A New Year's Eve I'd completely forgotten

When I was on my way home from work after my night shift the call-in topic of the morning show I was listening to on the radio was about most memorable New Year's Eves... for all the wrong reasons. As I headed my car down the hill by the university I started thinking about that, and this memory surfaced...

It began on the day before New Year's Eve, 1970 when we were living in Alsask. Around lunchtime the phone rang; it was a woman who worked as a waitress in the hotel bar where Mom was a waitress in the dining room. She wanted to know if I would babysit her little boy while she and her husband drove a transportation-less couple (our next door neighbours the Nowans) into Kindersley to have their baby. I'd never worked for them before although I had a large clientele for my babysitting services. I already had a job lined up for New Year's Eve but that was more than a day away, so I was only too happy to make a little more money. How long could it take to drive someone into Kindersley anyway?

Little did I know they'd planned to stay with the other couple until the baby arrived, first babies usually took their sweet time doing that and it would be many hours before I returned home.

I walked the short distance to the Gauthiers' house with a book and a roll of Lifesavers in my pocket. The couple was in a hurry to leave so they gave me some brief instructions about their toddler and his routine. Oh, and the dog had been spayed the day before and was still a little sedated, but she'd be fine... And away they went.

The dog was a huge Newf with a white blaze on her chest that made her look like a Himalayan black bear; she was solidly sleeping it off in the front hallway. I'd never seen a dog that large and was more than a little scared of her. The little boy was at the age where he made strange so when he woke from his nap he took one look at me and began to scream. Between trying to calm the child and my dreading the moment when the gi-normous dog regained consciousness, my stomach was in knots. When the Gauthiers hadn't returned by suppertime I scrounged around and fed the baby. A couple of hours later I broke down and helped myself to some of their groceries. A while later I put the baby to bed and settled in to watch TV. I had a choice between CFQC (CTV) from Saskatoon, French CBC and CFCN (CTV) Calgary. With rabbit ears. And LOTS of snow. I struggled to stay awake; it was a point of honour for me that I never fell asleep when I babysat. I was not being paid to sleep, after all. I was completely fine with both the baby and the dog remaining asleep, however!

Somewhere in the middle of the night the baby woke me up. He settled back down to sleep and I curled up in the by-now-chilly living room with a blanket and my book. The dog slumbered on. I don't think she had moved at all in all the hours I'd been there, although she was definitely breathing - I could hear her from across the room. I dozed off several more times, shaking myself awake each time, mortified in case the Gauthiers would come home and find me sawing logs. I needn't have worried. They returned around noon with the news that Sue Nowan had given birth to a boy that morning and both mom and baby were fine. I grabbed the $10 they gave me and sprinted for home and bed.

That night I walked over to the Wiazeks at the appointed time. I was torn between pretending that I'd had a good night's sleep and would be my usual highly responsible self and telling them the whole story about the night before. In the end I told them, and Mrs Wiazek was so nice, she told me it would be just fine if I was asleep when they came home. If I wanted to I could just sleep over. (I was SO relieved!!) In the end I chose to go home to my own bed at 2 am when they came home; Mr Wiazek drove me home, something that NEVER happened on that tiny radar station but totally welcomed that night.

Oh, yeah... what about the dog? She woke up not long after the sun came up, stretched mightily, groaned a bit, ambled to the back door and gave me a look that said, "Lemme out NOW!" When she came back in she went back to her rug in the front hall and promptly went back to sleep. She had no intention of eating me, which was absolutely fine with me.