The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Cafes come and go on the island about as fast as the weather. Open up one day, seems like a month later they’ve put the CLOSED sign in the window, locked the doors and another business bites the beach sand. When I first got off the banana boat down by the Yacht Club, a boutique café hung a shingle where the first Senior Center thrift store would eventually take over. Seeing’s how there wasn’t much food service on the island, you’d figure a breakfast and lunch joint would have a pretty easy time making a success of it.

But you’d be wrong. The yuppie couple who ran the place offered macadamia nut waffles, strong fresh ground coffee (long before Starbucks ruled the world) and a menu of fresh vegetables, sprouts, whole wheat breads and local eggs and meats. They were maybe half a century ahead of their time.

I took a boatload of pals up from the smog-smitten city who were crashing at the shack for a wholesome breakfast and a little relief from the hangovers from the previous night’s revelries. We ordered big mugs of coffee and the owners went around the table studiously writing down our orders. Since they were the chief/cook/ and bottle washers, we waited a long time for our servings even though we were the only customers, but the coffee was refilled, our lethargy seemed to subside and life on this side of our foggy island was good once again.

At some point – about a gallon into the coffee – one of us inquired where the restroom might be. We were solemnly informed there was none. This was dire news indeed for nearly all of us. We shrugged it off and waited patiently for our breakfasts. And waited for our breakfasts. When they came, they came one at a time, with five minute intervals in between. Fine fare, however, and we ate our plate’s worth, individually as the rest watched enviously while our bladders swelled like a Guernsey at a dairy where the farmer overslept.

We ate fast. We refused further refills. We crossed our legs and slapped ourselves with knives and forks. We began low moans. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. Maybe. Probably. All I know is 8 guys stood in the parking lot as soon as we could pay our bill and let loose the floodgates right beside our Volkswagen bus. If we left a tip, that was it, but near as I can tell, they never took it. A month later the café was closed and another dream bit the dust. Well, hit the mud….

It’s easy to come back to the place of your youth and fall into a nostalgic reverie, long flashbacks to the good old days. You know, if they were actually good, not mostly memories of hard struggles and forlorn winter glooms. But looking back from these years future, though bittersweet, reveals a winding road you might not care to travel again, still, you wouldn’t want to have missed that detour.

Old age, so they say, brings wisdom. Youth, I say from experience, was a frenzied search for some kind of meaning, maybe any kind. The monks, and the zen masters, they removed themselves from the distractions of the world to contemplate, to synchronize with the OM, to hear the one hand clapping. When they had reached satori, when their breathing was one with the cosmos, when the koan of a tree falling in the forest without them there to hear was solved, they emerged back into the world, exemplars of purity of thought.

I wonder if they wished they had stayed. I wonder if what they learned in solitude and meditation was that they were one with what they had left, that the sound of the one hand was the same sound as the tree falling as the same sound as the OM as the same sound of their breathing which is the same exact sound of everyone’s breathing and that the journey we take is the journey they took without our distractions but the distractions are actually the one hand clapping after all.

Maybe they know the answer to that and I don’t. But … what I think, looking back from the road I started on, is the answer to that is that the road is never the same. We are never the same. The sound of the one hand clapping, don’t kid yourself, it sounds different the next time. Be glad to be IN the world, don’t try to BE your own hermetically sealed world. And that one hand clap, by the way, it won’t be the sound of applause, more like a sigh of relief.

I was in the beer depot the other day with a couple purchases of adult beverages when the checkout lady asked to see my ID. I don’t take that as a compliment anymore now that I’m 45 years past legal. It’s the law and I am as law abiding as the next fellow down at the South End, meaning, I try my best even if I fall short more than occasionally. She noticed my ID was a driver’s license from another state since I was in a liquor store in Wisconsin, not that I usually make my beer runs that far from home, no matter how good their local beer is. She looked at it a lot longer than I was accustomed to, which is maybe ten seconds longer than a cursory glance. June, 1950, she said. My bank likes to tell me my birthday too, I guess to make me feel like we’re all family down there at the old First National Gouge and Steal that is my lending institution.
She finally handed me back my ID, which even has a picture of me in the same weatherstained cowboy hat I was sporting at the time, so she knew it must’ve been yours truly, but when I paid for my purchases, she asked suddenly, springing it on me, what year was your birthday again? Trick question for the feeble minded or the counterfeiter trying to buy legal liquor with a bogus ID.
This is the state that requires drivers license photo ID for the ostensible purpose of ensuring that voter fraud is kept to a minimum. Some folks think its real purpose is to keep students and minorities from voting since they’re more likely not to own a car OR a license to drive one. Me, I’m cynical so you can probably guess how I stand on that. But I wasn’t in the liquor store to vote, you see, although she might have figured maybe that’s where I was headed next, probably after drinking my illegal purchases. They got a big vote out here in a couple weeks and everybody and their mother is wound tight as a cheap alarm clock. Who knows, maybe I was on a dry run, see if my phony ID would work on beer, then use it to vote back in the folks who were voted out for wanting to let my vigilant checkout lady form a labor union for better wages and maybe some benefits. Or maybe she just was mistrustful of some immigrant from a state she wasn’t sure was in America or Mexico. The price of ignorance when you don’t bother with the GED. Nevertheless, you can’t be too careful in these polarized times. Especially in a state where it’s now easier to get a concealed weapon permit than one to vote.
Well, I passed the pop quiz with, okay, maybe not flying colors, and certainly not the answer she expected to hear. Once I get a few beers under my belt, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to try voting here in the dairy state. Right after I get that permit for a Luger. If I do, I’m voting to keep her wages pegged right of minimum. I figure a true patriot like herself ought to be willing to work practically for free.

Snail Mail

Back in the Paleolithic Age I used to write a lot of letters. Mostly to friends. Hard as it is to believe now, I used a pen and notebook, wrote by hand, put a page or two into an envelope, attached a stamp and sent it through the U.S. Mail. A couple of days later and voila, it would arrive at its destination. Later I might even receive a letter in return.

A couple of decades ago my friends stopped writing back, but being a stubborn Anachronist, I persisted. After a few years of sending epistles into a Black Hole, I guess I wearied of being the last yahoo on the planet trying to prop up the U.S. Postal Service with first class mail when everyone else had moved on to e-mail, so I got myself an e-mail account and wrote my letters on a keyboard, hit SEND and voila, instant delivery.

Course my friends had moved on by then to text messaging on their cellphones. Since I didn’t own a cellphone, I just continued my communications on a computer, figuring they could handle both technologies. What I didn’t anticipate was how using two thumbs on a small phone pad would morph communication to truncated misspelled messages the length of their new attention spans. Now, in response to my salutations, I received a garbled often incoherent pecking that apparently has become the Lingua Nueva of the Twitter Age.

I was idling at a fast food joint recently and the kid who brought me my tray of dollar specials said, “Hey man, that’s too cool.” I asked what he was talking about and he pointed at this notebook I’m writing on now and said you don’t see that anymore, you know, people writing stuff down. “Good for you,” he grinned.

Well, I resisted the urge to ask him for his address so I could write him a letter maybe. And anyway, you and I both know he’d never, not in a bazillion nano-seconds, write back. Nevertheless, I hope he moves on from burger flipping, maybe develop an app to organize Tweets into full blown novels. Okay, graphic novels.

You might not guess it, and you might actually be alarmed to know it, but I was a school teacher back in 1972. Taught English and Social Studies to 8th graders, those pre and post pubescent adolescents who drove a couple of my colleagues to retire early. Truth is, I retired early too. But it was my fellow teachers and administrators who drove me to it. Or so I like to say. You know, 40 odd years later….

I guess you could accurately say that I wasn’t cut out for teaching. I came out of the radical 60’s where one entire semester our campus was in full blown riot, National Guard camped down at the ballfields, buildings trashed and finally one blown to pieces. After nearly four years of grueling studies in pharmacology, street protesting and alternative philosophies, I realized I maybe didn’t have the credentials for, well, probably any serious occupation beyond car wash employee. So I took some education credits, just to hedge my bet. Who knows, I might like teaching.

I got a job teaching 8th graders. Eighth graders are an interesting subset of humans, half already passed into virtual adulthood, half still immature as a 3rd grader. It was like teaching in a one room schoolhouse circa 1850, kids age 6 to 18. Being a graduate of a radical institution, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I came into the profession with radical ideas. Schools, or so I thought at the time and pretty much still do, are nothing more than prison lite, get those brats into some cells and keep them busy all day long. Instill in them virtues that would make working in a factory or a corporation palatable. Obedience. Subservience. Acceptance. Sit down, shut up. Do what you’re told, get a good grade. Act out, the Man will sit on your head.

So naturally I dispensed with seating charts, grading systems and most rules. My fellow teachers watched with horror my kids outside hanging from the trees where we would take books and read on sunny days. It looked like Monkey U. My principal stopped by one day to inform me that one of my kids’ parents, a University professor in English lit, was extremely distressed to drop by his son’s class only to find him in white facepaint with blood smeared on his lips in the filming of our epic zombie movie. “It was ketchup,” I smiled. “No zombies were harmed in the making of our film.” Oddly, this was not reassuring to him. Nor was the fact that I refused to issue grades, just written evaluations.

The zombie movie, no doubt the inspiration for our current wave of endless copycat books, television shows and B movies, was really a social commentary on the school itself complete with shots of zombie like students in my fellow educators’ classes, sitting in rows, half awake, barely alive. My fellow educators, once we began to screen the film for 25 cents a head, were less than amused. My principal trudged once more to my room to inform me school policy forbade charging money for school activities. I said I didn’t realize that. We instituted the novel concept of voluntary donations and had Gerald, an 8th grade gorilla the size of a bar bouncer, ask forcefully for those voluntary donations. We made more than enough money to pay for processing the film with plenty left over. Lessons in Capitalism 101. And still the administration complained!

At the end of the year my principal explained that I would not be coming back and he would not be offering letters of recommendation. I explained that this was okay with me. I had had a dose of the education system and maybe it was time to remove myself and set out to explore the ‘real’ world. He heartily agreed and for once we were on the same page. The real world, it turned out, proved that I was probably right to get those now useless teaching certificates in the first place. I was ready for some mean lessons in the school of hard knocks. The zombies were about to have some fun with me this time.