The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

So I’m at an old buddy’s kid’s bar mitzvah reception after the shindig at the synagogue which I skipped, not being a fan of religious ceremonies and not versant in Yiddish. But it’s the kid’s day, he’s 12 and I guess now a confirmed man or adult or, hell, I don’t know, some passage out of childhood celebrated by family and friends. Okay, not by me. I really did not want to come to this thing but my buddy, after my firm rejection, went behind my back to Karen who said okay, which precipitated an argument that ended in a compromise to skip the Temple and show up at the reception. So what if it looks like we came for a free meal and an overdose of this klezmer band they’d hired to annoy the gatherers.

My pal’s mizzus barely spoke to us, no doubt peeved we’d boycotted her boy’s big deal. His brother, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, wouldn’t return a hello. Later he asked who the jerk with the hat was and learned the jerk was his brother’s best man at his Chicago wedding to marry the wife who now comes on cold as ice. Sure, I was having a good time.

Klezmer music is the equivalent of Scottish bagpipes, they’re weapons of war, a caterwaul meant to soften the will of the opponent, possibly force an early retreat, probably a route. Karen and I sat by ourselves, me stewing in a slow simmer, hoping for a quick retreat myself. By the third song by the band, I’d pretty much written off my pal. No friendship can survive these insane clarinets!

About then the kid wandered through, an official grown-up now, saying hello to any and all, probably no idea we’d met many times. Don’t ask me why, but for some ungodly reason I asked him what his plans for the future were. Criminey, didn’t we all hate adults asking us that bullshit question?

“I’m going to be an osteopathic surgeon,” he informed me with a certainty that to this day, I have no doubt he did. 12 years old. Jehovah almighty — kids shouldn’t be allowed to grow up that soon, I don’t care what religion you got.

So I’m in the grocery store frequented by the high school crowd at lunch breaks and on the wall of their latrine I find scrawled with a knife: Dare to be Normal. Driving into the parking lot minutes before, I had noticed a young girl dressed hat to boot in black, adorned in all manner of body puncture, looking for all the world like a poster child for National Sado-Masochism Day. Except for the pink stuffed animal strapped to her backpack. Inside the rough exterior of our would-be dominatrix lurks the soft heart of an innocent adolescent, apparently.

When I left the store I noticed a small knot of teenagers waiting at the crosswalk beside the highway for the light to change. All identical to the teddy bear toter, sans the teddy bear. Sure, it occurred to me to roll down the window and yell Dare to be Normal! but …. And here’s the rub …. These kids were normal. When we went to high school, we all pretty much looked homogenous — go check out your yearbook if you still got one. I don’t really want to dare anybody to be normal. Vote Ike again. Drive a Chevy. Drink Coke. Eat a Popsickle. Listen to the Beatles. Join the Army. Get a Job. Cut your Hair! Take out the Nose Ring!! Buy something at the Mall!!! Get married !!!! Have a family!!!!!!! Get a cemetery plot ahead of time!!!!!!!

Next time I’m in the grocery store, I’ll be looking for my little graffiti writing conformist. I assume he’ll be the one who isn’t dressed Goth, doesn’t have tattoos, wears blue suede shoes and a letter jacket and sports a butch crewcut regular color. He’ll look like my old man, is what I figure. And Dad, if it IS you philosophizing on the bathroom wall, knock it off! The kids will turn out like you after all, count on it.

United Airlines, always on the lookout for a good publicity story to promote their quality service, had a passenger forcibly removed from his overbooked seat. Judging by the viral videos, he didn’t seem agreeable to have someone else take his place. Probably had somewhere to be, people to see, maybe a meeting to attend, something that made him reluctant to leave the plane and hope United would get him a seat later that day or next week.

United stated they’d asked nicely for volunteers but no one came forward. So … what else is an airline to do but grab someone by the feet and drag them to the front exit door in front of all those other overbooked passengers who, if they were the thinking types, might see themselves in a similar position. One fellow passenger gave full throated support: “Way to go!” Course, he was rooting for the air marshals, not the fellow who might have been him. Probably thought the guy being dragged away was a terrorist.

I fly United occasionally. And yeah, they overbook all the time. They ask if there’s anyone who would take a voucher and fly another time, free flight or a pretty good discount. Great for folks with no family, no job, no hurry to get anywhere in particular. But for those of us who need to be someplace, well, I wouldn’t want my name chosen at random by the desk jockeys for United. And it does make me wonder, how did they choose this man to drag off? Alphabetical name place? Last passenger to book, other than the ones overbooked? Profiling? Name pulled from a hat? Eenie Miney Mo?

Personally, dragging a passenger off a plane seems pretty consistent with airline policy these days. Crammed overhead cargo, narrower seats, no leg room, extra fees for … well, everything, more and more delays, lost luggage, smaller options. I haven’t flown a friendly sky in a long long time. Next time, though, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that we aren’t dragged by the feet off the flight we booked and paid for. And to the guy who yelled Way to Go, let’s hope it’s you next time when they need a ‘volunteer’ to give up an overbooked seat.

Well, okay, about a third of us in this country have been hacked. Social Security numbers, driver’s license, date of birth, all the necessary ingredients some crimninal in Belarus can sell to identity fraud specialists. I didn’t realize there were 3 or 4 companies that kept credit databases, much less 3 or 4 companies who were wide open to hackers. Silly me.

And here I was worried about Big Brother. The Damn Government, I mean, not Mark Zuckerberg. Turns out all of us are just one big happy data family, smooshed together in some internet Cloud that knows everything important about us. Now we’re sharing that information with hacker hoodlums. Swell. Just swell.

Back in the dark days of the 1970’s I lived with a bunch of freewheeling yahoos in Seattle and Gomorrah who majored in various studies at the University of Washington, but spent most of their time experimenting with drug abuse of various sorts ranging from hash oil production to laughing gas theft. They grew pot and they raised psilocybin mushrooms. They scored opiated hashish and they drank legal whisky. The place we lived in was a veritable criminal operation. ‘Honest, Officer, I only rent a room here.’

On our bulletin board we had a Social Security card pinned up. Ralph Speidel. The kidz had gone down to the local cemetery and searched for a deceased child, then gotten a card in Ralph’s name, they told me when I asked who Ralph Speidel was. ‘Just in case,’ they said. Just in case of what, I asked. ‘You never know,’ they replied. ‘We might need to go underground. Set up a new identity.’

Jeez, I thought at the time, these are drug addled paranoiacs. But they were playing with fire, stealing canisters of nitrous oxide from hospitals, selling various illegal drugs. Nixon was gone by then, the VietNam War was lost and the draft was over. These weren’t SDS roommates or Weathermen, they were college students doing a little research, nothing the FBI would find particularly interesting. Yet.

When I moved out a few months later to my ghetto home and some fresh roommates, I considered taking Ralph’s card with me but I left it on the bulletin board, just glad to be shed of these goofballs finally. Now, of course, in light of current events, I wish I’d snatched it. You just never know when a new identity might come in handy.

The South End Advisory Committee met last night in emergency session. The last time they convened a similar gathering was back in 2001 following the Trade Tower attacks when an alarmed citizenry demanded they beef up our shoreline defenses to counter what, at the time, seemed like imminent terrorist incursions. Since then the South End has pretty much kept its head in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the Great Recession (which seemed to most of us just a continuation of our unemployment woes), the Iraq War (we’re pretty much all too old to enlist) and the rise of ISIS (it’s hard to behead those with theirs buried in the beach). But sometimes events arise that demand attention, demand action, demand a committee meeting.

And certainly this was one of those times. Now that the Trump Tweet presidency has left the station, small groups around the country have declared themselves Sanctuary Zones. Sanctuary cities, sanctuary universities, sanctuary Starbucks, sanctuary nursing homes, sanctuary daycare centers. The question on last night’s table: should we declare ourselves a sanctuary too? Ethel Birmbach, current President of the Council, called the meeting to order. “Deportation is not an option,” she declared almost immediately. “These are our neighbors and friends, not our enemies.”

Randy Primplucker, a realtor for WindyRear Realty and the only member on the council actually born on the South End, argued for a quick vote “to protect our neighbors”, but Betsy Birdcall took him to task. “We don’t really know who some of these people are, Randy. Sure, you might have sold them their property, but beyond a credit check, how do you know what their backgrounds are? I’m not arguing for detention camps or even forced deportation, I’m just saying we shouldn’t assume there’s nothing nefarious going on in our community. The government won’t be looking out for us, that’s for sure.”

“These people already have detention camps,” Ralph Van Vleet practically shouted. “They put up their own gates! What are they hiding behind those gated walls? Why are they so nervous? Who are they trying to protect? Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“For godsake, Ralph,” Patty Plankton replied. “These people pay the lion’s share of our property taxes. Let’s don’t charge in half-cocked.”
Ethel pounded her hard rubber mallet on the desk that served as podium. “Calm down, everybody,” she commanded. “Randy, we all know you have financial ties to these folks. Maybe you should recuse yourself on this issue. This is way too important to have monetary issues clouding our judgement.” Randy protested meekly, but finally acquiesced.

In the end the Council voted 5 to 3 to declare the South End a Sanctuary. Up in the gated communities the 1% breathed a collective sigh of relief that, for the time being at least, their taxes would not go any higher. At least not until after the Trump presidency or a turnover in the South End Council. Down here we protect our own.