The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m one of those people who pick up hitchhikers. I give spare change to street beggars too. I guess because some part of me feels like there but for the grace of God, go me. Maybe you’ve never had to hitchhike, but I have … and I hated it. Broke or broke down or both — it’s not much fun, but it does teach you humility and an appreciation for the kindness of strangers and gives you huge motivation to buy a used car.

The hombre I picked up this morning was a lean long haired young guy, maybe 30, looked a little worn out already. He asked how I was doing, I said fine, how you doing?

“Okay now, I guess,” he answered. “Just got out of the hospital.”

Course I had to ask what he was there for. “Well, I’m not real sure,” he replied. I’m thinking some unknown undiagnosible malady, but no, he’d been up river partying, drinking, doing some recreational drugs (although he didn’t say so) and when he woke up, he was in a hospital bed, no recollection how he got there, no memory of most of the night before. “How long were you in there?” I asked. He shrugged, didn’t know. Didn’t ask either, apparently. Helluva party.

“Yeah,” he mused, “got another one this weekend up in Darrington, some festival my pal told me was going to be awesome. Awesome,” he repeated, already imagining it. I read about guyz like this everyday, heroin addicts who are brought back from an overdose, but shoot up same day. Alarm bells don’t, apparently, go off for them. Or the line between life and death is just a tightrope they think they can walk, no net necessary.

In town I dropped him off at the curb in front of Mission Motors, the Christian used car lot. “Gonna be a gas,” he intoned, already halfway to Darrington in his mind. A better man than me might have lectured him. A better man might have offered adult counsel.

“Party on, dude,” I said, throwing the truck into gear. He won’t be hitchhiking much longer, I figure. Slow learn, fast burn.

I’m about to leave fogbound Madison, Wisconsin this morning after a week of adult daycare for my folks. Mom just went into the medium care apartments but she didn’t go quietly. Dad is still up at their house where they’d lived for 5 years and you can bet she wanted to go back up there too. The Old Man finally relented, even though the assisted living staff said no way could he handle her needs, but at the last minute he decided they were right, at 93 he was no serious caregiver. Believe me, my mother was devastated.

Still, she wasn’t going to give up. She wanted to go ‘home.’ Home, I said, was where you are, make the best of it. Three meals a day, light housekeeping, nurse a buzzer away, laundry once a week, friendly and professional staff — really the best that money can buy, a blessing for the rest of the family. Hell on earth for her.

I got here a week ago. Her apartment had furniture my brother and his wife hauled down, kitchen table, chairs, TV, couple of small end tables, lamps. They wanted to hang some paintings and prints but Ma growled No Way and so the apartment had all the warmth of a Keokuk Motel 6 in the dead of winter. She wasn’t, she told us repeatedly, staying long, she was going home.

Where there’s a will there’s a way is an old aphorism that’s plenty oversold to eager optimists, okay with me, but there comes a time to accept your losses and move on, make the best of a bad situation you maybe didn’t choose. So … my job was to cheerful up the place. I bought a few paintings and when I rolled in with them under both arms, she asked what I had. Presents, I said, early Christmas, late birthday. Little by little, day by day, we hung art, placed silk flowers, brought in vases and baskets. Takes a heap of living, though, as the poem notes, to make a place a home, nothing she was going to do, that’s for sure.

She knew, with every nail in the drywall, every framed painting hung, every vase placed, she knew she wasn’t going home. I’ll look back months or maybe years from now and wonder if all that art, rather than the cheery bumper sticker ART SAVES LIVES! art didn’t actually kill her.

Someone the other day asked if I thought by writing sketches about the South End I wasn’t contributing to the polarization of the island, Us vs. Them. I will admit, it gave me pause. Had I set in motion the wheels of discontent? Had I created the mechanism for separatism, otherness and the seeds for civil war? Should we make South English the lingua franca or should we encourage bilingualism? Are we a mixing pot or a melting pot?

So … you can well imagine the sleepless nights I’ve had to endure, the moral dilemma of all who slam face to nose with the reality of their mightier-than-the-sword pen and can no longer avoid taking responsibility for the effects our words have on a population fed starvation diets of Tweets and Twitters. Admittedly it’s an explosive concoction, thee short little expositories, and when what might have been seen as scarcely more than travelogues of a twisted imagination become kindling for fevered prejudices, the burden, my friends, is heavy indeed.

The warnings were there, I admit. I sent some of these audio recordings to our local public radio station KSER only to be told they might Offend. Offend who? I asked. People on the South End, the station manager replied.

Satire, you see, is a two edged sword. You’re never really sure who will take umbrage, but rest assured, someone will. Or everyone! I decided finally that in a world where Fox News is considered actual news or where we still debate (outside coal mining towns) if Global Warming exists or when one political party nominates a rich playboy philandering loudmouth know-nothing, I can’t really shoulder the burden of fomenting polarization. If you decide I’m poking fun at you and yours, I might just be. If you think I’m on your side, don’t bet on it. If you think I know what I’m doing, think again. I’m a South Ender. You think we live down here so we could spread the news, I got a job for you as copy editor. Call after midnight most any holiday, my secretary Raoul will set you up with an interview.

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.