The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Me and a sculptor neighbor were out and about the other day when we decided to go visit an old friend who was building a dome house out of a mixture of earth and cement, one of those South End homes the county shakes its head at but pretty much tries to ignore. It’s totally heartwarming to this old lapsed, apostolic hippie to see folks going back to the land and the basics. After all, that’s why I immigrated to the South End half a lifetime ago and why a lot of us are holed up down here today hiding from reality.

Our friend offered us some home-made scrumpie — she’s English — which is hard apple cider she’d pressed and fermented. It was, well, really drinkable. Excellent, actually. She offered us some artisan bread, baked, it turned out, in an outdoor wood-fired oven right behind my homestead by a neighbor I hadn’t met yet. I’ve made bread for forty years but I thought this was incredible bread. I maybe needed to meet the baker and take some refresher courses.

I’m always amazed and totally exhilarated to stumble on folks who are building their own homes or making their own wines, who play music on their back porch and sing to the highway, who plant their flower gardens and their orchards, who build boats or fashion an instrument, who take the time — even when time is precious — to make the world theirs. Of course you don’t have to go back to the land to do this. But you do have to return to a simpler time, to a slower pace with a natural rhythm, not a regimen or a routine. You have to return to why you came here in the first place.

Sometimes I forget. Like most of us, I’m in a hurry these days, but I couldn’t tell you why the rush? The times I meet folks who sway to the tidal ebb and flow rather than the tick and the tock, I’m reminded of an earlier South End, where jobs were mercifully sparse, money was a luxury and work was for your own ends. Make bread, brew beer, build your house. Life was good. I’m surrounded by friends who make art and music, who grow gardens and orchards, who teach me, when I most need it, how to recapture what is potentially so easily lost….

Hits: 50

Hits: 18

I guess we’ve all seen these folks at the freeway entry ramps with their mournful mendicant faces and their homemade signs that say they’re looking for work or money or food or a kind word and can you help, God Bless! They stand like stoic poster children for the poor, the homeless, the forgotten losers in the economic gears of a capitalist machine. They don’t seem to be on drugs or carry a bottle in a paper bag. They seem like us — okay, like me — just a bit down on their luck.

Myself, I’m a sucker for a panhandler on the sidewalk. I’ll empty my pockets even if I KNOW it’s going toward the purchase of the next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Maybe it’s the suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go I …. Some wrong turns, a round of bad luck, an accident, a disease, you name it, that guy with the glazed eyes, the bad breath, the shabby clothes — he could be me. On my dark days, I think maybe he IS.

But the folks on the freeway ramp, looking like the one at exit 205 or 216 or, well, all of them, I have this uneasy suspicion they all work for an outfit run by some smooth operator registered with the State of Washington as Legitimate Beggars, Inc. or BumsRus, LLC or just Freeway Freeloaders.com. The signs are hand scrawled but they seem remarkably uniform like they were copied from a foreman’s template or made down at the home office.

Maybe it’s that I’m enclosed in a steel and glass vehicle, window up, eye contact minimal, that makes me more critical than I am with the guy on the street asking for spare change. They certainly don’t look like they’re flush with income. They never look anything but gaunt and underfed. They seem Totally Authentic and yet … I never roll down the window, I never dig for loose change or a spare buck, I never quite see myself working that intersection.

Course, when they’re finally standing by Elger Bay Store, hands out, signs lettered in the same printed childish script, maybe they’ll melt my heart. Then again, we got plenty of needy down here now. They just don’t stand all day at the closest busy intersection. Maybe why they’re still needy…. They just need a little organizing and we got plenty of artists who could help me with those signs.

Hits: 66