The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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My first banjo was one I traded a semi-automatic Marlin .22 for, a good deal for the guy trading the banjo. Nice gun, pretty poor banjo. But it got me pickin and grinning and for that, it was a great swap for me too. A couple years later I found a nicer one in a Stanwoodopolis 2nd hand shop and even though it was a couple hundred dollars, I jumped right on that deal like a dog on a bone.

Before you know it, I was playing Cripple Creek and Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Shady Grove like ringing a bell. The second banjo was okay, but nothing to write home about. So when I found a used beauty up in Mt. Vernon at the music store on consignment, I knew at first glance it was not only a very nice instrument, it was meant for me. Actually, I figured I could sell the first two and pay for the good one, what we bluegrass yahoos call Zero Sum Pain.

My wife at the time, my Ex, she didn’t live up on the South End with me. She had a boyfriend and a house in Seattle and Gomorrah. We were waltzing toward a breakup, but never quite making it to the end of the dance. A lot of bust-ups are like that, I think, slow motion wrecks any fool could see wasn’t avoidable so why not just get it over with?

When I mentioned my discovery of this sweet little 5 string practically being given away up north, she wondered aloud — as you might have too — why in blue hell did I need another banjo when I barely could play 3 songs on the two I got?? Well, okay, I said, but this was a helluva deal and one I’d sorely HATE to pass up, practically a ticket to Nashville, baby.

We quarrelled a bit as we often did back in those loveless days and finally I said I meant to buy the bugger. I’d sell the first two. Probably make a tidy profit when the smoke cleared. “You buy that thing and I’ll leave you,” she vowed.

Well, I’m sure many a marriage has cracked up on the rocks over a banjo. But usually they bust up over playing them. Leave em in the closet, you have 50/50 chance of making the next anniversary. Buy 3 and play em … all badly … and often … trust me, music doesn’t always soothe the savage breast.

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The power went off an hour ago. Computers went dark, afternoon TV blinked and disappeared, washing machines stopped mid-spin, life as we know it came to a complete and abrupt halt, a small reminder that the Digital World is more fragile and vulnerable than we Modernists like to admit.

I was back in the woods splitting and hauling next year’s fuel, 12 cords filling up the sheds. Behind me the Baker Woman has her outdoor oven stoked and filled with today’s loaves. This noon I’m going to visit the Goat Lady who quit her Boeing career to homestead up behind the Barefoot Bandit’s trailer. She’s got milk and eggs and cheeses for sale and I plan to stock up.

A neighbor called yesterday offering mussels she’d gathered. I ate my first salad out of our garden last night. The folks who bought the farm to the north of us plan to open a micro-brewery and maybe a small boutique distillery. We ate oysters from Triangle Bay a couple of friends raised from seed and are cultivating into a fairly large nursery.

When I survey the neighborhood, what I find are folks making furniture, building boats, milling wood from timber, fashioning musical instruments, making art of every conceivable kind, raising livestock, catching seafood, growing gardens, brewing beer, making breads and cheeses, living closer to the land. I don’t see the Past so much as I see our Future.

Like the Irish monks who toiled in the caves during the Dark Ages, us South Enders are keeping the flames of Old Knowledge alive. And when the time arrives, when the power is nearly gone, a sporadic spark along decaying fiber optic grids, we’ll re-emerge, blinking in the newly discovered sunlight of another Dawn, ready to pass along the knowledge once thought obsolete. Meanwhile, we’re not too troubled by power outages. Power, as we all should know, isn’t just electrical.

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The mizzus came home the other day with some real bad news. It seems she’d been at some soiree or other, schmoozing with the local philanthropists and somehow or other my name was brought up. She loves being guilty by association – or marriage – when the discussion turns literary. “Her husband is Skeeter Daddle,” they say and she knows by now there’s no hole on all of the South End big enough to crawl into. Me, I just tell her she swore For Better or For Worse and she got Door #2. Apologies and half assed jokes aren’t good for much after 32 years, I guess.

Seems there was a gentleman at the soiree who was NOT a fan of the Daddle School of Dark Humor. Hard as it is to believe…. “I won’t read that stuff,” he declared, referring to my contribution to South End Culture with about the same regard as his neighbor’s dog’s leavings on his perfect fescue. Not much room for further conversation after dropping that little buzzkill, but she managed to remain graceful. After all, she’s had practice.

I have never subscribed to the school of thought that art, whether musical or visual or literary is some kind of popularity contest, although, in full disclosure, I understand that on some levels, particularly the fiscal, it most certainly is. Offend enough of your would-be audience and see how much work you find. Explains why the South End String Band doesn’t play politics. Our fan base is small enough without cutting it in half.

The trick, you understand, is not to sell out for the applause. Or the popularity. Or the bucks either. Sometimes you have to offend some sensibilities, not necessarily intentionally — well, okay, intentionally! — if you’re going to make Art. Otherwise you might as well work for a corporation. (Gosh, no offense to those of you who did.) They’ll pay you to say the correct thing. They’ll promote you if you toe the line.

These are polarized times we live in. If you didn’t offend someone most of the time, you weren’t saying anything. To the guy who won’t read this, I guess I’ll just have to live with the weight of your disapproval. Me, I don’t give a rat’s patootie. It’s the mizzus I worry about — and I notice it was her you dropped your criticism on, not me. What do we make of that, Ace?

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My ex-wife and I bought a house in a Seattle ghetto back in ’77. She was living with her boyfriend across town and I lived in the ghetto house with an assortment of roommates. Don’t ask, it’s too long a story right now. The house was in what was the Red Line District, meaning grocery stores, pharmacies, most retail weren’t able to finance from the banks which considered our area a DMZ. We did have a small store down the block which sold beer and fortified wines, some bread and old dairy, lots of canned goods, pop and candy. In a pinch, I shopped there. When I got my change, it was always short. Always. Not being the sort who argues about nickels and dimes, I wrote it off as a sort of ‘tip’ to the clerk, usually an obese black guy who never said hello or thanks or how’s the crime down your way?

Wednesday nights my wife would come over to visit. We had a small black and white television set that got 3 channels, something called an Astronaut, probably Sputnik era. The sound was shot — even turned up full volume, you could barely hear it. My wife liked watching it while we ate dinner, usually a box pizza. We were ‘living large’, as we say down in the mean streets. One Wednesday she forgot to bring wine so I hopped over to the ghetto market and bought something savory and romantic to go with sitcoms and preservative packed pizzas. I was thinking our marriage might’ve pretty much run its rope. I was thinking maybe I was close to Bottom. Course, if you think that, you aren’t even looking over the edge of the abyss. Yet.

I carefully chose an insouciant little white zinfandel for $3.99 plus tax, took it to the counter and watched ruefully as my friendly merchant shorted me most of a dollar in change. Don’t ask me why, but I chose this moment to challenge his math skills. “Mistakes, happen, Man,” he shrugged. “They happen all the time here,” I said, “and oddly, Man, they always come up short on my end.”

“Don’t got to shop here, you know. Plenty of other places. Free country.”

A racist thought jumped into my politically correct head. I kept it to myself, pocketed my extra quarters and headed back to Camelot with a fine bottle of screwtop swill. My ex was 5 feet from the Astronaut, sound this tinny scratchy noise. I poured her a tumbler of zin, popped a beer and we settled in to eat pizza and watch reruns. When she finished her wine she mentioned casually she had to leave soon. She and her beau were meeting for an evening of fun and frivolity and, well, she’d forgotten to mention it, but there you are.

My one lousy night a week marriage just got whittled down a bit. I looked at her with what I assume was a look of incalculable pathos mixed with scarcely concealed rage and/or disappointment. I’m guessing it was actually the look of a rube at the fair who just spent his last dollar on his girl throwing baseballs at rigged targets for a kewpie doll prize he’d never in a million reincarnations ever win. When she left minutes later, I sat stupidly staring at the Astronaut, slowly becoming aware the sound had given out, no doubt beyond earth’s orbit and terrestrial audio range. I twisted the dial until it too left orbit.

It was later that night, after midnight, when the wine was gone and the beer too and most of what was left of a stupid marriage. The TV had sat on its crappy little stand, flickering black and white images for hours, snowy ghosts dancing in my peripheral. At some point I jerked the power cord out of the wall and the picture shrank to a dot then nothing. I picked up the set, walked out the front door with it and up the now rainy street to my ghetto store. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just walked up the block looking, to any cop driving along, like a looter on his way to the pawn shop with a brand new stolen TV.

The store was closed, the doors shut behind iron bars, the lights mostly out other than a neon or two. I suppose I vaguely planned to put the TV through a window, but the bars made that plan pretty much senseless, if it ever made sense before. Finally I put the Astronaut on the ground in the doorway next to a couple of empty fifths of wine, gave it a good kick in the picture tube teeth and walked away. If I thought the Space Age had ended, I was in for a very long wait.

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