The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

Any of you unfortunate enough to know me probably understand that I’m not the kind of hombre who wanted neighbors. Thomas Jefferson famously said people should live far enough apart that they can’t hear their dogs’ barking. Times change, I understand that, but in these modern times, I’d like to think we would live separate enough not to hear each other’s lawnmowers, chainsaws, weedeaters and teenagers’ boomboxes. So imagine my distress when, two years after moving to the end of this island at the end of the continent, the trees across from me were clearcut and a 52 lot development was slated for my neighborhood. I immediately went looking for a new home, up river by the Sauk and Skagit convergence, over on the peninsula, out by the coast, somewhere I could hide out.

Needless to say I never left the South End. The development got scaled down to 26 lots and for the past 3 decades, about one house a year was built. My own included…. This past year the last house was finished and the clamor and clang of construction ended, the quietude enfolding us like a benediction. Amen.

Today we were over at the annual picnic our neighbors put on for themselves and those of us across the road. The mizzus and me are the only non-members who attend, but every year we meet the folks who moved in the past year, shoot the breeze, carry in a potluck dish, eat potato salad and hamburgers, reminisce and get reacquainted. Slowly but surely over the years we’ve made our peace with a more crowded neighborhood than we’d maybe wished for. And slowly but surely the neighbors are no longer folks older than us but quite a few are younger. I can see where this is going. Through bifocals clear as day.

I haven’t always been on the best of terms with these newcomers of ours, I’ll admit that. Probably their fault, I figure. And in the old days they didn’t get along with each other. Not my fault, definitely. But as we all sat around the picnic tables at the cul-de-sac’s only shade under the big leaf maple on a hot summer day, I felt at home with all these folks, all these neighbors of ours, some new, some old, and I count myself lucky, this crusty curmudgeon, for the friends we’ve made over there and the friends we’ll make in the coming years. We crab together, we talk across the fence, we go to birthday parties and anniversaries, all that socializing you might expect when you move to the country and not the suburbs. If you live near your neighbors, close enough, say, to hear their beagle bellowing, think about that picnic once a year if you don’t have one already. Invite the neighbors and if they don’t come like some of ours don’t, it’s their tough luck. Chances are, up close and personal, you’ll find you have plenty in common. And don’t let the potato salad sit out too long….