Another Bonus Lesson

      Of my time spent working at day-cares when my girls were young – almost a year in Texas and a little more than a year in Georgia, one thing I say often in thinking back on those days is that I loved the kids, but I did not care much for management, or parents. Employment now as a lab rat is, of course, a much better fit for me.

    The Texas day-care was just down the road from where we lived, in what folks would call a somewhat affluent neighborhood. (Our house was the next neighborhood over.) One night teenagers with nothing better do do broke into the day-care! They came in through the window over the sink in the kitchen – they stole all the computers and tape-players – this was 1989 – and all the petty cash found in a file drawer. What an inconvenience! - I brought my own tape-player after that so we could still run around the room on Friday mornings with crepe paper streamers to the tune of the William Tell Overture' and another teacher would borrow the tape-player for her class to hear Raffi. Ah, Raffi!

     It was not long after the break-in that a car hit the corner of the day-care! Rammed right into the brick building after a high speed chase one evening! This was very hard to do since the building was off of the road a bit and at the top of a hill (or rather, incline, not many real hills in that area of Texas)! We arrived at the day-care the next day to see a gaping hole in the kindergarten classroom! 

     A bit of reshuffling occurred then to accommodate the 5 year-olds into space elsewhere in the building while repairs were being made.

     After a month or so, insurance money came through for the items that had been stolen and for the repair of the hole in the building. In a move that totally floored me because management was incredibly stingy with funds, all of the employees got a $50 bonus for all that we had been through putting up with the break-in and the ram-in!

     Now, the room I had at the day-care was shared with another class. I had the 18-month-old kids, and on the other side of the room was a class of early 2-year-olds. The teacher, who I will call Liddy, had had a much less charmed life than I had. She had an ex-husband who may or may not have been in jail at the time, and from that marriage was a teenage girl. Liddy was married to her second husband, who I will call Max, and they had three more children, all of whom were grade-school age. While most of the other women who worked at the day-care were using their paychecks for fun stuff like cleaning ladies and gym memberships, Liddy clearly needed her job to help support her family. And she was wonderful with her 2-year-old class.

     The day after the bonuses were distributed, Liddy and I had gotten the kids down to sleep at nap-time, and we sat on the floor chatting quietly to each other. Liddy asked me about the bonus. I told her my family had gone out to dinner with the money to celebrate – and there was even some cash left over.

     Liddy looked a little wistful, and then she smiled and said that when she got home the day before and told Max about the bonus, he got so excited that they made love! Liddy said, “and it was still daylight!”

     Making love in the daylight – the best way ever to celebrate the bonuses of life!

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