The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

Up behind us and through our woods there’s a road that snakes into the interior, got a few houses back there, even some folks who live there full time. Marge was one of those. She moved here when the clearcut ruined her own woods down by Lake Stevens. Course, about a year later, two or three of her neighbors cleared their 2 and a half acres and she felt like there was really nowhere to hide anymore.

She asked me to come up one day. Her husband was there in the livingroom with a whisky glass and the TV tuned to a game show. It was about 10 in the morning and he was drunk as a purple skunk and friendly as most alcoholics, meaning he wouldn’t say hello or shake hands. Marge made muted apologies, said he was a boat skipper, gone a lot of the time. From what I could see he was gone most of the time, even when he was in the room.

Marge shot herself a few years later, I can pretty much guess why, sad deal, sad woman. Her husband offered the place to his no-account kin, some punk pedophile the sheriff warned us neighbors about. The kid ran around with a crossbow, putting arrows into the neighbors’ houses, killing deer and leaving them to rot. He had parties the neighbors complained about, but he told them to jam it, he’d do what he wanted. The cops weren’t much help, pretty typical, so for four or five years we had this drug addict Chester the Molester for a roommate on the South End.

A few years ago Marge’s husband stopped by my shack during our annual Ma Day Studio Art Tour. Said he was moving, just wanted to say so long. “I haven’t been much of a neighbor,” he said sheepishly, “but I’ve quit drinking and I’m starting over. Wanted to apologize and say goodbye.”

A better man might’ve accepted that hand and that apology. But … I’m not that man. I leaned in on him and said, “I’m sorry too, Charlie, but it’ll be a better place with your sorry ass gone and your evil kin too. Adios, man. Move a long ways away, be all right with me.”

I believe in second chances, I really do. But I’m not one who believes an apology necessarily makes things right. I know he didn’t hold the gun to Marge’s head. I know he didn’t kill her, she killed herself. But I’ll be damned if I’d shake his hand and say good luck. I said instead, good riddance. Like I mentioned before, a better man …. that’s not me.

KINK, the 500 watt AM radio for the South End, recently received its FCC certification to broadcast as a bona fide public radio station. The station manager, Rhonda Bodley, made a short introduction yesterday morning at 8 a.m., something to the effect that finally the South End had its own voice. Course, for the last two years, that voice was intermittent, coming as it did from pirate broadcasts. If you happened to turn your AM dial to 490, you would have thought the Dark Ages had come to a crashing conclusion, that the rock had rolled off our cave entrance and that finally we had joined civilization. Never mind that podcasting had rolled the rock back.

Wolfman Chuck volunteered to be KINK’s first DJ. Well, the first legitimate disc jockey, spinning platters of his favorite old stuff, Jefferson Airplane and B.B. King, Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt, all the albums and 8 tracks he’d listened to stoned out of his head, at least any that were now out on CD’s. The first song to hit the South End airwaves was White Rabbit which he introduced as ‘our theme song’. “If you remember where you were when you first heard this,” he declared, “you didn’t hear it in the 60’s. Those memories were all … ERASED!” Wolfman would laugh his psycho laugh, usually ending in a coughing jag interrupted by another song.

Wolfman’s program is called Radio Free South End. “Where the truth comes to die.” Wolfman likes to announce it as four hours of Not-So-Easy-Listening, which is true, not so much for the music format as Chuck himself. He tends to ramble between songs, reminisces about the Golden Age of the sixties, extols acid rock and waxes nostalgic over everything from the Peace Movement to Timothy Leary, all in a sleepy stoner baritone punctuated by embarrassingly long pauses. He screws up the song credits, mangles syntax and punches wrong buttons for station ID when he meant to hit a public service announcement.

But … as Wolfman likes to tell us every few hours, “They pay me exactly what I’m worth. Nada. Zilch. Zip and zero. Speakin of which, this next tune is a million dollar winner … Cripple Creek with our own South End String Band!”

Like the man sez: not so easy listening.