The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn’t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn’t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she’d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn’t have expected less.

Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled ‘Utsalady’ as a nod to our island’s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, ‘How you doing today?’ By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M’lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we’d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.

They say time is money, but they don’t say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner’s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It’s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she was price gouging them.. And the rest don’t see or hear her, she’s just the checkout girl.

Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina’s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It’s a scrape every damn month, but I’ve never heard her complain. She’s glad to have this job. “You have a nice day!” she smiles to Her Majesty who’s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, “How’s it going, Skeeter?” If she and I weren’t happily married, I swear to God I’d propose to her on the spot.

Day after Tomorrow

Someone asked me the other day
buttering me up, I spoze
if I would like to be remembered …

Without thinking much I said no.

Like maybe I’m a buddhist zen priest
or something.

No? this somebody asked. No?

Who no’s?!! The days roll off the calendar
making a noise like wind through the firs, which, when I think about it,
is a bad metaphor. The wind’s coming back.

We don’t even have kids, fer chrissake. The woods
beyond the garden sits cat silent. And waits. Long
after I’m gone, maybe the firs’ll remember.
Maybe the wind is just a memory. Or just the wind without the fir.

Some of us farmers down here on the organic South End are alarmed at the news Coca-Cola is making milk. They claim they’re making it better. God is going to be heartbroken to hear this. Probably thought She’d pretty much perfected it after all these millennia. Course God neglected marketing, something the labs down at Coke sure didn’t.

I’ve been getting milk down the road from my friend the Goat Lady. Pure, unadulterated, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, free range goat milk, unpasteurized, really creamy stuff. What we South Enders call ‘natural’, Coca-Cola would characterize as raw, meaning it’s pre-manipulated. They’re planning to separate that into sugars, proteins, carbos and fats, all its component parts, then reconstitute it. I’d tell you the formula, but it’s a secret, no doubt the hangover of those first Coke recipes that used cocaine before the pharmacologists and food scientists realized sugar and caffeine would be cheaper and less criminally suspect.

Science, a powerful tool. And … if you can’t trust your food to a soft drink corporation, who can you trust? It’s not as if they’re a cigarette company, chopping tobacco into its component parts, making a slurry, then adding 200 ingredients known to the state of California as carcinogens before rolling the goop into a totally addictive product for the consumer. Not like that at all! Besides, we got the FDA regulating food, right? Right??

The future looks grim for us farmers is what I think. Reformulated broccoli candy bars, reprocessed pea popsicles, endive gum, bus bean twists. But … when the chemists are done, what an improvement on that stuff growing in dirt and you-know-what. They’ll take that out first step in the centrifuge.

It’s a brave new world and maybe we better put on a brave new face. Hey, if nothing else they’ll take the sting out of our nettle crops. Sales might go back up to pre-Recession and the good times might return. Plus we won’t have cows tromping around pooping in our fields now that they’ll be confined to laboratories. Thank you Coke! But … wasn’t your slogan a few years back ‘YOU CAN’T BEAT THE REAL THING’? So why try?

When I first arrived on the South End, my biggest concern was finding a job. I’ve always maintained, and still do, that the only thing worse than work is looking for work. The best days of my life are those where I quit or gave notice or just walked off. The worst were the days following when it dawned on me I would now have to go searching for another dead end minimum wage position.

I had driven school buses back in rural Wisconsin and in Seattle and Gomorrah. I’d even driven metros so it seemed like I’d be able to get a job with the local school bus company, which proved true and before long I was chauffeuring children into town and back twice a day. My boss was happy to hire an experienced driver … until I let my hair grow and then a beard and he finally realized I wasn’t the cleancut young man he thought he’d hired. At which point he wanted me gone. Twice a week I was summoned into his office next to our break room to answer charges of driving recklessly, driving drunk,  driving on drugs, driving onto the shoulder, driving toward oncoming traffic, slamming the brakes, kicking kids off the bus miles from home, outrageous accusations that I refused to take seriously, but he wanted me to know were serious offenses if true. I would roll my eyes and he’d fire another accusation purportedly made by the parents of my kids. I suspected they were made by him, but really, what difference did it make? I knew my days were numbered as a professional driver.

We had a bus driver on a Stanwood route who had a reputation as a real ballbuster of a disciplinarian, at least according to him most days in the coffee room after the routes. When he came down with pneumonia, I subbed in for him. Holy Bluebird, the kids on that bus never heard they were spozed to use the seats to sit on. I never saw anything like it. Took me a whole minute or two to pull over and have a short chat with the little attention deficit folks, something to the effect that I might be taking them home for a free vacation day, maybe see if their parents wanted to babysit instead of go to work. After that, we didn’t have much trouble.

On the last day of my short career with the company the supervisor came up to let me know rumor had it there might be a water fight on the bus and I should be watchful. I said I sure would, boss. You better believe he wasn’t going to be my boss much longer.

At a convenient stop that’s now the Visitor Center I pulled my 40 foot long yellow Bluebird over, turned off the motor, set the brakes and turned to my charges. Okay, I said, give it your best shot. We went at it for ten minutes, water pistols and cannons, even a couple of half gallon jugs I brought for the finale. When we’d finished, I opened the front door and water poured out of that bus like a mini-Niagara, cascading down the steps onto the ground. My supervisor asked me when I got back to the barn if there’d been any trouble. No, I said, no trouble at all…. Thanks for the heads-up. That, happily, was the end of my bus driving career. Course, the next week I was scrounging for the next miserable job. Without, needless to say, a good reference.

I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR!

Me and my buddy Clyde were sitting up at my deck on a nice summer afternoon this year enjoying a cold one and listening to the pesky howl of a lawnmower in the distance down below. Except for the lawnmower it was an idyllic scene. Warm breeze off the Sound, mountains beyond, good conversation, cold beer — about all a South Ender requires of Paradise …
… before Nirvana was shattered by an ungodly scream of metal on metal, a horrific clatter and screech and finally silence. Clyde and I shook our heads. “That doesn’t sound good,” he said. “No, sounds like a John Deere death knoll. Glad it’s not our mower.”

We popped another cold one and counted our blessings. The neighbors could afford a new John Deere. Sure, a bit of an inconvenience, but hey, keep the economy humming, if nothing else. You can’t expect a mower to last forever, right?

About this time we hear footsteps on the stairs and from around the corner here comes Junkie Jeff, my heroin addict deadbeat con-artist no-account who rents the house next door and before we can say ‘whazzup?’ he’s apologizing, didn’t mean to hurt anything, he’ll make it good … and I finally say “STOP! You mean that godawful noise we just heard was MY mower???”

Jeff had borrowed it from my unlocked shed, filled it with my gas without asking and proceeded to run it into a pipe half buried in his lawn where it died a horrible death, spinning blade vs. steel opponent. RIP. “I’ll buy you a new one, really, I’ll replace it, Skeeter.”

From a calm center I replied firmly, “Naw, Jeff, I’ll buy a new one myself. And here’s the deal: you never touch it, you never ask to use it, you never step on my property again, not ever, never. And … I would greatly appreciate you start as of now.” Head hung hangdog low, Junkie Jeff retreated back to his syringe-filled sorry ass miserable excuse for a life with the unmowed lawn and the drawn curtains and his sad dreams of the next fix. “Man,” Clyde said in amazement, “you really let him off the hook.”

“Not really,” I admitted. “This morning I stripped the bolt that holds the blade. The blade is shot. The mower was shot too. I was going to buy a new one this week anyway. Jeff just saved me taking that one to the dump. And … now he’ll never darken my doorway again. He wouldn’t have bought me a mower in a hundred years, trust me. He’s a junkie. A liar. And he’s dead broke. This way, it’s a win-win. Say adios to my buddy Jeff.” Clyde smiled, we returned to our beers and celebrated. The South End — morally uncomplicated.