The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I’m out in the Dairy State right now, halfway into moving my father from an independent living apartment to the assisted living one at the far wing of the complex he’s been at less than a month. Part of the building is in Lockdown, part in quarantine, so you can imagine the logistics of moving furniture and the rest of his belongings are fairly daunting. So far so good. Last move a month ago we managed to get him into the apartment, then the entire complex shut down, no one out, no one in.

This time we’re crossing fingers and throwing the dice, moving piece meal in case the cell doors slam shut once again and he’s locked into a mostly empty apartment, no visitors, no exit. The place is called Attic Angels, what I now call Attica. Tomorrow, Allah willing, we move the last stuff, bed, kitchen table, chairs and … him. Once we move him we can’t visit on the lockdowned side he’s moving to. I fly home the next day but my brother won’t be able to visit until, hopefully, a few days later when the 14 day quarantine expires.

Strange times. Meanwhile life goes on. Yesterday my brother and I went to the Toyota dealership to pick up a van he’d ordered months ago. Sharks in the kiddie pool, believe me, when you walk inside where the sales personnel wait filing down their teeth. Standing at the main entrance, my mask on and a South End String Band ball cap on my long hair hanging below my collar half a foot, who should I see but a friend we’d just seen two weeks ago. Now you might walk up and surprise him by just being here 2000 miles from home, but me, no sir, I bounced up and greeted him with my best land shark imitation and a ‘What kind of vehicle can we put you in today, sir?’

Well, fun is fun, but finally I dropped the mask and dropped the act. It took him a second to rearrange reality, but we had a good laugh. By the time my brother had title to his new van, my pal’s friend had bought a car too. On our way out I strolled over to their table and said, ‘I trust our sales staff met your expectations.’ Tomorrow I’m going to send him a survey asking him to rate that service. Life, as the philosophers say, goes on ….

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My old man is turning 98 this month and we’re moving him from his house to an independent living apartment. Okay, I know, not much of a birthday present but here I am, back in Wisconsin to help my brother haul furniture and pack dishes, sell a car and sort through a lifetime of accumulation. We had hoped to call a thrift store and have them pick up what wouldn’t fit in his new apartment but Covid killed that plan.

Plan B is to box a few decades and deliver who knows how many years to Goodwill or St. Vinnie’s. Assuming they’ll even take donations during these plague times. If not, we’ll haul it to the nearest landfill.

If you’ve never sorted through the lives of your parents, you maybe can’t imagine the endless possibilities of nostalgia, sorrows, regrets and memories laying in wait among the claptrap and the photographs, the letters and the bad art. None of us three boys want much of anything the folks accrued over nearly a century. Which says more about what children of the Great Depression spent money on than it does the difference in theirs and their kids’ tastes.

Our folks weren’t collectors of art or antiques or even their own parents’ stuff. They bought cheap or not at all, making it easy to discard at this juncture. But … the family photographs, old albums of aunts and uncles, great grandparents and family vacations, who takes those? Our little brother, the only one of us with kids, doesn’t want them. I’ll take a few but when I bite the big bullet, they’ll go to the burn pile and another family history ends up the way most do, letters lost, names forgotten, memories fading like the photo chemicals in the albums, sad but true for most of us. This trip will be a lesson in accepting that we’re not famous people, we better just live our lives and be thankful for that.

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