The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You’re married to a historian, you live a part of your life in the past. This vacation we’re in the mountain town of Index, population about 150. Yesterday we got the full tour of the Historical Museum and its Annex from the town historian. Plenty of mining tools, crosscut saws, old toasters, pieces of the Post Office, kraut cutters — about what we got half of at home. Not exactly like viewing the aqueducts of ancient Rome, more like a postcard of early life on the South End when we were the pioneers.

History is a tough sell. Not many folks tour these museums. And those that do whip through, skip reading the captions on the black and white flood photos or the loggers square dancing on a 15 foot diameter fir stump. Most of it looks like Grandma’s old house they visited as kids. A few folks come to find Grandma’s house — or at least a small record that their family actually lived in this hick burg. Genealogy they’re interested in, the history of the area, not so much.

Our own Museum, like the one here, draws virtually no one the one or two days they’re open. Even most residents are devoid of curiosity, a little busy raising kids and paying the mortgage on the subdivisions outside the newly annexed city limits. Way of the world, I guess.

We’re zooming headlong into the future, technology accelerating, AI no longer on the horizon, it’s right here right now and dragging us along. There’s no time for lolly-gagging about what was when last month feels like the distant past and tomorrow fills us with dread. Doomsday scrolling, not old histories, fills our time. We don’t have time for the old stuff. What’s in the rearview is definitely not closer than it appears, it’s way far back, almost out of sight. And most definitely out of mind.

So I don’t mind a few days spent here in the past. More and more it’s where I live. Just one of the benefits of living with a historian.

Maybe you’ve read about boarding houses, probably before your era. Widow ladies mostly, but not always, rented out rooms by the week or month or even the year to supplement their income. For two summers I lived in a boarding house with 3 rooms for rent upstairs from the landlady, Jane Dean, the town librarian, who lived downstairs. I don’t remember exactly the rent but around 50 dollars a month, an amount that cut into my Coca-Cola truck driver/delivery sales commissions a bit but I was around 20 years old and this was 1969. Plus … my girlfriend lived in that town so there you are.

Mostly it was just me and Glenn, a 50-ish alcoholic who would disappear for days at a time on his benders, then return so hungover he would hole up in his bed for more days at a time, recovering before the next cycle began. He admitted openly he had a problem but was powerless to control it. Usually he had no memory of most of the days spent drunk and the ones sleeping it off couldn’t have been much either. Ms. Dean explained one day to me that he was harmless, tremendously sad but otherwise a likeable fellow. How he found money to pay his rent, much less his bar bills, was a mystery to me.

The only other tenant we had was one short-termer, who stayed for a week. She came for a science fiction book writers’ convention. Since we shared the kitchen, we had some conversations over an occasional meal where I learned over my habitual TV dinner and chicken pot pie, that she had written a book about alien encounters. Fiction, I presumed incorrectly, what was a serious faux pas, it turned out. No, she was writing, she said, from personal experience.

At the time I had aspirations myself to be a writer. Not that a career as a truck driving pop salesman wasn’t appealing, but my colleagues who did have that career all urged me to stay in college and find other lines of work. I totally agreed. And even thought maybe this particular alien encounter might make a fine beginning. But my fellow boarder proved to be fairly insane and any hope of turning her into my main character dimmed considerably after our second and last dinner together.

What I think now, looking back 50 plus years, is that a boarding house was a lot like riding the Greyhound bus cross-country. All of us fairly itinerant, mostly poor, hauling our small possessions, waiting to get off at some further stop. Glenn died of cirrhosis not long after I left. Jane Dean retired. I went back to college. And I have no doubt our science fiction writer is safely situated on some exo-planet where, hopefully, her fellow boarders treat her well.