The babysitter

Thinking about child care this morning, I remembered a woman, we'll call her Lisa because that was her name, who used to babysit my brother and me. The first thing you would notice about her when you met her was that she weighed 450 lbs, for real. And this was before one in three Americans was seriously obese, so it was still kind of novel. She was huge! I remember she had these tiny little feet and she always wore tiny little white Keds on them and you sort of wondered if any of this was really physically possible. But there she was.

There are so many stories about that time in our lives, but I only started telling them when I got older and realized that they were stories. Before then, it was just normal life.

For a while she babysat my brother and me in the mornings in the gap between my mother leaving for work and the two of us going to school. We learned later that in the not terribly large amount of time while my brother and I were still sleeping, she managed to eat her way through our basement freezer: a whole birthday cake, hundreds of Market Day frozen hors d'oeuvres, various other assorted frozen foods, though she would leave a teeny bit left and leave the whole package in the freezer so it wasn't until you actually needed something that you discovered it was all but gone. Most of it was our food, but there was one awkward incident in which the appetizers our next door neighbors were storing in our freezer for a party were reduced from over a hundred to a small handful rattling around in an empty box.

She got a German shepherd puppy at one point and rather than put it on a leash she would carry it around on the shelf created by her enormous bosom. For his part, the dog seemed quite happy to curl up there and be ferried around.

The other thing you should know about Lisa is that she always had a boyfriend. In fact, they weren't just boyfriends they were doting, adoring boyfriends who worshiped the ground she walked on. It truly puzzled my mother who, also dating at that time, I think seriously considered tripling her body weight to see if that would help her to meet men.

I wanted to end this post with a "where is show now" update so I took a peek on Facebook and here is what I can report: in her profile picture she is still huge, and she is cruising on a Harley behind a man I assume to be her husband. She looks quite happy.