When I was a small boy, Illinois was mostly country and farms. I think once it was all farms except for Chicago. That's where you brought your pigs and cows if you lived in Illinois. They killed them right there next to the train tracks. It smelled awful and sounded pretty bad too. So when I was small lots of people lived on farms. My mother was always working somewhere and I never was sure what she did for a living either and it was confusing to me and my dad was never around and died a long time ago and it was mostly me and my mother except that she was always working somewhere so it was me and my babysitter a lot of the time and believe me, I had dozens of babysitters and some were nice but mostly they were really weird and my days at the baby sitter's house could be like the longest days of somebody's life, like the day that never ended. Some of them lived on those farms, not farming. I can't remember some of them like the lady whose dog knocked me over and I broke my collar bone. But some guys look at my collar bone and say "oh, broke your collar bone, eh?" I can't tell even though I looked really close. Nowdays if a babysitters dog knocked you over and broke something, everybody would go to court and the dog would be sent away. Back then you could get away with anything and a lot of babysitters did, that's for sure. I can remember being in a really junky basement and sucking on old D cell batteries scattered around and they were certainly tangy. I remember it very clearly. I remember a jungle of junk and toys that were really cool to a three year old and some worked and some didn't and sometimes somebody would burst in on you and scream "oh my god! You can't put batteries in your mouth while you play with the sump pump!!!!!" and sometimes nobody ever came for days. I remember begging my mom not to take me to some of those babysitters as we pulled into their driveways and hearing her say how we didn't have a choice because she had to work if we wanted to have bread and butter and a house to live in.

I remember a lady making me change my underwear after I had a certain bad kind of accident I will only call "The Big Brown One" and she was drinking with her friend at a dining room table while I struggled to put on the new underpants and was humiliated because they were both looking at me really creepy and had huge, huge beehive hairdo's. This babysitter had two kids and one was nice and was really my babysitter even though she was only six or seven and one who was pretty scary because he was way older and would stick firecrackers in the cracks of their old wood floor and light them while his sister screamed at him to not do that and I don't even think their mom was home half the time which is another thing that would send you to jail today. People like this always had an ironing board up with an iron on it, I don't know why. But the nice girl would take me all over town and I remember visiting old fat guys at the jail in the police station until the police figured out that two kids were down in the jail part. Most of them were drunks I think. My mom had no idea because I never told her about it and she probably didn't ask. A lot of the time the babysitters had a bunch of kids around but I never knew which kids were theirs and which kids were just stray kids hanging around but if you're only three or four you just follow the kids wherever they go and a mom would hope it wasn't your number that was up that day. I remember a big kid knocking me down into the snow and laying on top of me and I couldn't breathe and I really thought for a minute that he was a great ape and somebody had to get him off me. It wasn't always horrible, but those are the things you remember best. I remember laying in a sandbox and playing with some cars and busses as my mother pulled up, so there's a good moment that's on the books. I remember a really old lady (one of the farm people) chasing a kid who was smaller than me around and around and around her car, screaming at him. She caught him but it seems like they went around the car a hundred times. I remember eating a sandwich with her and copying her chewing and she yelled at me that I didn't have to eat that way because I wasn't an old lady. I remember being at a different farm that was really a farm and eating horrible old farm meals that were supposed to be so great and they smelled bad and felt like snot going down your throat. I'm not joking. Like snot. That's how come I'm a survivor and can really force down anything that isn't poison. One babysitter had a little kid who was practically crazy and would do stuff like throw poop from his crib at me taking a nap in her bed and all I could do was hide under the blankets and yell for help.

Then there were some places which were supposed to be like a day camp but were really just a more organized baby sitting place with tons of kids. This one camp was run by a guy named Bucky and it was "Bucky's Boy's Club". It was like the Army, for little kids. I even found an old t-shirt from there. He would take us to Lake Michigan in the middle of winter and make us have fun but I remember it was grooling and hard and cold and terrible and not for little kids with short legs and no grown up would pick you up and give you a break and you could only trudge trudge trudge along behind those who could keep up only to find them doing something really bad by the time you did catch up and wished you didn't. Like sliding down a sheer cliff on the bluffs on your belly in some icy natural snow-trough down to the beach which was all frozen waves higher than a building. There was somebody you couldn't recognize because you were up too high saying "OK DICK! COME ON DOWN, I GOT YA!" So, you pull out your only weapon which is crying and then spend another hour outside with horrible snot-spit-ice all over your face and really, just about everywhere. I remember on the day of the snow-trough, finishing our outdoor experience by following Bucky around and around in the park area, making a huge "snow train" by shuffling our feet through the snow in a pattern left by our feet and I bet from an airplane it looked just like a train. Finally the most weird scene I remember was them making some kind of house way way way back in a sumac jungle. It was a gigantic area and was probably on Bucky's property. They were making a house by breaking down some of the sumac and some of it was layed on top of the standing sumac for a roof and there was thick smoke everywhere because they were burning it too. All the small kids were just winding their way through it all and asking when it was time to go home and it was like, September or October and cold and smoky and confusing. I think you have to think of this before you sign your kid up for active duty at just any old daycamp or daycare and remember that they won't tell you any of this in a way that you can understand because when you are a kid you only live from one moment to the next and when the next moment is being in the car with your mom the old moment is already just history and not interesting to you when you are thinking about your stuff at home and what will be on TV so you say "nothing" when your mom asks what you did or what happened or you tell her but she doesn't really understand what you mean because you are three and don't understand half of what you did anyway or why. Like when your teacher snuck up behind you in class and smacked you really hard in the middle of your back with a board that said " Board of Education" on it but really hurt. But that's school and is way off the subject.

I am Dick Tater and I stand for truth.