The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.

These are fast times we live in. You maybe remember when we talked about the Rat Race, that post-Eisenhower era when the corporations took over the South End and America too in a bloodless coup, ran a few efficiency studies, then busted the unions and paid us serfs paltry wages for long hours. The ‘modern’ citizen isn’t just in a rat race — we’re watching the information tsunami breaking over us, rocketing us forward on wave after wave of googled crap disguised as news or finance or sports, but is really a vehicle for advertising and a prescription for attention deficit when we’re tossed on the rocky beach of a fearful future.

You ask a friend or family member how their summer’s going, they say ‘crazy busy.’ We’re on our own treadmill now. Cellphones, laptops, text messaging, e-mails, sexting, online dating, online shopping, online everything. The truth is we’re not busy, we’re just half crazy, bored to death without a ‘device’ in our hands, constant stimulation but not anything with depth. Couple minutes max. Short text, quick internet search, got to move on to the next stimuli….

We don’t have time anymore for a walk on the beach, for reading a novel, for growing a garden, for learning new pursuits or new hobbies. No, we have to check our e-mails, messages, stock markets, ball scores and Facebook. We have to stay ‘connected’ and being ‘connected’ means keeping up with an accelerating digital glut. Not metaphorically — we’re rewiring physically. I guess you could say we’re evolving if you’re not a faith-based computer user, intelligent design if you are ….

I rowed out in my boat today, fighting wind and swells, to drop some crabpots. From far offshore I could see our house up in the trees back off the road, mostly obscured, but peeking out. I suspect my life is like that now, an anachronism peeking out from behind a woods no one ventures into anymore, a very long distance away as the waves pushed by a new wind crash up against my little dinghy and I’m in two places, but both are growing smaller and smaller, just specks on a receding horizon.

Zorba, a buddy of mine, stopped in today. I asked what’s new? and he opened up the tailgate to his truck and pulled out a metal attache case, snapped open the fancy clasps and lifted out a spidery looking gizmo with four propellers at each corner. Nestled beneath its insect body was a gimbaled camera. I was looking at my first real life drone.

Roll over H.G. Wells, give Beethoven the news. Zorba, whose real name is Mike, ran me through all the sci fi protocol, then showed me photos of where we were on the South End from hundreds of feet up, photos where I could see Port Susan lapping shore on the east and Saratoga Straits on the west. He ran this aerodynamic spy plane with his laptop. He said it could go up 500 feet and fly as far away as a mile and a half. I thought I heard a Time Machine land in my backyard.

This is indeed an age of miracles and wonders, a future we barely have to wait for. Zorba and I shook our heads, laughing. At least until he asked, “If we can buy this, what do you suppose the government has? How much more sophisticated is theirs?” We’ll all have one these before long. $300 now, they’ll put em in cereal boxes as prizes in a couple of years.

Well, I haven’t given enough thought to how I’d like to use mine yet. Course, I’d have to get a laptop first, maybe even a cellphone first, something to control the little hummer. Doesn’t seem likely. Once again I’ll be the last yahoo on the South End, miles behind the curve, watching the aerial acrobatics in the neighborhood, everybody taking photos from outer space while I’m earthbound. I know it’ll seem like techno-envy, but I may have to set up a No-Fly Zone over the shack, enforced not by laser beams maybe, but I still got Gramp’s old shotgun.

Ma and me got a sign down by the road that identifies us as a Backyard Habitat. I think folks who are official members are spozed to put up bird feeders and robin bubble baths. You need to have more than just a damn backyard with a bbq and lawn chairs is what they’re saying. But you don’t need a whole lot more….

I didn’t really want to join the Backyarders, but the mizzus insisted. The more backyards they got signed up, she argued, they could qualify as … I don’t know … a real woods or something. We got 7 acres of real woods and more woods next to that woods. Coyotes and deer and raccoons and squirrels and porcupines and all kinds of varmints who enjoy our backyard fruit and vegetables more than they do the sparse pickings back in the wilderness. I don’t want to get all snobby, but a backyard habitat isn’t going to fire up my tired blood. I didn’t come to the South End to feed squirrels from a bird feeder. They don’t need welfare, they need to be left alone. I’d much prefer they steal from me than wait for handouts.

This year we got a velvet horn buck who thinks maybe I’m the one stealing from him. He chomps on our plums and apples about 10 feet away from me and when I offer him a fresh one, damn if he doesn’t eat it right out of my hand like he expects to be served. He’ll be wanting a napkin next.

I guess all of us on the wild wild South End are more and more gentrified these days. That, or we all realize now that we’re being threatened with backyard confinement, we’d better learn to live together. Probably won’t be long before we put up bird feeders…. I just dread the day when they feed us.