concrete floors. In the winter they were more active. With their thick black fur coats, the cold didn’t bother them at all, and they would run around in the snow together before coming back inside. I always tried to stand out of the way when they came in because the first thing, they would shake to get the melting snow and water off, before going to lie down on their rug in the family room. From that shake, there would be drops of water, globs of slushy snow and strings of drool splattered all over the tile floor, the cabinets near the door, on the backs of the kitchen chairs and sometimes on the table and counter; which I would then proceed to wipe up.

When the Fergusons returned, usually around one in the morning, Mr. Ferguson would put the dogs’ leashes on and the three of them would walk me home. I only lived a block away, so he would usually take the dogs home by a longer route so they would get some exercise.

One Saturday in late May, I arrived at their house and Mr. Ferguson had a bandage on his elbow and a scrape on his chin. He told me that he had taken Ben and Rudy for a walk the day before, one his new roller blades. They saw a squirrel.