'.... and babies don't keep'

I have held, to date, 32 jobs, including several stints as a babysitter, combined here to count as one of the 32. I have waited tables, washed dishes, tried to "make the donuts," cared for the elderly, cooked for the elderly and for school children, and did my time under the "Golden Arches."

I even worked as a telephone solicitor, many years ago, using those big, black dial telephones, cold calling from pages torn out of a telephone directory.

Whenever we are guests at a hotel or motel, we are careful to leave with the covers at least pulled up over the bed and the towels draped to dry so they don't get musty, but my stint as a maid at a motel revealed that we are definitely in the minority.

I tried my hand at bookkeeping, selling photography services, and even tried to be a cocktail waitress. Once. I kept getting the orders wrong. Ever polite, I would go to the bartender and request some kind of mixed drink and if someone at the table also wanted a beer, I'd add, "and a draw, too, please." Apparently, sentence structure matters a lot in the cocktail business. "Draw, too, please" meant "draw two, please" to the bartender and I'd inevitably come back to find one too many glasses of beer on my tray.

I stumbled into the newspaper business quite by accident, first witnessing the production of a newspaper at the Northern Wyoming Daily News, in Worland, Wyoming, in the paste-up department. I barely managed to keep my job at the Northern Colorado Daily Press in Craig, Colorado, selling advertising. I think the publisher, Bob Sweeney, felt sorry for me. Nearly 20 years after that job ended with our return to Denver, I found myself in the newsroom at the McCook Daily Gazette, and nearly 13 years later, I'm still reporting for duty every day.

At each job, even the repeat jobs of waitressing, I have learned new skills, adding to my repertoire. That entire repertoire came into play last week when I was on "vacation."

Day one and on each day that followed, my cooking and serving skills were brought to bear, all while two little girls vied for my attention. I confess, one side of the grilled cheese sandwiches did get a little too done, but the evidence of my inattention that day quickly disappeared.

I got my workouts on the rope swing and walking through Barnett Park, bread crumbs in hand and though I've never sought a career in hairdressing, I did my fair share of shampooing and detangling each summer day's worth of play.

It was time travel, after a fashion, as memories of my days of mothering the girls' dad and his siblings flooded back throughout the week, but time travel with a twist. I am not a young mother anymore. By the end of each day, I was spent, physically and mentally. But my heart was full.

Our time together, the first in several years, went by too quickly. But we used every waking moment to its fullest and nothing was left to waste. I had to resurrect my imagination station during a tea party that included 35 stuffed animals and my story-telling skills, as Haili and Maddy clamored for one more story about their dad. I did not, however, have to find new voices for storybook characters. Both girls are excellent readers, and were content to read aloud or to themselves on the rare occasions when they stopped spinning about. We visited the library twice (or was it three times?), for new material in less than a week, and they pored through the titles on our bookshelves here at home as well. Haili read "The Last Dream of the Old Oak" by Hans Christian Anderson to me while I made supper one evening, a treasure I had missed during my own childhood reading

It all ended yesterday. They are back home now, in Colorado, a little sunburned (even with sunscreen, their three trips to the pool took a toll), with a new cache of hair ties and a new cache of memories. It was hard to see them go.

But I, nearly 35 years after becoming a mother, finally have vindication. Near the end of the week, Danny, who had graciously ceded his position as the center of my world for the duration of their stay, said, "Now I understand why you never got anything done back then." Anything, on any given day, being the dishes, the laundry, the dusting or the vacuuming.

It was a week of time travel, back to the poem from a sampler given to me years ago by a friend,

"Cleaning and scrubbing can wait 'till tomorrow,

for babies grow up, much to our sorrow.

So quiet down cobweb-dust, go to sleep.

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep."

No, babies don't keep and neither do granddaughters.

"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance." Psalm 16:6