The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

I remember about 30 years ago first coming up to Skagit Valley and seeing the tulip fields. Pretty amazing. Ten years later I drove down Best Road thinking I might catch a view of the fields and maybe lunch in La Conner. It must’ve been two days later when I finally managed to get off Fir Island. For some reason I’ve never liked tulips ever since. Sure got to thank the Chamber of Commerce for that. I’m sure the farmers thank em too.

But I been thinking — how can we turn this public relations machine to our advantage — and I hit on something I think the Skagit Valley Economic Council can sink their sharp little teeth into. Tulip Fuel. Bio-diesel with Hi Octane Petal Power. You drive in the Tulip Station and you can choose from candy apple red to lemon drop yellow. Earth Friendly, Home Grown Flower Power Fuel. The Valley’s sort of where the 60’s hit the Sound, never really ended. So Flower Power won’t be real hard to sell. The Co-op’s next big Expansion will include 10,000 gallon underground tanks and those colorful pumps. High pollen octane for the BMW crowd. Bulb mulch for the Volkswagens.

Oh, I suppose the backups will be sort of long, but spread out longer than 2 weeks, nothing like the Tulip Festival. Plus knowing you’re doing something great for the planet should help. Something that should’ve been done long ago. You know, putting a halt to that Tulip Gridlock.

Petal Power —- think about it!

Before the heady days of internet shopping, we had Bryant Hardware. You got some impossible to find esoteric gizmo, you could probably find it down at Bryants. Or at least Ma Bryant could. If she couldn’t, trust me, Joe Google couldn’t either. And if Joe couldn’t find it, trust me again, you’d pay Top Dollar for one when you discovered it in an antique store.

My piston driven well pump quit pumping water about 6 months after I bought my palace. My water was down over 100 feet in a hand dug hole 3 feet in diameter. The pump ran fine, it just didn’t pull up the water. Down the hole 105 feet away from quenching my thirst, a foot valve had given out so we had to pull up the oak rods in 10 foot sections. Which meant cutting a hole in the wellhouse roof so we could hoist each of 10 sections high enough to unscrew the upper one from the next one below. It was nerve racking work, but then … most of life on the South End was nerve wracking back then.

When we got to the end we found the old ‘leather’ was blown out. My neighbor — who’d identified our problem in the first place — said we needed to go to town to buy another. “Another?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in holy hell is going to carry a ‘leather’ for a 1930’s well pump system?”

“Ma,” he answered. “Ma’ll have one.”

We drove to Stanwoodopolis, walked into Bryants and asked the owlish woman behind the register if she had our ‘leather’. She peered at the ruined one, then peered at us. Finally she got up with a heave and we followed her into the back section with the 20 foot ceiling of stamped tin, what’s now the food bank, down the aisle of 1950, over to the shelf of 1940 and up to some dusty boxes near the top that was all that remained of the Great Depression. She climbed up on a rickety step ladder, pushed aside a Kitty Hawk propeller and a Model T crank, rummaged through Victrola parts, muttered once or twice, then finally came up with the last two ‘leathers’ in America. “I thought I had a couple,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. “Two dollars,” she told me, probably the price back in 1928.

You folks who buy your hardware in plastic wrapping and expect the part you want has long been obsolete, well, that may be the modern condition, but for a long time on the South End, time meant nothing in Bryants. Ma finally died a decade ago and we lost the 20th Century overnight. Needless to say, I have a modern pump now that I can’t get replacement parts for my old one. And you know, I’m sure, when it malfunctions, it can’t be repaired.

I got a pal, Guitar Bob, who just came back from the doctor’s office for his yearly checkup. The doc, he told me, last time I was over, said he should start taking statins. “Statins?” I asked. “Aren’t those for lowering cholesterol?” Bob’s cholesterol has always been low. His old man died at about 99 and Bob’s got genes like Methuselah.

“Whaddaya think?” he asked. Guitar Bob and I have spent many a night talking medicine between songs, mostly with the determination to avoid it. Folks I know spend a fortune on herbal remedies for arthritis and colds, pump ibuprofen for pain, take meds for depression, drink fungi-infused teas for god knows what, all in the hopes it’ll cure what ails em. I believe in eating good food. I know, not gonna sell self help books with that, but I believe you ought to skip the experiments and stick with apples off the trees in the orchard.

Statistics don’t lie, mister. But they are misleading. For awhile I was taking a baby aspirin every day. Supposed to cut down the odds of a heart attack. Now they say it increases the odds of a stroke. So I quit the baby aspirin. If the doctors can’t make up their minds, I sure can.

Who knows what combinations of the myriad stuff we stick into ourselves does what to what? Tomorrow night we’re making sauerkraut, fermented cabbage, garnished with Cindy, the goat woman’s, garlic. Her cabbage too.

Some day, years from now, some future foodologist will discover that fermented cabbage combined with garlic caused duodenal cancer in 10% of the South End population. Except for the lucky few who were taking statins to control cholesterol.

Back when I first moved to the wild South End, I worked graveyard weekends at the Pain Motel in Everett, Everett General Hospital. We had maybe 3 or 4 emergency rooms in the ER, what is now 65 rooms. Most weekends were pretty quiet, good for sleeping if you were the orderly, which I was. But occasionally we’d crank it up, holidays especially, but we could never predict.

My first year there was an eye-opener. A lot of blood, plenty of horror, none of it for the squeamish. I guess you can get used to about anything. But that first year I wasn’t used to the shock yet. My job was basically gopher. Run fluids to the lab, look for missing medical records, deliver supplies, take the dead to the morgue, deliver patients to the wards, you name it, that was my Job Description.

Bout a month after I started we had this motorcycle gangbanger come into the ER. Drove himself in after he’d put his hand into the moving chain. I ran bloodwork and paperwork on him to the lab and eventually I was called on my beeper to go get him in the ER and take him to his room. He was sitting up on the gurney and said he could walk okay, but I said we got rules and one is he had to get driven by gurney. “Okay, man,” he said, which is biker talk for ‘bite me’, but he said, “Let’s ride.”

A nurse ran up to me with a cup and said deliver it to the desk on the 5th floor when I got there. The biker said, “You got my fingers in there, man. They’re gonna sew em on in the morning.” I took a peek and yeah, there on ice were three fingers a bit worse for wear.

“They told you they’d sew them on tomorrow?” I asked. He said, yeah, no problem. Well, maybe not to a drunk biker, but you know and I know, if you’re going to reattach missing body parts, it’s kind of critical to do it sooner rather than later. I said, “Hey, man, talk to a nurse when we get up there and tell her what you told me. They’re not planning to sew these on you, c’mon, think about it.”

Our hospital, being a public funded hospital, took in everybody, insurance or not, no small thing really, but I learned that night not everyone receives the same care. Somewhere along the line, maybe on an adjoining barstool, I’ll probably meet an old biker, 2 finger Fred, and we’ll have a beer and maybe a laugh over this shared memory. Well … the beer, probably not the laugh.