The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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On my afternoon walk yesterday around the Head I ran into a couple doing the same thing, something you might consider ordinary except for the fact that nobody walks the Head.  In all my years on the South End I’ve rarely run into anyone down that southernmost stretch of beach.  From Wilkes-Garry on the western side to Tyee Beach on the eastern, there’s an uninhabited section of Camano that runs about 5 or 6 miles without a house or a shack or even an artist studio.  Pristine.  With views of the Olympics, Hat Island, Mt. Rainier, the south end of Whidbey, the Cascades and finally Mt. Baker.  All to yourself.  It is a place so remote the carcasses of dead whales stinking up the waterfront of Everett are towed here, presumably where the stench of rotting blubber won’t bother anyone.

But yesterday I run into two folks.  Nice couple, live in a house in Wilkes-Garry I passed on my way beyond civilization so naturally we made a little conversation, moved beyond the weather, talked about this and that, but finally got to some palaver about exercise, diet, clean living, good health.  My newfound buddy told me he was 69, probably, he said, a little older than me, but hey, he didn’t drink or smoke, he ate a healthy diet and look, he was the picture of health.  I mumbled something or other about how a regimen like that probably helped keep him the Adonis he was and his wife smiled beatifically.

Course, that just opened the door to some health remedy he was promoting, hell if I listened close, but something to do with a miracle artery roto-rooting without medical procedures, clean out your arteries and plenty of other corollary benefits, mostly inducing me to consider escape options.  When he got to the part about how he kept himself in shape with clean living, which he defined now as a life without sin, sin being a disease and a sickness unto itself, I had trouble resisting the urge to mention that my own recipe for a long and prosperous life kind of included drinking and drugs and probably sin too, a prescription that obviously worked slightly better than his judging by my advanced years and the fact that he’d asked how far it was to Tyee, meaning he’d never walked that far, just a Stroller, apparently, whereas I obviously walked that far.  And oh, by the way, I said,  I’m a few years older than you, just look a lot younger….

I finally tore myself away from any further potential panaceas, bid them a good day and a good walk in the sun, then sauntered on home.  I guess we’re all looking for cures and remedies.  I mean, I guess if you think you found the news you must want to share it.  So to that end, any of you reading this and feeling a little under the weather, maybe dial back on your sinning a bit.  You’ll feel better in no time….

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When I finally reached the ripe old age of 65, my nanny state sent me a notice that I could sign up for national health care, what some might call socialist medicine.  Not me, I call it health care, paid for through my taxes over the years along with Social Security, what some would call a socialist give-away, but once again, not me.  I call it my retirement fund.  My nest egg for old age.  But to tell you the absolute truth, call it whatever you want.  And if you hate socialist programs, by all means, turn the money down and buy your own damn health care insurance.

For awhile I thought I understood finally what the Golden Years meant.  Freedom from going bankrupt from the next health care crisis, if nothing else.  That, of course, was before the phone started ringing.  I have a landline, the precursor to a flip phone and the subsequent generations of cellular gizmos.  My landline doesn’t have caller ID, something so far I refuse to pay for since I’m willing to answer my phone and be surprised who might be calling.  At any hour of the day or night.  I remember when we were on a party line here on the South End.  Cost an additional buck a mile from the phone headquarters up in Mt. Vernon to get a private line.  Per month.  We endured the teenage girl and her mom for about a year before taking our grocery money to pay for a phone we could actually use occasionally.  And that may be the case with caller ID eventually.

We get calls starting early in the morning and into the evening.  They’re 90% from ‘Medicare Providers’.  And they’re 90% non-human.  They might ask how we are and if you answer, their programmed machine intelligence launches into their pitch.  I used to keep answering the robot until a human was connected in order to finalize whatever transaction they had for me, then I would request they take me off their list.  The next day, same time, the Hi, I’m Amy message would come on, repeated later in the day, repeated until you have lost your mind and found yourself talking ugly to the robot.  The robot, thinking you just answered its last query, moves on to the next part of the sequence.

This is not what I had in mind for my Golden Years.  What this is is the capitalist health care system piggybacking my Medicare.  They’ll send me some box of health care stuff free of charge, so they say, and I assume the government will reimburse them.  Maybe folks are happy to get free medical stuff.  Right now I have all the medical stuff I want.  Band aids mostly and a bottle of expired aspirin, but all I need. If I thought ditching Medicare would stop these incessant phone calls from Amy the Android, I might vote to repeal Obamacare and go back to the wild west of the American healthcare system, but somehow I suspect Amy and her legions of robot telemarketers would fill the void until having a phone with or without caller ID would be senseless.

Course, the peace and quiet might be worth it.

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As you infrequent readers well know, I’m not the kind of person who complains or whines or throws himself on the ground in fits of rage over some insignificant slight.  Okay, sometimes I do.  And all right, maybe that’s basically my M.O.  Take this latest outrage and you tell me if I’m overwrought to what essentially is another of those small indignities that make everyday life a smidgeon smaller and a tad harder to take.

I’m talking about my two daily newspapers, morning papers, the ones I read quietly guzzling coffee before undertaking chores and work and the daily grind — those papers, delivered by 6:15 a.m. by some poor schmuck paid by the mile and by the paper, using his or her own car, the one with the failing muffler and the terrible mpg’s, but usually on time.  But gee, the publishers of those two papers evidently can’t round up delivery folks to get up at 3 a.m., hit the distribution sites, then motor down to this end of the island at the end of the world, so their solution: mail the day’s edition, already old news in a digital age of instantaneous information, via the U.S. Postal Service, the one the last Administration made far less efficient, hoping to undercut our faith in a system going back to old Ben Franklin.

So that now we get our morning paper late afternoon.  You tell me what universe, economic or journalistic, this makes sense in?  It is, after all, called a NEWspaper, not a history essay.  And yeah, I KNOW I can substitute the New York Times online or I can listen to NPR mornings, repeated every two hours, or I can watch daytime TV and catch the headlines on local news channels … but dammit, I’m an old codger and I want my, not MTV, my newspaper to read quietly in the morning WITH coffee.

Needless to say, sorry to whine, but now I read Yesterday’s news in the morning.  I know it’s pathetic and possibly intolerable over the long run.  But for now that’s my solution and I’m not happy about it.  Just thought you needed to know.

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When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.  Just me and my baby.  Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.  Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.  Like making a living.  Or needing a few skills.  You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.  Basic stuff like that.  I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:  Love will find a way.  Or all you really need is love.  Or love is the answer.  Love love love.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.

Oh brother.  I’ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.  Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.  Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.

You can learn life’s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.  Oh baby oh baby oh baby.  Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.  But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.  Or nightmares, really.  Still, I was knock-headed persistent.  Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:  Hand to Mouth Survival.  Karen, my wife now of four decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.

The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.  I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,  that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.

We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story…with an ending not yet written.  I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window – I think we all know it’s really, on some level, still a love story.

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Francine rolled into the County Administration offices looking like the dog had dragged her to work.  “These three day holiday weekends are going to be the death of me,” she muttered to Harvey, the county’s health officer.  Harvey looked up from his list of septic tank inspections for the week and said, “What?  You don’t like football playoffs all day long, all weekend long?”

Francine tossed her purse behind the counter and made a bee-line to the coffee urn in the back corner.  She was still growling by the time she returned with her quart mug Big Gulp steaming with fresh joe.  “One ballgame is one too many, Harve, but honest to god, there must have been a dozen.  Wally had a friend or ten over, beer cans everywhere and crummy leftover pizzas far as the eye could see.”

Wally was her 26 year old son, laid off from the lumber mill in Sedro Wooley three years ago, unemployment exhausted and now a refugee in Francine and her husband Trey’s basement which they’d finished off into living quarters.  If you called a room with no windows, a small bed, apartment sized fridge and a makeshift toilet and sink ‘living’.  He had a small TV in there but mostly Wally watched ESPN on the 48 inch drive-in theater screen in Trey and Francine’s living room.  Meaning, his real living was upstairs.

“How long are kids supposed to stay in the nest, Harve?  Riddle me that!”

“I read the other day that nearly half of children from 18 to 30 were living with their folks.  You’re in good company, Frannie.  Just takes longer these days for kids to grow up, I guess.”

“When I was 18, I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house.  Got an apartment with a couple of girlfriends in Seattle, found a job and got out.  What’s so hard about that?”

Harvey put his appointment list down.  “Remember what you paid for the apartment, Fran?  My first one was 75 bucks, some sad little second story one bedroom over the TV repair shop down in Ballard.  75 bucks a month.  What do you suppose that would go for now?  I bet you couldn’t find anything cheaper than a thousand.  On top of that, figure how much some minimum wage job would pay.  Might tell you why kids are living at home.”

Francine took a slow hit off her Big Gulp cup.  “You think we should charge Wally rent?”  The idea seemed to grow immediately in her imagination.  She was looking at Harvey and already nodding her head.  Why not? she was saying more to herself than him.  Room and board too!  Yes, why not?  “Harvey,” she finally said out loud, “you’re a genius.”

Harvey shrugged.  Tomorrow Franny would be muttering about the same thing.  The kid couldn’t afford rents in the area, he sure couldn’t afford Francine’s.  “Or,” he said, shuffling papers, “you could move away.  That’s what we did.  Jim, our son, didn’t want to leave his friends.  I hear Phoenix is nice.  At least winters….”

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