The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Pushing my loaded grocery cart up to the checkout aisle this morning, I bumped into an old neighbor from yesteryear hunched over his own small cart, no groceries, just cashing in some card for cash near as I could tell. The cart was for leaning on since he could hardly walk. “I’m all stoved up,” he said when the how ya been’s were over. “Got arthritis. Taking insulin for my diabetes. Hard to get out of bed in the morning.”

Keith’s three years younger than me, meaning, he’s an old man. Long hair, wild beard, pushing 300, 350 pounds, sleep apnea, quit drinking 10 years ago. He’s living in the duck shacks on the Skagit delta. Last time I was there, there was no power, water had to be hauled in, heat was firewood. What you got back along the dike was total privacy, a wilderness oasis only a couple of football fields from the highway and two or three miles from the interstate. He said his woman had left him and so had the subsequent ones. As he so eloquently explained concerning his now preferred bachelorhood, “the price of pussy has gone too damn high.”

Same old Keith, a happy redneck Norwegian, mostly angry at the world but at least able to laugh at his own miseries. His son, he said, died awhile back and when I asked how, he shook his shaggy head. “Heroin. Od’d.” The kid had been riding his motorcycle, evidently had spilled gas on his pants and the muffler ignited it. Burned him terrible and they medi-vacced him to Seattle, skin grafts and finally oxycontin for the pain which he became addicted to, subbing heroin and fentanyl when he was discharged, a too familiar story. His daughter lived not far away, north of Seattle, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years.

For half an hour we stood by the liquor lockup at the end of the checkouts and caught up the past 20 years, mostly a chronicle of friends and acquaintances who’d died. Heart attacks mostly. Most fairly young. Most bad diets, no exercise, too much boozing. Whoever said the good die young didn’t know our buddies.

I finally said I gotta get going and reluctantly he wheeled himself with the cart as crutch out the side door. A yellow lab pup was in the driver’s seat of a late model Toyota pickup, a leather muzzle mask over its mouth. “Chew’s everything. Steering wheel, upholstery, anything.” “Well,” I said, “good to have a companion.” “Yep,” Keith said, “I just wish he wasn’t a chewer.” “You can’t have everything, I guess.” Some of us, though, don’t have much of anything….
 

I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.

Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.

Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.

Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.

“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.