The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the Norse Village in Stanwoodopolis the liquor store has sat shuttered ever since the voters of Washington decided we should get government out of the business of selling alcohol. Actually most of the Norse Village is pretty much out of business. Got a Dollar Store and a laundromat, all of it anchored now by the ever resilient Uff-Da Shoppe, purveyors of fine Scandihoovien knick-knacks.

I noticed recently the Chapel of Praise has moved into the vacated liquor store. We all know it’s not the building that’s important, it’s the Spirit that moves inside. Or spirits in this case. But … ever since I moved here in 1977 the only liquor store in town was this building and this location. And now it’s a House of God, a concrete block sanctuary for folks the liquor store probably brought to their inebriated knees. With a bottle, now a hymnal.

Bernie Slivovitz, my neighbor down the highway, is a newly minted convert. He’s been pretty religious about his AA meetings at the toxic mold county-run Blue Building, formerly the Senior Center, every Thursday night and now he’s washed in what he calls the Blood of the Lamb. Sounds like a meatpacking house to me, but I don’t make light of Bernie’s newfound salvation. His drinking cost him more than a couple of jobs plus a wife and his kids still won’t talk to him, they aren’t as forgiving as Jesus. They think his sobriety, like always, is as temporary as the rain and wind stopping in November. The wagon he’s riding, driven by Jesus or Bobby Ryder, his best friend who takes him to the grocery store after the last DUI, will knock him to the ditch sooner, not later.

Maybe so, but Bernie’s doing okay so far. A little righteous for my cynical tastes, but hey, you think you found the Right Path, you hate to see your pals and family wandering, lost and forsaken. The road is narrow, Bernie’s pastor tells him. And for those who stray, get ready for the Big BarBQ in the sky.

“It does seem strange,” Bernie confides to me one day last week over a cup of black coffee and his ever present cigarette, “to attend services in the old liquor store. But ya know, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

Being a South Ender, I couldn’t agree more.

Our anniversary is coming up tomorrow. 34 years. No, not our wedding anniversary, the day the mizzus rolled onto the South End and into our love shack. Love shack. Put the emphasis where you want, but my god, it really was just an old dilapidated shack, warped floors, swaybacked roof, dryrot and cracked linoleum, standing on stumps and pier blocks at the end of the road. At the tail end of an island on the shore of a continent. You don’t believe in romance or the power of love, you should listen up, stories like this’ll melt your cynicism, maybe give you faith that life can always get better.

Thirty four years ago we were dirt poor, both of us. I had a part time job as graveyard orderly in a hospital 40 miles away with nothing in the bank. Karen had just finished a Masters degree in librarying. No job. Some student loan debt. She rolled in with $40, a suitcase and a set of skis. Maybe she thought we had winters here on the coast. Our $225 a month mortgage was hard to meet and it felt like the wolves were waiting outside the back door. You want to find out if your relationship is strong, live in poverty awhile, you’ll find out. Pretty quick.

But those were great years, those love-struck, hardscrabble years back in the early 1980’s. The South End was pretty remote back then, not many neighbors, not many friends. We spent most of our time together, working in the yard and the gardens, patching up the shack, adding a few additions. Family and friends who came out to visit us probably felt sorry for us living that close to the edge in a rundown hovel hard to keep warm. But me, I never was happier than those early years. Love will make you forget a lot of troubles the same way money won’t make you forget you’re lonely.

A lot of women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Okay, most women wouldn’t have stuck it out. Not only was I no prize, the shack wasn’t exactly a honeymooner’s dream home either. Couple of strikes right there. And any career possibilities for a prospective librarian … well, they were few and far between and a miserably long drive away. Staying meant some serious sacrifices.

Looking back, we’ve done okay. Karen found some library work, even ran a department at the University of Washington’s prestigious library. Long commute though. Too long. She’s become the area historian by dint of 30 years of research and writing and she still is a librarian. Me, I quit my orderly job after 10 years and spent a couple building a house to replace the shack she lived in with me for 13 years. Folks who see the place now can scarcely believe it. Here? they ask. This dump? Yeah, I say, this old shack.

It makes me smile to think back on her arrival 34 years ago. Stormy night, power blown out, the old homestead lit by lanterns and oil lamps, the wind howling against the paned windows we could see our reflection in. We ate fresh crabs and drank champagne in the flickering golden light. The woodstove crackled and we started our future together. I think maybe we’ll do that again this year. The windstorm is already here.

A friend of mine, Ginny Johnson, down the road whose mom had died recently after a three month stay at the Mabana Sunset Villa asked me who’d be taking care of us when we needed a rocker and a drool bucket. She didn’t have kids and neither does yours truly. Me, I don’t have much in the way of paternal instincts and anyway, most of my so-called adult life I never felt fit to be a parent. Course now that I’m well past child rearing age, I look at most of my neighbors who did raise children and think if all those dope-smoking yahoos could manage it, how much worse could I have been?

Well … probably a lot worse. But we make our beds and now it’s time to lay in em. Hopefully with a little time left to bounce in em too.

Nevertheless Ginny has a point. Who’s going to help us when our teeth loosen up and our joints harden and erectile dysfunction is the least of our worries?? She was thinking maybe a favorite nephew, offer a hefty cut of the will as a carrot. Carrot? We barely got turnips. Our nieces and nephews, ma and me’s, they got their own lives thousands of miles away. Last thing in the world I’d inflict on them is our health care. No, my suspicion is all us old farts will have to take care of each other down here on the crusty South End. Give us something to do between Gilligan’s Island reruns and the next adult beverage, if nothing else.

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I agree, but it takes one too to care for the elderly. Used to be we could send gramps off on the next iceberg when the ‘time’ came, but with global warming, that option’s melted off the table.

I know it gets harder the older we get. My own view is you just have to get tougher too. We didn’t move to the end of a once remote island to live the life of Riley. We moved here to live like pioneers. Some of it’s been hard. We never thought it would get easier. And like my pals down at the Diner like to intone when one of us codgers is complaining about the last operation or wants to show his newly minted surgical scars: old age ain’t for sissies. Gonna be a lot of headstones with that chestnut engraved in granite.