The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I got a new neighbor recently who bought the farm next door to us so naturally I wandered over to introduce myself, a one man South End Welcome Wagon he may have mistook for a snoopy neighbor. The 17 acres, barn, shops and 1930’s house went on the block after its previous owner declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time, obviously a slow learner, but like he always told me: No Brains, No Headache. I assume he’s poor now but migraine free. When he went under the last time he owed me a few thousand dollars. I still have a small headache. And trust me, I’m no smarter.

“So what do you do?” I asked my new sharer of a long property line he’s just had surveyed. He’d recently been laid off, he told me, not certain if he was required to testify against himself, maybe plead the 5th. He had a wife, kids in college, another house down in the City. I could see he was growing uncomfortable under the wilting barrage of questions I interrogated him with, maybe he should talk to his attorney first. He admitted he intended to build a house up on the hill, but money was tight with college tuitions, other mortgages and no job. I nodded my understanding.

“So what’s next?” I demanded, relentless as a prosecuting attorney turning the final inexorable screw before extracting a confession. “Well,” he said, “I’m thinking maybe starting a microbrewery or, I don’t know, a nano-distillery up here at the barn.”

“Lemme get this straight,” I laughed, boring in now. “A brewery? Hellfire, man, you came to the exact perfect place!”

“What do you mean?” he asked, truly alarmed now he’d spilled too many beans.

“You got no job, money’s scarce, kids are in college, your wife’s working and you want to build a house … but first, you plan to open a distillery or a brewery. What I mean is, “ I explained, smiling broadly, “ you’re a kindred spirit. You got the same dream as all of us South Enders. Welcome to La-La Land, neighbor!!”

It’s good to know — at least for this Old Timer — the newcomers will carry on our time honored traditions. Long live our Southern Values!

When I first got out of college with my fabulously useful degree in English, I moved to a Polish farmhouse in northern Wisconsin. My neighbors, assuming I was destitute since the house had no running water and only an outhouse for a bathroom, decided to help me out by setting up an interview at the local school bus company. I didn’t know how to tell them tactfully that I didn’t mind poverty near as much as I minded work, but that seemed like a tricky argument to make and still remain friends.

So I went to the interview. I wore my worst jeans, the one with multiple tears and holes and patches, a rumpled t-shirt with frayed neck, and some shoes that looked like they’d been eaten by rodents all winter. I took my most indolent attitude, my hippie hair and tossed on a ratty hat for good measure. Nobody up in this redneck neck of the woods would hire me, I figured, but at least I could tell my neighbors I went to the bus company and they wouldn’t employ me, god only knows why.

The bus office was basically a shed and it was there I met the manager and his mechanic. We bantered a bit, talked about living in an old farmhouse with a pump over a 40 foot well out in the middle of the yard, joked about the outhouse and the woodchuck that lived in it, told a few stories and basically killed some time between the morning and afternoon bus runs. They seemed like nice fellows and they were greatly amused by me, I could see. Finally I got up to go, my work here done, and Walt, the manager asked when could I start. Start? I said. Start, he answered.

And so I got my first job after college. My advice to Mr. Trump is: be careful. Be very careful. You just never know in this mixed up world who might be willing to overlook your obvious flaws and give you the job you only pretended to want.

Kellogg’s announced this week they will be opening a fru-fru cereal bar in New York City. These are the good folks who developed a technique for flattening grains and removing most of their nutrients to make a dry product in a box the modern breakfast eater can slop some milk on and wolf down before running off to a long day at the office. We all grew up with this stuff and whole aisles in the grocery store are devoted to it. Course they figured out how to add chocolates and sugars to appeal to the kids, advertised it on the cartoon shows and addicted another generation of eaters who get their nutrients primarily from the added milk. Thanks, Dr. Kellogg.

Like most American kids who grew up on black and white Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, Mars bars and processed breakfast cereals, we just took this stuff for granted. Advertising made Tony the Tiger’s sugared flakes look appealing and the Trix Rabbit made us beg for those food colored balls of basically air. We could eat an entire box of Rice Krispies and still feel hungry. We did eat entire boxes of Cap’n Crunch and felt nauseous from whatever chemical the Food Conglomerates used to artificially flavor the stuff with. It may well be the whole thing was chemical, nothing tasted anything close to wheat or corn or rice or anything else grown in soil even with healthful doses of pesticides and herbicides. Obviously, if it was advertised on Saturday morning cartoon shows, we’d demand it from our time-saving moms and they would oblige. Nowadays we should call this child abuse and the corporations who spoonfed the American family with this slop should be treated like tobacco companies and the fast food industry, purveyors of death and diabetes.

The New York cereal bar plans to charge $7.50 a bowl for their nostalgic pablum. They do, in their defense, sprinkle lemon zests and other thrilling spices to their corn flakes and they did say they weren’t going to overcharge with excessive prices like $13.50 a bowl. And the cereal baristas will definitely not add the milk themselves. Too personal a decision, they said, for them to take that privilege from the buying customer.

I guess it’s only a matter of time before we get the Oscar Meyer baloney sandwich bars and the Jiffy peanut butter and jelly cafeterias, the Hamburger Helper restaurants and the Spam counters, Frito Lay Potato Chip Delis and the Twinkie Lounges. I know we’ve been sold a bill of goods back in the Leave it to Beaver era, but seriously, do we have to have our noses rubbed in it?

When I first came to the desolate South End, my first priority was finding a job, sad to say. I tried some dead ends, then got a school bus driving gig, but my boss decided I was probably a long-haired dope smoking leftist radical who needed to find other means of employment. The writing, as they say, was on the wall. So … I picked up a part-time furniture stripping job 35 miles north just in case the ax fell.

I’d finish my morning bus driving shift, then head up north for my dose of ketones and other chemicals known to the State of California as Killers. Trouble was, the repair shop didn’t open til 10 so I would drop into the Freedom Café in downtown Mt. Vernon and have coffee and breakfast, fritter some time and maybe do a little writing while I waited. I still had visions then of becoming a poet. Or a novelist. Who knows? I had a notebook, I had a pen, I had time on my hands. You can write the Great American Novel over coffee and eggs and toast if you keep at it. And if the stripping solvent fumes don’t scramble your brains first.

My waitress, after a month or so, asked what was I writing? They evidently don’t get a lot of would-be Kerouacs in for breakfast specials. The sight of rambling Jack scribbling away over his omelette provoked some serious curiosity. When I told her, she seemed mildly impressed. After all, how many literary furniture strippers had she served?

Well, after some light banter over the next few months, she finally asked me out, maybe shoot some pool, drink some beers, see how the wind blew. I said sure, be fun, but when I came up to find her a week or so later to make it official, this date of ours, she’d quit her job and taken another one up at the Farmhouse, the new café on the highway to Whidbey. So I drove up there, figuring what’s another 10 miles more. Of course when I asked at the restaurant they told me it was her day off.

So I drove home and had some time to wonder what it was about her that was so attractive to me. On the long lonesome drive back to my shack, it hit me. She reminded me of Karen, the woman I’d left back in the Midwest, and so, I resolved to call her up after these intervening years, see if she was married with children, and if not, maybe ask if she would forgive this fool, see if she was footloose and fancy free, see if this cruel universe offers a reprieve occasionally, deserved or not. And just so you know, just to offer some small glimpse of optimism in this otherwise bleak old world we live in, sometimes it does….

My brother and I were comparing notes on our mutual maturity this last visit. I guess we both inherited some genetic predisposition toward hair trigger tempers, something we both thought we had made some progress on holding in check, but of course, we have our stumbles. He was telling me his latest, a sad little story of a woman who didn’t quite make it through an intersection before the light turned red, leaving her blocking the pedestrian crossing.

My little brother was the pedestrian she was blocking. He shook his head sadly before continuing, obviously embarrassed at his behavior at the ripe old age of 64. I cut into his recounting to guess that he had walked across this miscreant’s hood just to teach her a lesson. Which, I told him, I had done once or twice, but you know, when I was less temperate than my mellow self is now. But no, he didn’t stomp across her hood. Instead he walked around behind her car and then, beyond helping himself, he smacked his open hand on her trunk, something I’m sad to say I’ve done plenty of times.

But … this time the lady, startled at the apparent collision from behind, hit her accelerator and plowed into the car in front of her. Day ruined. Car too. My brother said he just put his head down and walked away as fast as possible, feeling like a total you know what. I did know what.

I said my last road rage I had a tailgater crawling up my bumper for a few miles. I tried slowing down but the driver wouldn’t take the hint and inched even closer. This, of course, infuriated me to righteous indignation and finally I’d had more than enough so I hit my brakes without warning, expecting to give my too close friend a little driving lesson that might back him off for the rest of the trip into town. Except instead of braking, the little jerk lurched out into the oncoming lane.

This, like my brother’s anecdote, is an example of Unintended Consequences. People can be hurt or killed, vehicles can be damaged or wrecked. Lessons may or may not be learned. Our combined ages, my brother and I, are 130 years on this little planet. If we both got as old as Methuselah, we probably will still be telling these stupid stories. “So this woman rolls out into the hallway in her wheelchair, see, and blocks my way into the cafeteria and all I meant to do was give her cart a little bump, then next thing you know….”