The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You can lead a jackass to water … but you can’t make em think. Some years back a 1960’s rectangular telephone booth mysteriously appeared in Hutchison Park from out of nowhere or possibly outer space. Since I’m the de facto ranger of that most southerly of county parks, it fell on me to deal with its unlikely appearance. A friend, who at the time was head librarian for the Camano branch, suggested we convert it to a Little Library so we did just that, put shelving in and stocked it with books donated by her. Literacy had come to the South End. Or so I imagined.

A week later the library was sacked, graffiti written on the walls, the shelves and books thrown into the rain and some burned. Undeterred, I restocked the shelves, cleaned up the graffiti and hoped this would be a one time event. Ho ho. Not long after the place was vandalized again, the shelves knocked over and the books strewn outside. Ever the optimist, I restored the place and hoped for different results. Which, for a year or more, was what happened. Until one day a window was broken out.

My solution was to make a stained glass replacement. I’m a believer that art will triumph over ignorance, that installing an aesthetic fix might act as a talisman against future vandalism. And for awhile it seemed my faith was substantiated. Last night, however, a pal called to say he’d found the library knocked over on its side, the windows broken out and one sculpture and the stained glass window stolen. When I got there the hundred or so books were a sodden mess, shattered glass was scattered everywhere … and my optimism was too.

Today I’ll go clean up the mess. And try not to count this as a personal failure. But I will confess, this does seem like a metaphor for the times we live in now, braggingly ignorant, malevolently self-righteous, just happy brutes knuckle down in a world shutting the door on science and knowledge, reason and rationality. Then again, maybe it’s just a couple of dumb punks whose idea of fun is knocking over telephone booths, maybe better not to read too much into it. Either way, that library ain’t coming back.

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

Some of the ladies down at the Salon were engaged in a Round Table discussion during perms and touch-ups. It’s a mixed clientele at the Salon, partly the result of stylists who run the gamut from tattoos and piercings with rainbow streaked hair to the primly permed. It does make for lively debates under the blowdryers. Ronald, the token gay guy, he of the nose ring and silk puffy shirts was listening to Carol Wanderman’s diatribe on the Pope’s call to tackle global warming as a moral issue. She was deeply Catholic and she didn’t want the Holy See stepping into politics, especially when she disagreed with him. “What does he know about science?” she asked the room.

“Oh, sweetie,” Ronald sniffed, “you are SO right on. Didn’t they send Galileo to the Inquisition?”

Carol shook her curlers like evil talismen at him, started to respond, but Jill in the chair next door, jumped in first. “I don’t mind the pontiff piping in,” she said while Brenda snipped and clipped Jill’s new bangs. “But if he thinks global warming is a moral question, what about population control? You think all these new people in 3rd world countries aren’t the REAL problem?”

Mrs. Ketchum arched a penciled eyebrow from above her apron. “The world has to grow, dear. You can’t dictate morals in the bedroom.” To which Ronald snorted wildly, tossing back his newly curled coif. “Tell THAT to the queer haters.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Ronald,” Mrs. Ketchum protested. “It’s unbecoming.” Ronald giggled. “The Q word, you mean. Well, darlings, that’s a word of pride now.”

“Oh Ronald …” Kathy at the far chair sighed.

“And,” Ronald continued, “you ladies should thank us for NOT contributing to population growth. Talk about cutting down carbon footprints! I mean ….!”

“Oh we do, Ronald,” Jill laughed, “we do. We broke the mold after you.”

“All I ask,” he smiled, “is the proper appreciation.” He handed Betty, his walk-in client who must have thought she was getting styled in Oz, a mirror and asked, “How do you like the New You?”

I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

n I was about butt high to a bumblebee, we lived in Mississippi. Then we moved to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to live in a ranger station back in the Pisgah National Forest. Some years later we headed further south and moved to the hill country of North Georgia. I lived in the Deep South from the time I was three until I was thirteen. You never lived there yourself, you can’t really imagine what the South is. It’s different, is what it is.

My best friend in 6th grade invited me to come along with him to his grandparents’ for a day on the farm and a Sunday dinner with the family. I said sure and we all rode in Tom’s dad’s station wagon into the red clay country south of where we lived. Once we arrived Tom and I headed into the pasture to explore the countryside, getting admonitions from his folks to be back in an hour for supper, supper being lunch. All I remember of that walk was being chased by the biggest meanest bull I’d ever seen. Tom said Run! and boy we sure did. I’ve never thought of cattle as benign ever since.

So later at the dinner table, after grace, we told the assembled family how we narrowly escaped death by Brahma as we hunkered down to eat okra and cornbread and ham and pickled beets and so many vegetables from the garden it looked like a pantry from the Garden of Eden. I may have noticed the grandfather glaring at me, kind of a contemptuous stare, but I tried not to, just ate my food and complemented Tom’s grandmother and thanked them all for inviting me for lunch. Supper, I mean. Somewhere about the first round of dessert he pointed a fork over my direction and asked, “Boy, where you from?”

“Dad, don’t start up now,” Mr. Vandiver, Tom’s pop cautioned. The old man said he was just askin the boy a question, and he turned his gaze on me again. I felt my apple pie turning to cement in my mouth. “I’m from Gainesville,” I said and he shook his head no. “You come from up north with that Yankee accent,” he corrected me. “Yessir, I do. I lived in Mississippi, North Carolina, California, Michigan and I was born in Maine.”

“A Yankee,” he muttered, “in my house. Never thought I’d live so long to see the day …”

That supper table got real quiet real fast. Tom’s father was shaking his head sadly but he wasn’t about to add much to the conversation, not at his own father’s house. Later on the long ride home he told me he was sorry it turned out this way, but Gen. Sherman had marched through those hills 100 years ago burning and pillaging and some folks had long memories. His father was one.

You think maybe another fifty years later, folks down there might have forgotten the War. But you would be wrong. They don’t fly the Confederate flag because they forgot the damn war. Some of it might be racism, plenty of it is resentment the North fought them and won, even more is that they think a way of life, a cultural heritage was stolen from them that left them poor. I have no doubt there are more than a few places still where no Yankee has crossed the front door in a century and a half. And just like the bulls, I give them a wide berth too.