The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

History is written by the winners, some say, but those folks obviously never ran into the South End String Band. Saturday, Feb 6th, the Stanwoodopolis Historical Society will host ‘Camano in a Clamshell’, a brief but complete history of the island by us losers, the South End String Band, fiddling once again while Rome burns with special guest Julie Campbell on violin.

According the band’s grief counselor, Skeeter Daddle, it will be a fair and balanced accounting of Camano’s rich past as a backwash paradise accompanied by song and music. As always, food will be provided, wine and beer will be available and ample, the music will be spirited and history degrees will be awarded to those who complete the course by the prestigious if non-accredited Elger Bay Institoot of Aesthetic Enlargement.

7 pm Sat. Feb. 6th, Floyd Norgaard Cultural Center. $15 donation at the door. Y’all come on down! Remember, you forget history, you got to repeat it. Don’t make us do that to you. Once is plenty.

Awhile back I was at the Big Hospital up north looking up a friend who’d been admitted the day before. Something about a hospital that puts you off your ease … even after working at one for 10 years. Or maybe because of it.

I’d slipped past Admitting and planned to head right up to my buddy’s room, but I needed to use the john so I found a sign that pointed to the restrooms at the far end of the hall. When I turned the corner a guy was standing next to the Men’s room with his back to me. What, a line? I’d barely seen anybody cruising the halls, couple of nurses about it. I was about to ask if he was waiting for the toilet when he turned around and mumbled in a garbled voice something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Say again?” I asked. He was pointing now to his crotch. Zipper unzipped. Creepy thoughts were flashing red lights in my head when he mumbled something else unintelligible. I shook my head. “No comprende,” I said and he pointed to his crotch again with the zipper wide open. He was tugging at the thing in some distress and I was feeling more than a little distressed myself.

“Mmm, muh, mawah,” he told me. You read these stories in the newspaper, you get overdosed with em on TV news. You think perverts are everywhere, waiting down an alley, crouched in a dark corridor, hiding in a bathroom stall. We’re all one step from being victims, the next night’s news lead. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t let your kids out of your sight. Lock your doors, bolt em from inside. Buy a gun. Hell, carry a gun. Depravity is everywhere! Danger! Danger!

Don’t ask me why, but I stood there. “What?” I asked and he pointed one more time at his crotch, zipper down. Finally, finally, I asked if he wanted help getting it zipped up. He garbled something happily, nodded his head yes. I reached down and put two hands on his fly, pulled the zipper up and looked at this guy. He was nodding earnestly. He mangled something that sounded like thanks. I took it to be exactly that. When he started down the hallway, he had a tortured gait, hip akimbo, leg hauled along painfully, holding close to the wall.

It’s a small thing, that little act of hesitant kindness. I hate to think how hard this man’s life must be, how much fear he witnesses day in and day out, how courage must seem rare to him. Maybe we should quit watching the nightly crap on the evening news. It makes cowards of us.

I got myself some new health insurance last year which replaced the ‘catastrophic’ health plan we had the past 30 years or so. The catastrophic plan was actually more of a catatonic plan, meaning, we’d have to be nearly dead to get any benefit from it. It just kept the wolves from picking the bones clean when things got bad and our savings were used up in the first round of care. For the past few years I’ve been hobbled a bit with a bad knee, something I figured would heal up over time but didn’t. So … with that new insurance plan in hand, I decided to limp in for a look-see.

The South End Clinic is a small but busy little place. My appointment to see a doc took a month, but I finally got in for an appointment just before Christmas. The doctor asked questions, rotated the knee, said it could be any number of things so he scheduled me for an x-ray. A week later I had the knee x-rayed at a clinic in town. A few days later the South End Clinic called me with the results. Mostly old age, they said and gave me an appointment for another visit to see the doctor.

I went in a few days ago. Got my blood pressure rechecked and my weight redone, then I got deposited in a waiting room. My doc came in, checked my chart, asked how I felt, asked if my wrist feel any better. I said my wrist still hurt, but it was my knee I wanted to have looked at. He checked the chart again then asked once more about my wrist. After a couple verses of the kneebone’s connected to the neck bone he finally seemed exasperated and called me by name.  Ronald somebody.

No, I said, wrong patient. I’m the one with the bad knee. He shook his head sadly, apologized and told me to wait for a few minutes while he retrieved my chart, probably from some poor guy down the hall getting arthroscopic surgery on a knee that wasn’t bothering him. Just before he shut the door I asked, “This mean I don’t get that new heart?”

It took him a double-take but he finally smiled. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Me, I can’t tell you how good it feels to be in the health care system finally.

I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 65 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.

So I’m sitting in the South End Clinic filling out paperwork they lost the last and only visit many years ago … when a young guy comes in with what he tells the receptionist is a very bad cut on his hand from work. His hand is wrapped in a dirty handkerchief held in place with duct tape. The receptionist explained they don’t do that kind of emergency — he’d need to drive himself to the next clinic down the road in Stanwoodopolis. About 10 to 15 miles.

But wait … did he have insurance, she asks. He did, but then he was told the clinic about two pints of hemoglobin away wouldn’t accept the insurance he had. Could he drive 15 to 20 miles further?

Healthcare, at least from my seat in the waiting room, seemed hazardous to this guy’s health, if he even makes it the 40 mile drive before blacking out at the wheel. No one asked him how bad the cut was, whether fingers were missing, if a transfusion was necessary. I know it’s not an emergency room, but it is, supposedly, a part of the health care system.

My brother, back in our days together in college, wanted to be a doctor … until the night he did a drunken back flip and hit the radiator in his dorm room with his head. His roommate ran him to the University ER where he sat for a couple of hours with other patients bleeding and vomiting and oozing fluids. By the time he got stitched up he had changed his major from Pre-Med to Don’t Know. Probably good to learn he was squeamish around pain and blood before he interned.

Sitting my turn at the South End Clinic, I know how he felt. Trouble was, I was a patient. On the South End we’ve always relied more on Self-Reliance than health insurance. But sadly, the time comes to all of us when we need outside help. Course, chances are good they’ll tell you to go further on up the road. Keep the gas tank full is what I’d suggest. And carry a tourniquet.

Some of the radicals down at the South End Marina were discussing the take-over of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge down in eastern Oregon. They had started down by the boatsheds but had ended up in the Pilot Lounge where they could fuel their anger with alcohol. Walter, as usual, was the most vocal. “We ought to go down there and join these fellow patriots,” he cried after a couple of rum and cokes. “Show some solidarity!”

J.D. shook his head. “Don’t count on me, Walt. That’s another Waco in the making. The Feds are waiting now, but when they get bored, they’ll go in and clean up. Gonna be a bloodbath for sure.”

“It’s people like you, J.D., who let the government push us around. All these folks want is their land given back to the people.” A few heads nodded, another round was ordered and J.D. said he had to get home. “My turn to babysit the grandkids,” he said meekly and Walter’s laughter followed him out the door.

I was parked at the end of the bar with Guitar Bob, nursing a beer. Maybe it was the cold I’d been fighting for a few days that made me ornery. “Why don’tcha take over the State Park?” I asked the assembled militiamen. “Get our land back, why don’tcha?” Guitar Bob raised a glass in a salute.

Walter, always up for a challenge, shouted, “That’s the best idea you’ve had since I knew you, Skeeter. You gonna come with us?”

“Walter, I got some bad news for you. We already own the park. And we own that Wildlife Refuge down in Oregon too. If you got the park back, who you gonna have run it? Fix the roads? Clean up the toilets? All that stuff? You??”

“Power to the People!” Guitar Bob shouted menacingly. “Off the pigs! Remember the Alamo!!” Bob had recently fallen off the wagon and to make up for lost time, he’d maybe a had a few too many. “Don’t tread on ME! you %#@**!#”

Well, as you can imagine, things went swiftly downhill from there. Last I heard Bob was 86’d from the Pilot Lounge. Walter couldn’t muster enough manpower to take the men’s washroom, much less the State Park. And I took my head cold home where I fell asleep watching the evening news which probably explained my troubled dreams.

I just read a study that proved ‘grumpy’ miserable people live just as long as the happy cheerful folks. This is good news to us seasonally afflicted South Enders, all us perennial grumpsters holed up in our dark shacks hoping Global Warming is true and it gets here soon. I can say for myself, at least now that I can rub this phony smile off my mug and go back to honest cynicism knowing it won’t cause cancer or a heart attack, it’s a relief. A smile, I don’t care how many times you sing it, isn’t much of an umbrella. Even face down ….

Course half of us down here don’t believe in science so a ‘study’ isn’t going to change most minds. Half don’t buy climate change or evolution or the Round Earth theory. Just ornery, I guess. That, or they got religious beliefs we’re supposed to be tolerant of even if they’re intolerant toward everyone else’s.

I’m sure next year we’ll get a study on whether religion makes a believer happier. You’d sure think it would, not that they’d maybe live longer, but go ask the Taliban how cheerful they are without music or dancing in their lives. Some of our righteous neighbors seem too busy casting stones at the rest of us they don’t squeeze much joy out of their own lives, probably wouldn’t if every day was warm and sunny.

Personally I don’t think happiness springs from too rich a soil, not something that needs or wants much fertilizing. It requires maybe just the opposite occasionally, brings a little balance to the garden. Me, I sprinkle lots of skepticism, amend with some sarcasm, keep things a little on the warm side when I need to. I get plenty of bugs, worms, even critters. Gardening has its ups and downs, but the harvest, even if it’s on the lean side some years, is pretty good. Might not help me live longer, but it seems more natural, more honest.

And McDonald’s — you can go ahead and change the Happy Meal name, no health benefits, to what it truly is: Crappy Meal. You got science on your side now.

I get tons of viral e-mails from my old man, mostly right wing ranting about Muslims taking over Detroit and America, or the usual Obama-is-a-foreigner bent on destroying America, all the vitriolic propaganda you might think would fade out a little after 7 years of the Obama presidency. It’s been non-stop since 2012 and believe me, that seems like a lifetime.

Don’t ask me why, but this past year I decided to tune into Hot Talk Radio occasionally to listen in on what’s being said outside my usual frame of reference. My usual is three newspaper subscriptions, the New York Times online and plenty of NPR and PBS, what Rush calls ‘lame-stream drive-by media’ when he’s charitable, liars when he’s not. Hot Talk jocks aren’t much for dialogue or debate. They’re angry, they’re fed up, they’re not much interested in the clash of ideas so much as they want a clash. Democrats, all Democrats, are pretty much intent on destroying this once great country. They’re scaredy cats afraid to invade Syria, they lost Iraq, they want to open the floodgates to terrorists, they want to take away our guns, they want to see the Enemy win.

And there are plenty of Enemies. If you listen to this very long, you can become angry too. And more than a little cynical about the state of our union. You will distrust all government. Not just the Democrats, mind you, but those RINOS, those Republican in Name Only frauds who have capitulated too to the Enemy, the Democrats. You will be alarmed about the country going to the secularists, the gays, the politically correct, the Hollywood crowd, the anti-Bible, anti-Christian, anti-God folks who don’t understand what it means on the dollar bill In God We Trust. Your entire American Way of Life is under attack.

So when Donald Trump stepped onto the national soapbox, the lamestreamers thought he would fade in the polls about the time it took to say Birther Whackjob. Me, I bet my brother back a few months ago he would not only not fade, he would win the nomination. Jeb Bush, my brother said, and I said Jeb Bush, money or not, is the Enemy. Jeb Bush is dead raw meat for Trump and the Angry People. The Republican Party itself may be too.

A month ago my brother and I doubled that bet and Trump doubled his lead. He thinks, like most pundits, the Donald is too crazy to win. I think that is exactly why he will win. Maybe not the whole enchilada, but the GOP nomination. Maybe you’ll understand why I’m not going to celebrate when I collect my winnings… and why I’ve made my New Year’s Resolution to turn off right wing radio and stop reading my old man’s e-mails.

We always have a few friends in for Thanksgiving every year, mostly folks who don’t have family nearby. I guess we don’t either — this is our family. A few years back we had Dr. J____, a neighbor lady who preferred the Dr. added to her name, a PhD in business, giving her the right to ask, I suppose.

We’d pretty much sated ourselves on the abundance of the South End, gluttons for tryptophan overdoses, and maybe that was the reason Doc J decided as we cleared the debris before a second round of desserts to clear her throat and suggest, this Day of Thanks, that we go around the table, each one of us bloated feasters, and declare How We’d Like to Die.

“I’ll go first,” the good doctor volunteered. “I’ve given this some serious thought.”

Holy cranberry sauce, I thought as we all sat stunned. Before I could manage to sit bolt upright and offer objection, the professor was launched into her dream demise, a drowning at sea with her little dog Toto on her around-the-world cruise in her 40 foot sailboat. I could feel my turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes colliding with the yams and creamed beans and peas baked in onions. They were waging a war south of the duodenal canal and nobody was inclined colonward.

Finished with her preferred death, she turned to us future corpses and asked who was next? She looked at the person on her left but before that turkey-eater could launch into a thanatopsis, I raised a leg bone and demanded a halt to this. “It’s Thanksgiving,” I cried, “not a funeral. How about we go around and say what we’re thankful for? Jeez!”

Some folks are looking forward to Armageddon. They’ll tell you they’re the ones who’ll be saved, carried up to the Promised Land when the Rapture comes. Me, I’m gonna be glad to be left behind. And I was glad when the doctor finished dessert and left for home. Turns out she almost died near the Fijis on her ill-fated cruise. I guess you should be careful what you wish for. Or at least what others wish for you ….

For the past 30 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories.  I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska,  and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically  once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.

My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland.   My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff.  Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action.  ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’  So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day,  a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee.  Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff  we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.

I don’t remember what my favorite day was.  I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day.  But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time.  A real long time.  A way too long a time.   And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’  And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet)  My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’

Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that.  The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year.  You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself.   And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.

And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party.  And of course, you’re invited!  Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress.  Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends.  Happy New Year anyway.