The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Haunting the near empty halls of our island library, I ran into an old friend, a retired librarian no less, both of us latter day bibliophiles in an era of Tik-Tok, short news blurbs, gaming videos, Facebook and all media non-literary. These days in the New Dark Ages feels like the few of us remaining are a small cloistered secret society, the last of the letter writers, book readers, newspaper subscribers and fact checkers — monks passing one another in the abbey, pausing for furtive conversations, careful that no one is listening.

After the usual How Ya Beens and Whatcha Been Up To Latelys, we slipped into politics, the War, the tired singsong of spectators watching a losing ballgame. Just before we threw in the towel and forfeited, she asked if I knew what kept her awake at night, what frightened her the most.

“Global warming?” I guessed, picking the first existential threat to our species that came to mind. Gee, so many options these days … we could go on until the library closed and still need to continue our list at the tavern next door, finally adding alcoholism to the dozens of societal ills that hide in our closet of anxieties.

“No,” she said, “and anyway, it’s really climate change, not global warming.

“So okay,” I asked, “what spooks you the most?”

And she said, “That Trump will interfere in the elections this fall,” whispering.

And here I was worried about the Iran War, the Android Apocalypse, global warming or however you want to label it, new Pandemics, nuclear holocaust, major droughts and wildfires, ginormous data centers coming to the South End or just about all of the above, now too big to fit in my little closet of night sweats. Not that further subversion of our short experiment in democracy isn’t alarming, but I still have hopes we’ll right the ship this Administration is busy drilling holes in its hull. Call me an optimist. Or call me an idiot.

I guess we all have our worst fears. All I know these dark days, there’s plenty to choose from.