The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Duck and Cover

I’m old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and old enough to remember nuclear drills where us 3rd graders in Georgia would crawl under our desks and close our eyes, you know, so the blast wouldn’t blind us. My neighbor built a bomb shelter and kept a gun by the door so those of us whose dads were too lazy to do the same could be shooed away when the radiation was bearing down. When I told my father about the gun, he muttered something obscene and said our neighbor was a horse’s ass.

I don’t know how much our generation was affected by the nuclear jitters of the time. Maybe not as much as some psychiatrists think. But there is something about the idea of annihilation that probably seeps into the cellular level. Nuclear winter, mushroom clouds, flesh burned off bodies, cancers, giant ants in the desert mutating, all the horrors of cheezy sci-fi movies and yeah, the real thing.

So when I hear the Senator from Idaho talking about how a war with Russia would be over PDQ, I wonder where he was back in the days of Assured Mutual Destruction. If he thinks maybe the Russkies forgot the code to their nuclear arsenal. And then Sen. Graham joins in with the additional commentary that if Putin ordered an all-out nuclear strike, the general next to him would put a bullet in his head. Ah, magical thinking from the boyz in charge. Calling Dr. Strangelove, calling Dr. Strangelove!

I don’t plan to build a bomb shelter. Just yet. But a few more saber rattling comments from the peanut brain gallery, I may reconsider.

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

What I loved the most about the Trump years, aside from the bullying, dog whistling, money grubbing personality, was the propensity to lie. Fake news, everything was fake news. Catch him red handed, he’d attack the accuser in the most blatant, shameless way. Roy Cohn taught him well.

So now, what we have is an attentive world that, when confronted with, oh, say, an invasion of another country, its Fearless Leader, with a straight face, can claim it was merely self-defense. Or a faked bombing of a hospital, wasn’t them, it was a ruse to cast blame on them. What we’ve exported, this Shining City on the Hill of a country, isn’t democracy, it’s the lesson that prevarication works. Deny deny deny and maybe the true believers will believe that too. And if they don’t, deny more vociferously.

Keep saying the election was stolen, keep calling the war in Ukraine an incursion, stifle the press, ratchet up social media, muddy the water, bloody a nose … it’s a brave new world, pal, and if you don’t like it, well, next regime change maybe you’ll like a prison cell better, get your mind straight, get your facts bent around the right lie. Turkey, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, they must all love the Trump Doctrine: Lie through your teeth. Shut down the internet. Jail the dissenters, the disseminators of fake news! White is black, two plus two is who the hell knows.

Course Trump didn’t actually invent these notions, he just made them acceptable. To dictators, to strongmen, to a goodly portion of the Republican Party. Thanks a lot, Donald, for making us a role model.

Hank ‘the Tank’ Amundsen is standing up next to his barstool taking a swing for the outfield wall. “My gawd,’ he was gushing, “my gawd, it was something to see. That kid of mine is going to the majors, you guyz heard it first.” Pete, two stools down, sipped affably at his pint of IPA and said quietly, “I think you told us this last week, Tank.” Jerry nodded from a table full of empty pints he and the Flatheads had killed during the first hour of happy hour, ready for the second. “I believe Pete’s correct, Tank, but he forgot to mention the week before and last month and I think, check me on this Pete, I think you told us Jimmy was going Pro last year.”

“Aw, guys, I’m just a proud papa, is all. You can’t blame me, the kid is great. You can see it in his swing he’s got plenty of homers coming up. Practically got a contract signed. The scouts probably already got eyes trained on him.”

Little Jimmy, if he declared eligibility at this point, would never graduate Middle School. Tank has been sending him to camps, buying gear, tossing balls, all the stuff a Tiger Woods training dad would do since the kid was two and a half. If Jimmy had hoped for a normal childhood of bikes and X-box, it wasn’t going to happen. If Tank wasn’t hauling him and his bats, gloves and balls to tournaments and camps, he was out back of his shack where he’d set up a batting cage, firing curve balls to the poor kid, yelling at him when he whiffed, hollering in joy when he blasted one into the nettles past the swingset that Jimmy never got to use. His sister, pretty much ignored by Tank, got the swing pretty much to herself.

I don’t know what happens to all the Jimmys whose alpha dads drove them to be the best soccer player, baseball star, football hero or basketball idol, whose only dream was to go pro, make the majors, play ten years or less, then retire wealthy as Michael Jordan. I suspect they become sad, depressed, broken adults. Maybe they put their kids through the same nightmare gauntlet.

I had a buddy in high school who won state champ in swimming. When I saw him after we’d trudged off to different colleges, I asked him if he was still training for the Olympics. “I quit,” he said. When I asked why, he answered, “I spent half my life in a chlorine pool, before school, after school. All so I could compete in the Olympics, probably never make it, then wonder all my damn life why I didn’t do something else. I’m going to do something else.”

I suspect there are mostly losers out there. If we taught em to love the game, if we taught em to enjoy their teammates, if we taught em that sports were fun more than a path to riches, maybe we’d have a lot more winners. Jimmy, I suspect, isn’t going to be a winner. And his dad is going to take it a lot harder than Jimmy.

Just about everything you need is here on the South End. I admit we haven’t got a Mac Donald’s yet and there isn’t a Mall within hollering distance, but I’m talking about the Important Things, like a Modern Art Gallery, a café with friendly waitresses and a decent cup of joe, a mom and pop grocery that rents movies and knows your name, a little church to save a few souls – but not too many.

We used to have a garage and a junkyard back when Snowdens ran the store at Tyee. The first time I went to the garage, I needed my universal joints fixed. Ted was out there with his drinking buddy Seth – you see Seth Road by Mabana –that’s who Seth was.
They said sure, young feller, pull it right in, friendly as could be to a newcomer to the South End. I should’ve known things weren’t quite up to snuff, though, when they had ME under the truck handing ME tools and telling ME what to do next.

Course I was new and eager to get along with these fine neighbors of mine, and when in Rome, I thought, be a gladiator or be eaten. So with the help of these good ole boys I got the thing tore up fairly handily. Next day I hitchhiked into town and got myself some new universal joints – now I know you’re thinking isn’t it odd I got to go in myself, and I was thinking the same myself … but next night Seth and Ted drank and told lies to each other between supervising my cussing and grunting and smashing my knuckles and now I was thinking this is the damndest service station I ever had the misfortune to go to, but it was the ONLY garage on the island and it got me out of the winter monsoon, so I kept at it.

When I got done and crawled out from under that greasy blood-spattered pit I’d spent hours in, I asked how much I owed em for my time. I mean they had a genuine Slicker here is what I figured.
Ted said he thought maybe if I brought a bottle by someday, we’d call it even, and I thought well, that seems about fair.

It wasn’t til a week later somebody told me Ted’s wasn’t a real Service Station – just a place he worked on his own rigs. Later, when I took the jug over, we had a good laugh at my expense. And that was the first and last time we had us a repair shop on the South End and I guess you’re looking at the Head Mechanic. Retired now, thank you.