The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Some of the ladies down at the Salon were engaged in a Round Table discussion during perms and touch-ups. It’s a mixed clientele at the Salon, partly the result of stylists who run the gamut from tattoos and piercings with rainbow streaked hair to the primly permed. It does make for lively debates under the blowdryers. Ronald, the token gay guy, he of the nose ring and silk puffy shirts was listening to Carol Wanderman’s diatribe on the Pope’s call to tackle global warming as a moral issue. She was deeply Catholic and she didn’t want the Holy See stepping into politics, especially when she disagreed with him. “What does he know about science?” she asked the room.

“Oh, sweetie,” Ronald sniffed, “you are SO right on. Didn’t they send Galileo to the Inquisition?”

Carol shook her curlers like evil talismen at him, started to respond, but Jill in the chair next door, jumped in first. “I don’t mind the pontiff piping in,” she said while Brenda snipped and clipped Jill’s new bangs. “But if he thinks global warming is a moral question, what about population control? You think all these new people in 3rd world countries aren’t the REAL problem?”

Mrs. Ketchum arched a penciled eyebrow from above her apron. “The world has to grow, dear. You can’t dictate morals in the bedroom.” To which Ronald snorted wildly, tossing back his newly curled coif. “Tell THAT to the queer haters.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Ronald,” Mrs. Ketchum protested. “It’s unbecoming.” Ronald giggled. “The Q word, you mean. Well, darlings, that’s a word of pride now.”

“Oh Ronald …” Kathy at the far chair sighed.

“And,” Ronald continued, “you ladies should thank us for NOT contributing to population growth. Talk about cutting down carbon footprints! I mean ….!”

“Oh we do, Ronald,” Jill laughed, “we do. We broke the mold after you.”

“All I ask,” he smiled, “is the proper appreciation.” He handed Betty, his walk-in client who must have thought she was getting styled in Oz, a mirror and asked, “How do you like the New You?”

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I’m flying the friendly skies once more. For a yahoo who hates to fly, I sure seem to be doing a lot of it lately. Someday … probably sooner than later … historians will look back at jet travel the way we look back at big fin Cadillacs, giant carbon footprints. Political correctness will dictate that Frequent Flyers be denigrated for the culpability they share for turning the planet into a hellbroth of CO2 and acid rain. Meanwhile, I have to get to Utah.

Down here at South End International I’ve passed by the sniffer hound, a couple of TSA agents and managed to get through X-ray. X-ray is the government’s tactic to irradiate frequent flyers, thereby inducing various cancers and reducing multiple future flights. I’m sure there are already folks who believe this implicitly. Has the same result so I guess the government strategy works.

Security, even though I’m traveling more often, is amazingly fluid. We have now a TSA pre-check, which means somehow, probably random, the air passengers selected can keep their shoes on and dispense with fluid checks and various other scrutinizing. Apparently the traveling terrorist will not receive a TSA pre-check. I’m sure there’s a mathematical calculation on probability PhD’s have worked out on government super computers.

Today I took my shoes off but kept my belt buckled. The lady in front of me could leave her laptop in her bag. Last time she had to take it out. But she had to take her belt off. My pocket debris had to be stowed in my pack — no plastic tray in my line. Sometimes my handkerchief has to be taken out of my pocket, sometimes not. A recent test of TSA security found that knives, guns and explosives hidden to check the agents’ effectiveness, went through about 90% of the time, meaning, I suppose, terrorists would be thwarted in at least 10% of terror attempts. Statistics don’t lie, mister!

What I deduce from this is that if they would succeed 90% of the time, there must not be much terrorism being attempted. After all, why risk it if there’s a 10% chance of failure? I wanted to run that by a couple of this morning’s agents … but, I do want to get to Utah this week sometime. I might slip a gun through, no way I’m sliding a wisecrack by ….

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We don’t have many rules down here on the anarchic South End. Don’t need em, don’t want em, won’t obey em anyway. But there IS one unwritten one, maybe not something Moses brought down from the Mountain, but if he were around today, he’d probably make it the 11th Commandment: Do NOT do plumbing prior to arriving guests.

Plumbing looks easy. Seems like you take off a coupler here, exchange a faucet, replace a gasket, nothing to it…. If you think that, you’ve never done plumbing and you don’t live down here at the butt end of an island where the nearest plumbing parts are 10 miles away and the nearest SERIOUS plumbing parts stores are 40 miles away. Plumbing Repairs for the Complete Idiot states emphatically: no repair project requires LESS than 3 trips to the hardware store. It is a Law of the Universe, right up there with E= mc squared. It is inviolable. I know, believe me, I know.

I got company coming tomorrow. Don’t ask me why, but … yeah, I broke the 11th Commandment. I thought it would be a no-brainer, a piece of cake, a walk in the park. Just pull our old pitted pedestal sink and replace it with my new 100 year old mint-condition porcelain beauty, a $12.50 score at the RE-Store. All I had to do was disassemble the brass fixtures, put em on the new one and voila’, a Martha Stewart golden moment.

Course, the old parts, being 100 years old and corroded beyond belief, proved a bit recalcitrant, but I patiently worked with pliers, screwdrivers, vise grips, monkey wrenches, hammers, hacksaws, spit, curses and pitiable prayers to the implacable gods of plumbing. Half a day later I had the old sink literally in pieces. The pieces, of course, didn’t match up to the new sink. You can trying mating disparate parts of corroded brass with stripped threads in multiple arrangements, but … guaranteed, they won’t mate up, not in an hour, not in a day, not in the puny time left to you and me in this human lifetime.

So I went to the hardware store. Not once, not twice … you KNOW how many if you believe in PHYSICS. Meanwhile, our company is en route. I guess they can wash up with the outside hose. I suppose they’ll be understanding. Or … maybe this just a South Ender’s strategy for shortening their visit.

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Haul out the champagne and shoot off some leftover fireworks!!! Tyee Store reopened!!! They got lotto, they got white bread, they got cheap beer. The world, according to this South Ender, has tilted back into proper orbit. Oh, I know, the fly-by of Pluto was a pretty big deal and maybe more cause for celebration for some, but unless they sell cigarettes and catfood on the mini-planet, let’s try to keep one foot on terra firma.

Tyee Store is back and so what if NASA didn’t send an unmanned satellite to record the event? I sent myself, sickle in hand, through the salmonberry thickets and the nettle jungle and the blackberry barricades that had, for the last few storeless years, grown monstrously wild. I felt like when Lewis and Clark hit the Oregon and Washington coast and the Chinooks paddled up to them in the miserable little cove they’d taken shelter in from a wild storm. Gale force winds didn’t stop the natives from rolling in for some serious bartering and a mile of menacing overgrowth wasn’t going to stop me either. Tyee Store was open again and so was my trail to it. The explorers who made it to the North and South Pole, trust me, they didn’t leave a trail for the next folks.

I know, some of you maybe think, so what? A little mom and pop grocery has reopened after a couple of years, gonna sell some popsickles and camp supplies, some Pall Malls and Bud Lite, big whoop! But for us refugees down here at the end of the island, Tyee Store is the Real Deal. It’s our crackerbarrel, our gossip central, our cultural center and our trading post combined. We’ve gone a long time hauling supplies down from the North. The sled dogs are tired, the transit bus won’t come clear down here, the isolation is wearing on all us pioneers. You think cabin fever is bad, try it when the jerky is gone and the last can of Spam is being held for the next Christmas dinner. Tyee Store is a godsend, let me tell you.

I know, some of you northerners and off-islanders will never set foot on the South End, much less in Tyee Store. Big bunch of nothing down here for you suburbanites and city dwellers. But someday, mark my words, the Tyee Store will be a museum and a visitor center for a time when the Costco’s and the Walmarts hadn’t sent their ubiquitous tentacles into the hinterlands yet, where you couldn’t always get what you wanted, but you got what you needed. And when you did, when you walked into that far-flung outpost of experimental retailing, when you saved yourself that hellish trip to the Plaza or Elger Bay Store, when you walked across the island through a tunnel of brambles, sure, it cost a little more. It maybe cost a lot more, but this was our store, all of us down here, and we’re ecstatic to have it back.

Course, in a week we’ll be belly-aching about the prices and the selections. But … we always did and we always will. It is, after all, the South End.

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