I won’t say I ended Miss Neidermeyer’s babysitting career.  I believe my neighbor and classmate, Amy McClellan, still went to her house after the incident.  But, I was never welcome back without my mom.

Miss Neidermeyer was one of the most welcoming people you could ever hope to meet.  She was kind, gentle, caring and conscientious.  I scared the bajeezus out of her.

The dog bite was the last straw.

Mrs. Neidermeyer was Amy’s regular baby sitter.  Mrs. McClellan worked at my dad’s law office when I was very young.  Later she would join Barbara Frick to staff the Atwood High School library.

Lawyers in small towns do a lot of tax work.  It’s often the financial staple of their practice.  That was certainly true in Dad’s practice.  The busiest stretch of “tax season” in rural communities was early January through March 1, when farm returns are due.

I rarely saw Dad the first few months of the year.   Calculations were done with adding machines and by hand in those days.  Calculators were not yet affordable work tools.  Tax work, like many tasks a generation ago, was labor intensive.  Dad worked almost every night.  He devoted his free time to running and going to Atwood High School sporting events.

Mom worked at dad’s office during tax season for a few years when I was very young.  The law practice needed extra help and, I suppose, it gave her a break from being a full time Mom.  Apparently, a break from me was sometimes needed.  But, that meant someone else had to watch me.

Miss Neidermeyer was Amy’s regular baby sitter and she agreed to take me on, too.  We might have been in kindergarten by that time.  Amy and I were in the kindergarten morning class even though we were “town” kids.  (In those days, kids who rode the bus in from the country were given preference for the morning session of half-day kindergarten.  That meant most town kids went in the afternoon.  Town kid and country kid was a normal way we’d refer to ourselves.)  We would spend our afternoons at Miss Neidermeyer’s.

Miss Neidermeyer (Margaret) lived with her sister Helen who was a teacher at the grade school in a small two bedroom house.  It wasn’t particularly small by the standards of the day.  It had all the space two people really need – two bedrooms, a bathroom, a sitting room and kitchen all packaged in an efficient square.  Out back was a storm cellar that doubled as storage for canned produce.  The storm cellar was one of our favorite places to play.  It was reasonably warm on cold days and cool on hot days.  And, best of all, you could almost always find spiders or at least their webs.

Amy and I spent most of our time outside even in the winter months.  The house was too small to run or wrestle – the kinds of things kids want to do after sitting for half the day.  I can imagine the dynamic of two kids bouncing around was too much for Miss Neidermeyer so she sent us outdoors.  (I know few people with as much patience as Miss Neidermeyer but I understand I often stretched hers to the limit.) The Neidermeyer’s yard was small, too.  But, in the outside world, it doesn’t take much space for five and six year olds to engineer grand adventures.

Amy and I often played in the driveway between the Neidermeyer’s and the small blue house to the north.  A few years later, Joni lived in the blue house and became friends with Miss Neidermeyer as a neighbor.

Amy and I were running around the house, up and down the driveway, when a white German shepherd approached.  I loved dogs.  This dog was friendly enough.  He was mostly minding his own business checking out the smells on bushes and trees when he approached from the south.

I called the dog and he came.  I had been taught to hold out my hand to let the dog sniff before trying to pet.  I did and the dog wagged his tail.  I bent down to one knee and gave the dog a great big hug around the neck.  That’s the last thing I remember until I found myself sitting at Miss Neidermeyer’s kitchen table.

Miss Neidermeyer was on the phone.  Amy was crying.  I had a dishtowel pressed against my cheek.  I wasn’t sure why I held the dishtowel or how I had come to be at the kitchen table.  I pulled the towel away from my face and looked at it in my hand.  The once white towel was completely red.  That’s when I started to scream.

Everything was a blur.  Miss Neidermeyer rushed Amy and me to her car.  We stopped in front of dad’s office.  He raced out and jumped into the passenger seat.  We drove around the corner to Dr. Walton’s office which was still on 4^th street (the street most people think of as Main).

I lay on a table with a bright light shining in my face.  People were coming in and out of the room.  I felt pin pricks on my cheek and around my eye.  Then nothing until I woke on our living room couch.

It was a scary event for everyone involved except me.  I had a story to tell of twenty-four stitches and an eye caked closed with blood.  And, everyone I knew brought me comic books and toys.  (The only other winners in this affair may have been Currier Drug and Ben Franklin’s.  They sold a lot of get well gifts and cards.)

This kind of stuff – stitches, blood and toys – goes a long way in the school lunch line.  I appropriately embellished the events to keep my friends on the edge of their seats.  I’m still milking the story today with any new audience I find.  I can tell the tale as a grand adventure thanks to Dr. Walton’s amazing handy work.  He thought wound was severe enough I would need plastic surgery.  But, he stitched me up in a way that completely erased the evidence.  I’m grateful.

The dog’s fate was perhaps saddest of all.  He was a stray.  He was just a friendly animal minding his own business.  But, the indiscretion of a child and the protocol of the day required the dog to be put down to test for rabies.  George Beims, our police chief, had to do that dirty work.  George did a lot of that kind of work for our town – cleaning up after other people’s mistakes.

And poor Miss Neidermeyer…  She felt as though she’d let my parents down.  I had been badly wounded on her watch.  My mom felt awful, too.  Her kid, who often caused mischief, had made a kind and gentle woman feel miserable.  Miss Neidermeyer and Mom felt guilty for years.

There’s no real happy ending to this one.  Mom would take me to visit Miss Neidermeyer from time to time over the years.  She was always kind and interested in what I was doing.

We never spoke about the dog bite but it was always there.

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Photo credit: sdeinhorn (Flickr)