The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sometime back when Tyee Store was still the economic center of the South End I walked in from my trail connecting our Shangri-la-la with the other side of the island after spotting a car like we had, same vintage, and since we were pushing 275,000 miles on it, I wondered how many miles this one had, hopefully an additional 100,000 which would give me unbridled optimism about ours longevity.   We were the only two customers so I assumed it was his car.  “How many miles on that rig out there?” I asked the guy at the counter purchasing his cigs and beers.  He looked around at me and the look on his face immediately veered from innocent bystander to potential casualty.

He said he didn’t know and stopped looking me in the eyes.  His were glued to the floor.
“You don’t know how many miles your own car has?” I persisted, thinking maybe we could wander out and just have a look-see on the odometer.  Logic is one of my strong points, as you can see.  I think I might have asked it in a somewhat incredulous, possibly even rude tone of voice, one that rattled him.

“It’s not mine, it’s my uncle’s,” he finally offered lamely, trying to get his bill paid and his change back.  His nervousness quotient was palpable now but hellfire, all I wanted to know was whether I could expect my own chariot to run into the next decade or not, what’s the problem, kid?  Patty behind the counter watched this dispassionately.  Tyee gets plenty of weirdness, nothing to make her reach for the panic button or a phone to alert the authorities.  Yet.

“Your uncle’s?”  I asked, starting to wonder if this was a stolen vehicle, none of my business, of course, but then again, a concerned citizen.  That might be my car the punk had hotwired and made his escape to the hideaways of the nettle savannahs of the South End.  Civic duty required maybe I ask one more time, “So you don’t know how many miles on that jalopy of your uncle’s.”  By now Patty had given him his change, bagged his goods and parked the receipt in the bag.  The kid was sweating noticeably, hands shaky, eye contact non-existent.  “I told you I don’t know,” he muttered as he swept by me and out the door.

I looked at Patty and said, “Man, that guy was nervous as a cat.  Whaddaya make of that?”

“Your hat,” she said.  “DEA.”  I had forgotten that I’d tossed a ballcap on before taking to the woods, one that meant Drug Enforcement Agency to the kid, I guess.  Whatever sadistic pleasure I’d taken from our little tete-a-tete gave me some idea what a cop must feel like when a few questions, innocent enough, break the subject’s will.  Cat and mouse.  Sadism could rear its ugly head.  When I got home, I put the cap away.  The cops don’t need my help anyway.  My car died a couple weeks later, ran out of oil, blew up the engine.  I guess that answered my question without the kid’s help.

Every day I get a call, sometimes 3, from some nice stranger who wants to know if I’d be willing to sell them my house.  My house, it seems, is very very popular.  I wish I was that popular but I’m the owner of said house and maybe that should be enough for me.  Course, none of these would-be buyers have ever seen my house, at least not the inside.  I suspect they can find a google shot of the street and the outside, probably know what Zillow thinks it’s worth, surely know what I paid for it or have a guess since I built it myself so the county records wouldn’t have the price I paid if we’d bought it 30 years ago on the open market.

For awhile I’d tell my nice stranger when they asked if I was interested in selling, “You bet!”  This almost always caused a long pause, no doubt my caller wasn’t used to a potential sale and certainly not one whose owner was enthusiastic.

“Well, um… did you have a … um … price in mind?” they would ask.  And I would practically shout, “I do indeed!!”  “And … um… what were you thinking, price-wise, I mean?”

Sometimes I would say two million dollars, sometimes less but a helluva lot more than they hoped some Alzheimer owner might throw out, some grandma with dementia still able to sign over the deed for double what she paid for the place 50 years ago.  Which inevitably resulted in another long pause before they recovered enough to state that we could probably come to some kind of mutual agreement.  To which I would reply that the price just went up, take it or leave it.  When they started to speak again, boom, price just went up another hundred thou.  Followed by a click.

You get tired of fooling around with these people, though, after dozens and dozens, one after the other, sometimes, I suspect, the same yahoo.  If you haven’t got anything better to do, tell them a low ball number and wait for the heart palpitations and the salivating you can hear over the phone.  Got a live one here!

Got a sucker who’s selling for a fifth what the place is worth!

Sure, fun for a few times, then you start calling them names, question their morality, engage in some back and forth curses, and then, well, you do like I do finally when they ask if you’d be interested in selling your house, just say I was hoping someone would want to buy this place, I need to move to the Home and this is practically a godsend.  Then hang up …

Whatever you do, don’t answer the next few times the phone rings.

Twenty-five years ago I agreed to put a stained glass window into the proposed Visitor Center the Chamber of Commerce was planning to build at the strategic Y where traffic north separated traffic south for most everyone coming onto the island.  I guess I figured some small panel in a doorway sidelight maybe, nothing to write home about, just a small donation.  When I sat with the architect, the original design was basically a box with a shed roof and when he asked me what I might consider doing for glass, I drew in a quarter moon over the door.  He shook his head in confusion and I said it looks like an outhouse, why not pop in the iconic quarter moon insignia.

Yeah, I wonder too why I seem to never get along with architects.  He said give me a minute and walked back to his drawing table, then came out a few of those minutes later with a sketch of what would become the Visitor Center, tall box with a curved roof and a giant X metal framework in the entire front, fifteen feet high by twelve wide.  And so I volunteered to do the entire front, a dramatic piece for the highway traffic.  For the first weekends of construction I offered my help, after all, I had built my own house and I was full of piss and vinegar, but after the initial structure was up, the contractor who’d volunteered his time and his crew told us he had to get back to his day job.  And so I became the de facto project manager.

It took me from spring into late fall to complete the Center and its sculpture park.  Lots of politics, fights with the Chamber folks, arguments with my artist buddies, begging for donations, all that fun stuff … but we did it, we built an Art Park and a Visitor Center.  And we ended up with 3 and a half acres behind it for extending the Sculpture Park, what is now Freedom Park.  The Chamber, about five years ago, decided to vacate the building and rent it to a local artist who promptly stuck huge posters of comical animal asses on the front and covered the artwork of our most well-known artist with a caricature of himself.  You bet I was annoyed.

A month or more ago the folks from Freedom Park who now own the property in front asked if I could repair the damage to the original glass mural.  I took a look and told them the panels were almost all shot with pellet guns, thrown bottles and lawnmower rocks, but if they were serious about rehabbing the building and park, I’d give them a new mural, new design, all gratis.  The tenant wasn’t happy about being asked to vacate for a few weeks while all this upgrade took place and he ultimately took his butt banners and his posters and went home .  Adios, amigo.

Fast forward to two days ago.  Grant Shaw, the hombre spearheading all this upgrade, the guy who scraped and primed and painted the metal front, the spark plug for what will be a complete refurbishing of the building and the landscape, Grant hauled in ladders and I hauled in ten panels of new glass.  Took us all day and had to recruit a couple of unsuspecting volunteers from the playground behind to help us hoist the 4×5 foot upper panel to the board we’d run through two ladders where we stood 12 feet up, but we got it done.  You think it didn’t bring back memories from 25 years ago, you’d be dead wrong.  You think I’m not worried that something similar to the past fiasco would happen down the road, yeah, same as the above.  You think I’m not happy to see a new bunch of volunteers helping put this corner back together, maybe better, well, think again.  For awhile I feel about 25 years younger, a little sore from the installation but once again proud of what a few people can accomplish.  And yeah, I know, most folks won’t notice.  But I’m used to that.

My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill.  The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers.  Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire.  She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.

“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know.  “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots.  You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died.  The Casino was their whole life.  We even provided funeral services.  Why not?  Half their friends were us casino workers.  You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”

I said it was something I never imagined.  Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop.  Jill muttered ‘why not?’  and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question.  “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought.  “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go.  She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED.  Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought.  I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.

I confess.  I have a TV.  Not a very big TV, not a drive-in theater size TV, just a TV that our friends find maddening if we want to watch a movie together but that seems plenty big enough for the mizzus and me.  I don’t want to build another house to make room for a 60 inch television.  But I do want to watch the news and a few shows.  And I don’t want to pay for cable or satellite.  Not that I wouldn’t want to watch 100 stations with the weirdest content imaginable just to get PBS.

So it probably won’t surprise anyone to know that I have an antenna on the roof.  Since everyone went to digital, the old antenna wouldn’t pick up anything.  Nada, zip, zero.  Thanks a lot, FCC.  The first UHF antenna would catch a few stations, not most, and even then you had to haul up to the roof, turn the antenna, climb back down and see if that picked up the station you were after and when it didn’t repeat the above.  Great exercise, not good viewing.  Like the internet, TV reception out in the boondocks is for the birds.  Sure, the providers promised high speed updates, but any fool knew they were lying.  And now that the pandemic has forced us all into quarantine, the internet with everyone logged on is reminiscent of the old dial-up days with buffering that lasts longer than TV commercials.

A week ago I did some buffered research on TV antennas, ordered one online and got it a few days later.  The old one, which actually wasn’t very old at all, had replaced the previous one that refused, no matter what compass direction I pointed it, to pick up PBS.  PBS, we learned through further internet buffered research, had a slightly weaker signal than any other station this side of Portland or San Francisco.  Close, but no cigar, so I figured get a slightly bigger antenna but maybe not as big as a large array telescope.  With high hopes and plenty of pessimism I hauled the new aluminum job up to the roof peak, attached it to the metal mast, pointed it in the direction of Seattle and Gomorrah, climbed back down the ladder and turned on the TV.  Wow.  The stations were really a lot crisper, all of them.

All of them except PBS.  Which didn’t come in at all.  PBS asks us for contributions all the time.  Maybe when they offer a repeater station instead of a cheesy coffee mug for a donation of 120 bucks a year, they might have a shot.  Until then, they can quit asking.