Almost 6 years ago,

A girl up the street from us posted a flyer on the mailibox advertising her fledgling babysitting business. She was not quite 13 and Maddie was 2 1/2. They hit it off from the start, mostly because Sam was wonderful with her, both leading in play and following, always staying engaged and being a playmate.

At first, Sam would come over so that I could nap when I was pregnant with Harry, then when he was born she came to play with Maddie when I nursed Harry down for his naps.

We were crushed a year or so later when she told us her folks were moving to Temecula. We tried another sitter or three, but no one could replace Sam. So we started driving the 20 minutes to pick her up and bring her back home. And the kids continued to grow with her as a surrogate big sister.

She was tremendously patient and good natured, letting them take charge of play and roughhousing endlessly with them (in her initial sales pitch, she emphasized that she had two younger brothers that had trained her well for babysitting, and it was true.) I kept up with developments in Sam's life on those drives back and forth to her house, as she and her family vacillated between homeschooling and Christian schooling and public schooling and homeschooling again for her and her twin sister Hana. Then to our delight, they moved back to Murrieta to a neighborhood on the other side of town, and it became easier to have Sam over to play. She was for years my only break from stay-at-home parenting and then, after Steve took the buyout at the Times, our biggest source of date time.

When she turned 17 she got her driver's license, which suddenly made it even easier to have Sam over to sit, now that I didn't have to provide transportation as well. But I lost the chance to catch up with her and her life on those drives, and I had gotten busy too, with my massage practice, and didn't take the time to chat on the way out the door or back in. (It was Sam who helped me realize that I wanted to be a massage therapist. She was talking about not knowing what she wanted to be when she grew up and I half-jokingly said something like "I don't know either. I think I want to be a massage therapist when I grow up," and I stopped and thought, "Okay Sue, time to listen to yourself.")

So, I've known that Sam's gotten busier and busier over the last year or two, but wasn't paying too much attention and chalked it up to a social life and growing independence. When she told us a couple of months ago that her folks are thinking of moving to Denver and that she is planning on moving to Chicago, I saw it mostly as confirmation that it's time for us to leave. I did wonder what she was going to do in Chicago and whether it was brave or foolhardy of her to just take off, but I still didn't realize who Sam had become. I knew that she sang and played guitar for her church and that she was good enough to be asked to lead youth music worship each week. I knew she was giving guitar lessons to students and thought vaguely that I should see if the kids wanted to learn from her someday. I knew she was singing at some coffee shops around town and asked her to let us know when she had a gig, but I don't think she was quite ready to have us in the audience.

Last week, I asked her again if she was playing anywhere anytime soon and that we'd love to hear her. I was mostly thinking that I wanted the kids to see someone they knew making music, to connect with it in that way. She called us late in the week and said she'd be playing a set outside the mall Sat. evening. So we went last night.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing as I walked up, and when I saw Steve walking towards us a few minutes later after parking the car, he was mouthing "wow" at me. I sat in the folding chairs of the courtyard and watched her standing on stage, barefooted, unassuming, conversational and at ease in a self-deprecating way. She played guitar and sang in a powerful, rich folksy voice, very distinctive. I wish I knew more about music to describe it better, but here's a link to her myspace page if you want to hear for yourself. Her songwriting is amazingly sophisticated as well, at least to my untrained ear.

So many thoughts went through my head during that set of music -- amazement at her raw talent, dismay that I hadn't been somehow paying more attention to her life and worry that one day I'd turn around and realize that my own kids had blossomed into beautiful, talented adult beings without my paying enough attention to their transformation. I saw her decision to move to Chicago in a totally different light now -- of course she was going to Chicago! She needed to immerse in a larger music scene, to expand herself, to experience more of life and transmute it into music.

Steve sat next to me and marveled at what she was giving to us all, struck, he said, by the realization that this is why you pursue art, to offer it up to the world, to share your gifts.

And somehow, I also felt embarassed that I had been asking this amazingly talented young woman to come play with my kids for ten bucks an hour for all these years, what a waste of her time! (But I realize that's not true. In fact, Sam sweetly dedicated a song to Maddie and Harry, "the kids I babysit in the back row there.") I thought, "Good lord, my kids have been climbing all over the future Alana Morissette." I better get an autograph before she goes. No, what I really want is some pictures. Pictures of the young woman who helped me raise my kids, before she heads off on her own life's adventures...