The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I spoze the ghosts of the past are always waiting in the closet of the present for an opportunity to jump out of the dark and say Boo! in a voice that’s creepily familiar. Post Traumatic Spook Syndrome: finding a former self you thought you’d buried come knocking one midnight dreary. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a different doorbell.

My old buddy Ralph got one awhile back. Knock knock … who’s there? And lo and behold, there was a woman he’d ‘known” back when we all lived in the ‘hood. She was underage then, what the law would define as statutory rape then and now, but here she was 10 years later with a curly headed boy in tow, claiming, she said, the child was his. Whoo hoo…. The sins of the past do come stalking occasionally, the stuff of tragic novels.

Ralph, of course, was shell shocked. “Mine?” he asked. “Yours,” Desiree informed him matter of factly. Of course Ralph realized the implications after a quick deduction of the kid’s age versus the time since he and Desiree had made whoopee in her mom’s ghetto apartment while she was away working to support her dysfunctional family now that her boyfriend had disappeared after providing her with 3 children. And here was one of them, in the same sorry boat, looking for dear old dad.

Ralph, hard as it is to believe, was prepared to do the Right Thing by her. Child support, PTA, college tuition, wedding expenses, etc. At least that’s what he told me one confessional — and I believe he would have. But Ralph is nobody’s fool either, unless you count Ralph, so he asked Desiree if she’d mind having a paternity test. After all, the kid didn’t really look much like Ralph at age 10. Desiree balked, called him a few names, then ultimately admitted to friendly extortion. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and Ralph figured okay, he’d had his fun, now it was hers. He gave her a little money, guilt money I guess. And he fears she’ll be back for more. I think maybe she never left….

Jerry Hatrick had converted the back booth of the Marina’s Pilot House Lounge into a personal office, judging by the papers strewn around his empty pint glasses. “Whazzup?” Flathead Fred asked amiably as three of us yahoos slid in with our own beers at risk of foaming onto Jerry’s table top filing cabinet. “You doing your taxes early this year??”

Jerry pushed a pile of papers into a heap, leaned back with a groan and said, “Just trying to decide whether to take Social Security now … or wait.” The boyz are all over this one since we’re of that age. Fred took his at 64 even though the benefits were way less than if he’d waited til 70. “I’m grabbing what I can before they go broke,” he told Jerry. Phil laughed. “Fred, if the government goes broke, you got worse troubles than no monthly check.”

“Laugh all you want, Phil, I’m hedging my bets. There’s less people putting in and more of us taking out. You do the math.” Jerry said that’s exactly what he was trying to do before we interrupted. And that was assuming he lived until, oh, 90 and then how much would the difference be if he took early retirement and what would it be if he took it at 66? The last thing he needed was Fred’s monkeywrench logic, which included inflation, health insurance, nursing home care and anything else he could throw in to muddy Jerry’s mathematics. “Whadda you think, Skeeter?” Phil asked about ¾’s of a pint into the discussion.

I’m 64 and eligible for an early pay-out myself. Recently I got my earnings statement for the past 47 years. Four years I made zip. Nada. Zilch. Nine I didn’t break into 4 figures. The boyz consider me semi-retired and so do I … since about 1975. Truth is, I tell em, I’ll be working as long as I can. Which, of course, cracks the table up.

“Next you’ll be wanting us to buy your beers out of sympathy,” Fred crows, shaking his head. Fred worked for 45 well paid years as a construction foreman. His reduced benefits would look pretty good to this grasshopper who fiddled away his working years. Jerry’s going to have a hard time too, I know. But his working days are over with his arthritis problems and pretty soon he’s going to have to roll the dice like the rest of us. If I know Jerry, he’ll have a few more pints, divide by an even number, weigh the empty glass and then flip a coin. Just like the rest of us high rolling gamblers….

We got home late last night to find the front door wide open, leaves blowing around in the livingroom, the house cold as the frigid outdoors which was dropping past freezing, a hemlock crushing half the boathouse and woodsheds, the water association across the street working on the system so that black water clogged every faucet at the new house and the toilet filled with what looked like septic water.  Today I’ll see what needs to be done about most of the above.  Sunny and cold here on the tropical South End.  Pretty if you weren’t looking at disasters.  Home sweet Home!

I wrote here awhile back that WalMart was moving to the old Tyee Grocery strip mall. A neighbor thought it was true — and boy, howdy, did she ring my ears with outrage. She wanted that WalMart and now she’s stuck with a Marijuana Dispensary there. Course, when I wrote a year ago that South End Greenworks WAS going in there, a guy drove all the way down the island to find it. Yep, he was hacked it was all a joke.

I mentioned hunting season was opening up in a few weeks one April issue of the Crab Cracker — on alpacas. I got some serious threats from one particular herder that I would be billed for every one of the cute little buggers killed. Okay by me so long as I get the meat. When we built the new bridge onto Camano, I wrote that it would be named the Colton Harris-Moore Bridge and our commissioner at the time had his ears scorched by irate citizens. He said, Skeeter, you got to stop writing this stuff, folks think you’re serious.

Course then we ran Skeeter for mayor. Of the South End. The commissioner lost by a few votes and he thinks folks voted for me by accident. Maybe so. The line between reality and fiction is gone now. Political e-mails are so blatantly lies but nobody seems to mind. Hot talk radio has managed to pull the rug out from under what was once ‘unbiased’ reporting. If we think ALL news is skewed and biased, why not just make it ALL opinion? In an effort to give both sides, network news has quit making the call on what’s true or not. Let the Liars talk and you can make up your own mind. Except now we’re so saturated with prevarication, exaggeration and outright chicanery, half of us can no longer see the difference. Or worse, we no longer care.

Skeeter, needless to say (or so I thought), is a joker. He’s not advocating, he just thinks April Fool’s Day never ends. Sadly, in this Information Age — or Misinformation Age — it apparently doesn’t. Trouble is, folks out there on the blogosphere, on the internet, on the news, on the talk shows, they aren’t kidding.

I never wanted to live in a small town. I have a few times and I hated it. Everybody knows your Bizness …. or they think they do. Now I live on a small island. Used to be I felt reasonably anonymous. I kept a low profile the first few decades, no photos in the paper OR the post office. I still try to keep that part. Folks might know my name, but usually they don’t have a mug shot to go with it.

Still, you live in one place long enough, you’ll lose any anonymity you might once have prized. Folks come up to me all the time in town or the local grocery, saying Hi Skeeter, how ya doin’? Hell if I know half of them — embarrassing, for sure, but I’m getting, if not used to it, at least not losing sleep later. I just plead geriatric dementia. Pretty soon it won’t be a ploy, it’ll be a diagnosis. At least I’ll have years of acclimation.

I shouldn’t mind, I suppose. Not like I’m a Class 4 predator in the neighborhood. Although … that banjo I play might qualify for some community meetings with the sheriff to warn everybody. You can’t be too careful these days.

But let’s face it — privacy is a precious commodity, not one we should relinquish easily. Sure, we can grow a thicker skin, ignore the parochial paparazzi, try to keep our heads down but focused on the Goal, whatever the goal might be. Folks can think what they want … even if we’ve tried to create an Image.

Comes a time, though, when public opinion starts to challenge our self image. Fame, even small fry, small town notoriety, seems corrosive. Like having a mirror on the wall you try to ignore, but … you peek. And the reflection isn’t what you see when you brush your teeth.

I suppose I could pull back in. Or move away. Or change my name. It’s appealing some days. Except that I love it here. I’ve been back in the woods this month. Logging. Planting trees. Lining the paths with bleeding hearts. It’s a great escape. It might just be a start. Until the raccoons get too familiar with me.