Part01-On Writing-02

A year or so later, my mother, my brother, and I were in West De Pere, Wisconsin.

I don't know why.

Another of my mother's sisters, Cal (a WAAC beauty queen during World War II) , lived in Wisconsin with her convivial beer-drinking husband, and maybe Mom had moved to be near them.

If so, I don't remember seeing much of the Weimers. Any of them, actually.

My mother was working, but I can't remember what her job was, either.

I want to say it was a bakery she worked in, but I think that came later, when we moved to Connecticut to live near her sister Lois and her husband (no beer for Fred, and not much in the way of conviviality, either; he was a crewcut daddy who was proud of driving his convertible with the top up, God knows why) .

There was a stream of babysitters during our Wisconsin period.

I don't know if they left because David and I were a handful, or because they found better-paying jobs, or because my mother insisted on higher standards than they were willing to rise to; all I know is that there were a lot of them.

The only one I remember with any clarity is Eula, or maybe she was Beulah. She was a teenager, she was as big as a house, and she laughed a lot.

Eula-Beulah had a wonderful sense of humor, even at four I could recognize that, but it was a dangerous sense of humor—there seemed to be a potential thunderclap hidden inside each hand-patting, butt-rocking, head-tossing outburst of glee.