The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

In our collective overdose of all things Pandemic, all of us awash in the flotsam of overcrowded hospitals, plague cruise boats, mass masking on airline jets, protestors with assault rifles in state capitol buildings, kids at home zooming today’s lessons, body counts on the news, we sometimes lose sight of the victims whose names won’t appear in any newspaper accounts, on television interviews or radio reports. I’m talking, of course, about the millions of sequestered lovers whose affairs with married folks have been placed on permanent hiatus.

I was on the phone the other day with Wanda Milkowski, my old bus driver friend from our early days here on the then unpopulated South End. Wanda was married when she drove bus with me for the Stanwoodopolis school district, but she split the sheets with Teddy after she discovered he was shacked up with Lisa, a neighbor she was, or so she thought, pretty good friends with most days she was driving her afternoon route. These things happen with some frequency during the monsoonal winters of our island, the stuff of daytime soaps and underactive imaginations, nothing we aren’t accustomed to … until of course it happens to you. Wanda was a mess for a few months and during that time we became crying towels for one another.

Wanda, oddly enough, never remarried, can’t imagine why. Trust issues, I suppose or just deep scars that never quite heal. I’m no psychiatrist, just an empathic listener, and no, in case you’re wondering if this is another daytime soap opera, Wanda and I were platonic as neutered swans. She didn’t remarry but holy libido, Batman, the girl could fall in love at the drop of a hat. Not mine, mind you, but half the layabouts on the South End shared a mattress with Wanda. She was one of those rare women you wouldn’t call a beauty, but my god, every man jack of us boys commented on that something, that unnameable something that sparked wanton lust in us. Pheromones maybe, hormones crashing against our primitive brainpans. I couldn’t say, but I certainly wasn’t immune either. None of us could understand Teddy’s wandering eye, that’s for sure, and we spent many an hour over a flood of beers pondering it down at the Pilot Lounge.

Wanda might have broken up more marriages than alcohol down here on the lonely South End, which is saying a lot. But with this Pandemic in full rage and the men in her life quarantined with their wives, she’s become isolated and depressed. “I should have asked John to leave his wife,” she lamented on the phone. “He said he wanted a divorce and I should have pushed him.” She was referring to John Watkins, the vet at the animal clinic, an occasional poker player at our monthly card game, the kind of gambler who never bets a hunch, just a careful mathematician, no taste for a bluff.

“Wanda,” I said, “you would have been miserable with John around all the time.”

“I’m miserable now!” she howled. “You sure you wouldn’t care to drop by and visit, Skeeter?”

“Wanda, you said you were miserable, not desperate.” After a long silence, I said, “I’ll call you again tomorrow, I promise.” I have to confess, I haven’t called back. Yet. I guess I’m hedging my own bet.

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers?

It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake, we were in the old school. It was old and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, beautiful building, state of the art teaching equipment. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

The idea is to create an environment where we ENCOURAGE you guys to learn. To explore. To use your IMAGINATIONS. To ask questions and look for answers. We want you to feel safe and we want you to have all the tools you need to do that. Computers and books and all the rest. We also want you to have gymnasiums and ballfields so you can exercise and play, cafeterias so you’ll get good meals, all this so you can have healthy bodies which is important for healthy minds.

And the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or catepillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. A few years ago I built my own house. Every bit of it. I never built much of anything before, but I did it. I built a sailboat and I learned to sail. I built a banjo and I started a band and then I became a singer.

What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

Down at the South End’s premier tonsorial emporium, Joe Waltham’s barber shop behind the O-Zi-Ya wrecking yard has been open every day but Sundays during the Covid-19 Lockdown. He’s got the red white and blue barber pole out front even though it no longer rotates and he’s got an American flag the size of a billboard hanging from the peak of the roof where it just about but not quite touches hallowed ground. The boyz at the Diner call him G.I. Joe, maybe because he’s a Viet Nam vet, maybe because he’s a patriot in the culture wars. Joe is what we call a Hard Ass, not much of a sense of humor, quick to rile, definitely not a man you want to get started on an argument.

G.I. thinks the Covid panic is a hoax. He thinks the government is using it as an excuse to ruin his business and everybody else’s. “Look at how they’re sending everybody a check,” he muttered at the Diner the last week it was still serving breakfast before opening his shop. “Tell em not to work and then send em money. Socialism, that’s all it is, a way to make us sheep, pay us Not to work, make us reliant on government. It’s all bullshit. I got a right to work, I got a right to run my business the way I want and nobody, not the government, not the Governor, nobody can tell me otherwise.” Most of us agreed with that last part. Nobody tells G.I. much of anything.

Course that doesn’t stop Two Toke from telling him something. He’s stirring the pot the way he’s stirring another dollop of sugar into his already sweetened coffee. T.T. hasn’t seen the inside of a barber shop in who knows how many years judging by the shoulder length hair he usually keeps in a pony tail under his baseball cap, what G.I. has referred to more than once as a jackass tail, not that Two Toke minds, he’s just glad to have hair at all in his old age. “You think they invented the plague, Joe? You think maybe they created the virus in the first place at some lab and dropped it on us? If it’s a hoax, you figure the body counts are bogus?”

“Just like Nam,” Joe shot back. “Phony numbers. The government’s a bunch of damn liars, you can count on that.”

“Well…..” T.T. watches Joe over the rim of his cup, taking a long sip while the rest of us around the long table start to dread what’s probably coming next. “You figure all those doctors are liars too?”

“All I’m saying is I’m going to take my chances this epidemic is nothing but a bad cold, a flu bug, same as we get every year. We don’t tell people to stay home, hide, shut your business, quit shaking hands, be afraid. People die every year, Tom, that’s a fact.”

A couple of the boyz nodded in agreement. None of us knew a single person who contracted Covid, much less died of it. I don’t think any of us do now, a couple months later. Two Toke shook his head and set his cup down. “I wouldn’t care if someone gave you the virus, Joe, but the idea is to keep it from spreading, you know, to the rest of us. I can live without a haircut for awhile.”

“Tell you what, Tom, your next one is on me, no charge, totally free.” The boyz waited for T.T. to stop spooning another bag of sugar into his coffee. Two Toke finished up, licked the spoon and smiled. “Freedom ain’t Free, G.I. But thanks for the offer.”

I’m not sure how many of us have been shorn by Joe since the Lockdown ordered barber shops and hair salons to close. But I hear that he’s doing fine, plenty of folks who think a haircut is worth the gamble. My own hair is getting pretty long again. I can live with it that way.

Lately I’ve noticed my newspapers offering strategies for keeping sequestered rug rats entertained now that schools have been closed and the kids are trapped with their parents. I guess the internet and their Nintendos aren’t enough, although judging from my friends’ grandkids, they could live for years with just a cellphone and maybe food slipped under their doors occasionally. It isn’t the kids we should be worried about, it’s those parents. And … the adults without kids.

This Pandemic is a lot like retirement. No more office, no more commuting, no more friends at work, no more routines. Weekends no longer exist. Movie theaters are shuttered, churches closed, retail stores are boarded up. You can’t even get a cup of coffee at Starbucks unless you want to take it with you and there’s no library that will let you in the door so if you care to read, you better have a decent collection in your bookshelf.

Everyone thinks retirement will be the answer to their miseries. No more crappy job, no more useless work, no more asshole boss. Paradise here we come! And then it’s just home repairs, lawn mowing, laundry, CNN or Fox News running all damn day long, the same churned up rehash spewing from a TV the size of a drive in theater screen. There’s not enough popcorn in the world to make this scenario look good. Paradise? More like the second level of Dante’s Hell. And you better hope you and the mizzus have some love spark left, otherwise, hello alcoholism!

This is the grim reality of the plague. Death by boredom! Course, that’s why I’m here, to help. Skeeter’s Fun Things to Do While Waiting For the Vaccine. Subscribe today and you’ll receive not only my list of hobbies to try out and books online to order from the library, but also daily updates from the White House Covid-19 Task Force, briefings on the current death spikes in states that prefer to ‘live free or die’, reports on pandemic politics and much much more. Of course, you pretty much already get those. In addition, we’ll send you our bestselling brochure: Home Repairs You Can Do Yourself Without Tools, ordinarily a $50 dollar manual for the couchsurfer, yours free with your subscription. But … act now and you’ll receive, at no extra charge, just some minor shipping and handling, our 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Donald J. Trump at the Mayo clinic, bravely interacting with doctors sans mask, suitable for framing when completed, a wonderful artwork to hang on your wall. And … we’ll send detailed instructions on making that frame. Without tools!

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