The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My parents, when us little sprouts were growing up, never made much of a fuss over us. If we got good grades, they nodded approvingly. And if we didn’t, they told us to buckle down and smarten up, school wasn’t some game. They never came to our sports events to watch their star kids play and we were glad they didn’t because, well, to be honest, we weren’t stars. We were just your basic kids, vanilla, ordinary, okay.

When they became grandparents, however, things changed. Their grandkids, my god, they were Einsteins, they were football stars, they were just all around Wows. My friends who have grandkids have those same kids, all of them the smartest, best looking, most talented brats you ever had the privilege to hear bragged about. I don’t know, maybe if I had kids, they’d be superheroes too. But I didn’t and I bet they wouldn’t be if I did.

When I look back at my childhood (okay, the early years, not the present years), I drifted through sandlot baseball games, marbles, some fights, some homemade soap box derby races, all the stuff we hoodlums did back in the halcyon days of Eisenhower’s America. I didn’t think I had to be a genius. Or a basketball star. Or a movie actor. My folks didn’t push us munchkins out into a competitive universe with a prescription for failure by convincing us we were God’s gift to the free world. We were encouraged to try stuff, everything from track and field to chess to debate clubs, but they didn’t come down and play soccer mom and get into fights with the coach or the parents of our opponents. They’d ask how it went and if we got our butts kicked, they said better luck next time. These weren’t life and death competitions.

I worry that we’re trying too hard now. Sure, we’d all like to think that the fruit that fell near the tree is special, the sweetest, the tastiest, the fastest growing, the most flowers. But I suspect we just set the kids up for disappointment. Ballet. Dropped out. Lacrosse. Never really liked it. Cheerleader. Couldn’t do a head stand. Choir. Had a tin ear. Academics. Got a C+. Life. Just normal.

My folks accepted normal. So did we. What they wanted for us was happiness. It’s not a bad wish. In their own hands-off way, they taught us how to get there.

When the Flatheads got to the door of the South End Diner this morning, they were greeted by Anita’s handwritten placard:
No More Political Arguments
Until After the Election
No Exceptions!!

The vintage car guyz were flabbergasted. What’s it mean? they wanted to know. What about Freedom of Speech? Walter particularly wanted to know. Brenda was pouring the first rounds of coffee to about ten perplexed Flatheads. “We’re sick of it, all of us,” she explained. “Anita’s had a dose. She’s ready to close the diner until after next Tuesday if she has to.”

“Who does she think she is?” Walter demanded, waving his porcelain clay mug in a moving target for Brenda who finally grabbed his hand to hold the cup still. “She’s the owner, Walt, that’s who. No shoes, no shirt no service. You want breakfast, no more of your Trump talk.”

Jerry clapped his hands. “Okay with me, Walt. Maybe my appetite will come back.”

“What’ll we talk about instead,” Charlie moaned, only half serious. “How about cars?” Brenda suggested, starting now to take orders. “You’re a car club, not a political action committee.”

“Anita gonna ban that next?” Walter shouted, which brought Anita herself out from behind her register. Walter had his back to her and never saw the menu before it slapped across the back of his head, knocking his Make America Great Again ballcap onto the formica tabletop. “What the …?” he sputtered and turned to find Anita rearing back for another swat.

“Holy cripes, Anita,” he stuttered. “I’m just kidding.”

Anita whacked him anyway. “Jeez, Anita ….”

The rest of breakfast the boyz spent discussing the virtues of dual exhausts, twin carbs and rebored cylinders. Next week they’ll probably argue who stole the election. Or try, anyway ….

Down at the salon the only talk under the dryers was the election. Oh, the storm of the decade got a little play, but like the wind itself, it came and went with barely a whimper. The election, though, swirled like a tornado, styling chair to styling chair, fueled further by every new appointment.

“I’ll just be glad when the whole thing is over,” Kate, the newest stylist at the Cut’nClip, sighed after Abby Jorgenson had stepped out the front door, saying as she left her dollar tip that she just didn’t know who she would vote for.

“Oh sweetie,” Ronald had said down by the sink as he washed Myrtle Martin’s graying hair, “you mean it’s a hard choice? Between the first woman president and a serial womanizer?”

“Take it easy, Ronald,” Myrtle cried, “you’re digging holes in my scalp.” “Sorry,” Ronald apologized, “but good Lord, I can’t imagine voting for a man with that HAIR! It’s so not natural.”

“You judge a man by his hair?” Marie on Chair #2 asked. “Oh sweetheart,” Ronald sniffed, toweling off Myrtle’s newly shampooed locks, “the boy is 100% phony. His hair, my god, it’s golden and the man is 70 years old. Like a Greek god.”

“Grecian Formula, maybe,” Sally said from Chair #1 and Ronald snorted. Becky Myers laughed as Sally hit her with a hot blast from her blow dryer. “Ronald, you’re a crackup,” she said. “What about Hillary? She changes hairstyles more than she changes pantsuits.”

“Omigod, isn’t that the truth,” Ronald squealed happily. “I’d be rich if she were my client, that’s the holy gospel. Think of the jobs that woman will create. Ten stylists standing by at the White House.”

“Five more on Air Force One,” Sally tossed in.

And so it goes at the Cut’nClip. After the election, maybe they can return to the usual gossip. We’ll all be thankful is all I can say.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but this election is going to teach me a few lessons in civics. Mostly, you’d have to be out of your mind to communicate by e-mail. At least if you’re a politician. Time has come, I think, to at least write in some kind of unbreakable code. The Russians are hacking the Democratic Party, the FBI is poring over messages from that pathetic wiener Weiner, Wiki-Leaky is publishing all its hacked e-mails whether or not they’re really true or whether they’ve been altered, who could know and in this political climate, who cares anymore? Snowden should’ve proved that nothing is private.

I guess Hillary wasn’t paying attention. She just figured she would keep her stuff on a private server. Ho ho. Private? I mean, I can’t blame her. She’s only been investigated by her political enemies since forever, why would she feel the need to insulate herself from the right wing conspiracy? I, for one, sure don’t think she’s paranoid, just a little naïve.

Boys like Snowden and Zuckerberg and Assange, they think the world should be totally transparent. Whaddaya got to hide? Or what do you Dare hide? It’s a messianic vision. Evil will be rooted out so you will stop doing evil things. Tell that to Anthony Weiner and the underage kid he’s sexting. Every day you read about another bust of some child porno ring and I wonder, don’t these deviants read the paper, don’t they know they’re likely under surveillance, can’t they guess the little girl they’re meeting at the Greyhound bus station is FBI?

We’re all being outed now. We’re all under surveillance. If you’re on Facebook, you probably won’t understand what I’m talking about since you gladly strip yourself bare, sometimes literally. Privacy lacks primacy these days. Even the banal seems worthy of posting.

We say it’s only for my friends or it’s only a way to keep in touch with my kids now that they’ve grown. Sorry, we’re all on a party line once again, the way it was when I first came to the South End and a private telephone line cost a fortune. We were pretty circumspect on our conversations back then. Now we got cellphones, internet, e-mails, twitter and text messaging. We got the party line with everybody listening in … and the best part? It costs a fortune and I’m not talking about money. Go ask Hillary. Or Donald, when he’s ten tweet tall.

I’m parked in my dentist’s waiting room listening to the receptionist ask a Pakistani family if they have dental insurance. The odds of that must be about the same as winning Powerball this week. Across from me there’s an Hispanic twenty-something in for a root canal. The waiting area looks like a mini-Ellis Island by the time I’m summoned to the chair in back for a cleaning, both fiscal and dental. I heard it said once that if you wanted to determine if a person was poor or not, look in their mouth. Teeth will be rotten, teeth will be missing. The poor yank them rather than get a root canal or a crown.

A friend of mine, recently deceased, had half his pulled. Too much to fix em, he told me. By the end he looked like a caricature of a hillbilly. I’ve got another buddy whose abscessed teeth lay him low every month, but he won’t go to the dentist. Costs too much.

For some reason dental care isn’t lumped under health care. Not that most poor people have either. At least in this, the greatest nation with the greatest health care on earth. I guess if we just keep telling ourselves this bit of brag, we’ll eventually believe it even when statistics show us way down the list for everything from infant mortality to insurance coverage.

When I worked graveyard at the hospital forty miles away, the uninsured came to the ER where we treated them when they couldn’t pay for a regular doctor. We all not only pay for that service, we pay a lot more than if we treated them through a clinic or a doctor’s office. But you can’t go to an ER, usually anyway, for a toothache or an abscess or a root canal.

The Pakistani family walked out, probably to another dentist office, probably getting the same answer, a brushoff. Greatest health care in the world. Choose your own doctor. Just be sure to bring cash.