The notice hanging on the bulletin board of my dormitory caught my eye. Someone wanted to hire a live-in nanny for the summer. I did not want to go home for the summer. So, I called the number.

The woman and her friend came to interview me at my college student union. I can’t remember anything of the interview, but afterwards, I was desperately hoping for the job, sure I wouldn’t get it. And then she called and said, “I just felt like God was telling me to take you under my wing. So, you’re hired.” I must have sounded pathetic with my tale of divorced parents and not wanting to go home for the summer. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled.

I’m sure it broke my dad’s heart, but at the time, that never occurred to me. I was determined not to return to my suburban home, to a job at a fast-food restaurant or worse. A job as a nanny sounded exciting.

The first day, the 10-year old boy called me “fat,” and nicknamed me “Mamabahama.” I was not amused. In addition to the 10-year old, I was in charge of a 7-year old girl, a 5-year old boy and a 6-week old baby. Their mother didn’t have a job outside the house, but her husband was a doctor and she wanted help over the summer. I was the help. I was the playmate, the idea-gal, the errand-runner. I was the relief pitcher, the back-up mom, the one who walked that fussy baby for miles back and forth on the hardwood floors until she slept. I grocery-shopped, took kids to amusement parks, drove the car on long trips.

I lived next door in an apartment attached to the neighbor’s house. Goldie, the wrinkled and tan landlord, was said to be an alcoholic, but I never saw evidence of that. The apartment was furnished with the same kind of gold fake-Americana furniture I’d left behind in my suburb. A few Reader’s Digest condensed novels lined a shelf. I had practically nothing, hardly any clothes, even.

One night, I opened the door and flipped on the overhead light to see a scattering of cockroaches on the floor. I sprang into action, terrified, inexperienced, but fierce. I grabbed juice glasses from the cupboard and trapped a cockroach under each one. I’m sure I squealed like a girl during this battle, freaked out completely. I’d never seen a cockroach before in my young, sheltered life.

The problem, of course, occurred when I finished catching cockroaches beneath glasses. I couldn’t crunch a bug skeleton. I still can’t. I had no bug spray. What’s a nineteen year old girl to do? I lived alone, remember, with a mostly invisible alcoholic landlord. And I’ve never been one to ask for help.

So I did what any clever girl would do. I slid paper under the glasses and carried the whole contraption to the toilet where I dumped the cockroaches one by one into the toilet bowl. My system broke down, however, when a particularly boisterous cockroach–the last one– scrambled on the thin paper, causing me to panic, screech and fling my hands up in a girlish display of fear. When I did so, the glass somersaulted and landed in the toilet, broken upon impact. The cockroach crawl stroked past the jagged edge, laughing.

Not to be outdone despite my racing pulse, I ran for the kitchen and grabbed the Dawn dish-washing liquid and squirted until the cockroach passed out from laughing or smothered in the bubbles. I’m not sure which. Then I gingerly extracted the broken glass from the toilet, flushed and shuddered.

I didn’t have a television, so I read those condensed novels and part of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. But mostly, I worked.

And those kids hated me, especially the 10-year old boy. I cut them no slack. One day, I’d taken them to Silver Dollar City and the boy purchased a plastic comb fashioned to look like a switchblade. He tormented his siblings on the way home, continually flicking them. I told him, “If you do that again, I will take that from you.” And he did. And I did. And then the parents questioned me and as I recall, very reluctantly backed me up.

He was a trial, that boy. His sister was 7, easy as pie. The 5-year old boy was dreamy, distracted, adorable. I remember him with his feet on the breakfast table, a sticky cereal spoon in his hair. The baby was a girl, too, and a fussy thing. My job involved walking up the gravel road, cradling that baby in my arms until she slept. Blackberry vines reached out with thorny arms to scratch me, the mosquitoes and their loud-Missouri bug cousins shrieked in my ears. We in the Pacific Northwest might have too much rain, but we do not have bugs that whistle and click and holler and shout like those southern bugs do. I never got used to that outdoor noise at Tablerock Lake.

Nor did I ever grow comfortable with the idea that cottonmouth snakes lurked under the dock. We do not have poisonous swimming snakes, either, in my home state. But the kids swam, and so I had to swim, too. The back yard sloped down to the shores of Tablerock Lake and the view was pretty (for the Ozark so-called Mountains). Sometimes we went for boat rides, but mostly, we sat on the dock, sometimes catching tiny fish with kernels of corn on our hooks.

I hated that summer. I liked the mother quite well. Aside from the 10-year old, I grew fond of the children. But I was lonely, desperately lonely for my new college friends, and far from my home in Washington state. I hated the hot humid weather. Friends came to visit a few times and my sisters and stepmother stopped by for a couple of days. I received letters from friends, which helped sate my loneliness some, but I was a giant black hole of loneliness. I was unfillable at the point in my life and pretty much everything good leaked out the bottom of my broken heart.

And so I wasn’t a very good nanny.

That summer, we drove to Cedar Park for vacation, then on to West Virginia to stay with grandparents. Another time, we went to New Orleans, but I stayed in a round hotel with the baby the entire time we were there. Once, the father had a car accident (a race car accident, if I recall correctly) and the mother had to rush out of town and the housekeeper and I were in charge of all the children for a few scary days.

We went to a cultish little Pentecostal church which freaked me out almost as much as the cockroaches, even though I’d been raised in a Pentecostal church my whole life. We had season’s passes to Silver Dollar City and a water-park, which was the scene of the worst sunburn of my life. We rode bikes, did crafts, went to the library.

I earned five hundred dollars a month. Plus room and board. And when I started, she took me to Wal-Mart and bought me frumpy culottes, a horrifying sort of uniform.

But I was grateful. I earned my own way for a whole summer and I triumphed over cockroaches. And when I returned to school, things went from bad to worse, but that’s a story for another day.

So what was your worst summer job?

A little more than twenty years ago, I was working for Heritage USA, the brainchild of Jim Bakker. Mr. Bakker (as we learned to refer to him) wanted a high-quality vacation destination designed specifically for Christians. I knew nothing about Jim Bakker and his lovely mascara’ed wife, Tammy Faye, when recruiters came to my college campus that spring of 1985. But a guy I knew named Bill said it would be fun, I should go for an interview and before I knew it, I was driving east in Bill’s hatchback car, heading for Fort Mill, South Carolina, and a summer job.

Six weeks into the summer, my summer-job roommate (who’d managed to make our former Motel 7 room with shag aqua carpeting look marginally appealing with the magic of indirect lighting) dragged me to a Bible study gathering. I had avoided these sorts of events because frankly, after two years of Bible college, I was kind of Bible-Studied out. I couldn’t bear sitting through another emotional session of “sharing what the Lord has laid upon my heart.”

Hey, so sue me. I must tell the truth, nothing but the truth, so help me, God. I didn’t want to go, but I went, mostly because the guest speaker was someone who was the son of someone famous. (Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?) The students sat in a giant circle on the floor. As a “let’s get to know each other” sort of ice-breaker, we were instructed to say a few words about ourselves: where we went to college, what our future plans were.

The fun began and one after another pious student declared his or her super-spiritual life-plan. For instance, “My name is Suzie-with-the-big-hair-from Tennessee and God has called me to minister to inner-city people who don’t have shoes,” and “My name is John-with-the-swagger-from-New-York and God has given me the gift of evangelism–my tapes are on sale at the back of the room.” Maybe you have to grow up in a Pentecostal home to really appreciate the utmost seriousness with which young Bible college students regard themselves and their “call to ministry.”

I was a bit disillusioned already, plus I was sick of college boys, so I concentrated on not rolling my eyes as my turn approached. I was nearly the final person to speak and so, when it was my turn, I proclaimed, “My name is Mel and I attend ________________ Bible College and when I grow up, I’m going to be a rock star.”People laughed and the meeting went on.

Within a few days, I’d met my now-husband, a man who noticed me first at that meeting when I issued that ridiculous proclamation. He and his friend (let’s call him Rich) had said, “We have to meet that girl!” because apparently they appreciated my humor.

So, fast forward twenty years. I say all that because you should know that I have Jim Bakker to thank for my weekend. You see, Rich and his wife, (who I promised to describe as breathtakingly beautiful, bright, and at her goal-weight–oh, and did I mention that Rich is a tall, wry, funny guy?) invited us to their family cottage at Long Beach, Washington, to dig razor claims over the New Year’s holiday. We’ve been friends for twenty years, which on one hand, seems impossible because I’m only twenty-two in my brain, yet on the other hand, I can remember events from twenty years ago as if they were last week. Time is warped.

Did you know you can only dig razor clams during six prescribed time periods in Washington State? Despite being almost a native of Washington State, (I moved here when I was four) we have never been razor-clam digging before, so we looked forward to this new adventure and accepted the invitation eagerly. Did I mention that we also like free accomodations, that we adore our friends, plus, we’re hoping that Rich’s wife’s parents will adopt us, especially since her father has excellent toys and can build houses with his own two hands and her mother is the hostess with the mostest, a woman worthy of emulation? And last but not least, they live on a lake when they aren’t vacationing at the shore. What’s not to love?

Rain has drenched our green corner of the world the past few weeks, yet Saturday morning when we bundled up and walked from the cottage to the beach, the skies were dry and we discovered a calm, windless shore. I removed my jacket, in fact. The crashing waves mesmerized the children, so they raced to the foamy edges and then scambled out of the way. My husband (aka Mr. Safety) warned them repeatedly to watch out and then, a rogue wave pounced on him and my blue-eyed twin, drenching them to their thighs. After that, we were all a lot more careful.

A few hours later, when my 3-year old ocean-loving daughter and I returned for a second walk along the shore, the wind had picked up, and by low-tide that evening, a steady, cold wind blew. At 5 p.m., we twelve (Rich and his wife, their twins (boy/girl), and the wife’s parents, and my family of six) drove in three vehicles onto the beach (that stretch of beach is an actual state highway, strangely enough) and down to the section where we intended to pluck clams from their sandy beds by lantern-light.

Along the darkening shoreline, a string of lantern-lights bobbed, as far as you could see in each direction. Soon, the sunlight faded entirely and only faint starlight and lanterns illuminated our way. We broke into three groups, circling a lantern and stomping along in the low-tide sand. Occasionally, someone would yell, “WATER!” and we’d grabbed lanterns and children and scurry out of reach of the waves. Even better, someone would yell, “I HAVE ONE!” and then someone would plunge a clam-gun (pictured on that website) into the sand and twist, twist, twist it, and then pull up a core of sand. A boot toe would nudge the exposed sand and the clam would be revealed. The hunter would scoop it up, drop it into a net and then, stomp around some more, peering in the dark for the telltale pucker in the sand which indicated a clam beneath. (When you stomp, the clams dart into their shells, which leaves an indentation in the sand.)

(Low-tide happened to be in the evening–and that’s why we hunted in the dark. Sometimes clamming takes place in daylight.)

My 3-year old was bundled in snowpants, a coat, a hat, and mittens and seemed a little chilly, but really, the ghostly waves sneaking up in the dark were the real reason she and I abandoned the clam-diggers for the relative warmth of Rich’s truck. We sat for half an hour in the vehicle, listening to a CD and watching distant hovering balls of light through the foggy windshield. Then she said she wanted to go back (“I will not be scared anymore. I promise!”) and so we traversed the dark shore again, heading toward the lights. We rejoined our group and orbited the pools of lantern-light, hunting for quarter-sized circles in the sand.

Then the rain came and most of us headed home because we’d had enough. (The limit is fifteen razor clams per person and we didn’t find that many. Our haul was more like sixty, I think. I even dug one up myself.)

That night, I sent my kids to bed by 10:00 p.m., even though it was New Year’s Eve. They didn’t protest much since they were exhausted by brisk ocean air and the day’s strenuous activities. Even though I’d been nodding off, at 11:45 p.m., I joined Rich’s wife, her parents and her children (the irrepressible 9-year olds who never once seemed tired) and we drove down to the boardwalk where we saw about the New Year’s fireworks, which lasted about three minutes. We wore silly glasses and posed for photos in the dark and were back home by 12:15 a.m.

We slept two nights at our friend’s newly remodeled and gorgeous cottage. I, for one, was awed by the multitude of outlets available in every room and the well-thought out lighting. In the bedroom I used were five light-switches . . . talk about living in the lap of luxury! From the new second-story, we could gaze out at the crashing gray waves or watch satellite television or squint through a high-powered telescope while sitting on leather couches.

I thought about slipping into a closet and never leaving, but alas, the children found all the good hiding spots when they played hide-and-seek, and besides that, who would wash all the sandy laundry when we got home if I were mysteriously “lost at sea”?