Before my mom quit work to spend more time with me and my sister Jackie, our nanny Annie (don’t laugh) took excellent care of us, discounting the fact that she was nearly blind and once drove into the woods on our way back from school.

However, before those six blissful years that Annie the Nanny ran the show, the position changed hands so often it seemed my parents were firing and rehiring nearly every month. Some of the reasons for their quick downfalls were more obvious: one woman forced me to walk to school in the middle of winter without a jacket when I was five years old (granted I might’ve locked her out of the house for an hour when she went to retrieve her inhaler from her car); whereas others got the ax for more minor grievances, like the one whose boyfriend would come over and leave looking much happier, or the lady who kicked our dog Daisy in the ribs.

The craziest by far, though, was a very tall woman whose real name I don’t remember, so for the purposes of this story we’ll call her Belch Salad. Part of Belch Salad’s brilliance was that she never spoke one word to us, not for one minute of her full three weeks. Instead she communicated in a series of grunts, and the times we spoke to her directly, she would just sit back, stare at us, and release a burp toward the heavens.

And, oh my oh my, how her gaze never strayed when she churned out strings of burps so lengthy and variant she might as well have been performing in an orchestra. That was what was so horrifying; Belch Salad looked you dead in the eye while she played her instrument. And I remember her hair, even when she sat at the kitchen table, brushed up against the ceiling.

“Why do we always eat salad? We’re children, we like candy.”

BELCH!

“Please, miss. This is iceberg lettuce and a tomato. It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

BELCH!

“We don’t want this, please, how ’bout just a slice of bread?”

BELCH!

You know something, though? Thinking back on it, maybe Belch Salad had it right. Kids are annoying—we all know it—especially during the jerky ages of five through twelve. When you’re ten years old and throwing raccoon shit at the neighbor’s window, even you know you’re a jerk. Yeah, I bet Belch Salad knew just what she was doing.