The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A couple of our friends’ daughters were dutifully dragged along to our dinner party awhile back. They’re in their late 30’s, working women, one divorced and the other dating, which means, I’m guessing, they’re both dating. I don’t ask, give me that much credit. Once we got past the health care issues of us Boomers, all those geezer geriatric complaints, we finally settled into politics. Trump, Biden, the smackdown rematch coming up in 2024.

“I can’t believe,” Katie, the daughter of our oldest friends, said, “the same two old white guys are going to run again.” Jenny, the divorced kid of our other two oldest friends, rolled her eyes and chugged the half finished glass of sauvignon, then filled it with a sloppy flourish. “No kidding,” she growled, shaking her head. Her latest paramour lightly touched her wrist, no doubt worried we geezers would take umbrage, but he was the new squeeze, he’d learn soon enough us old birds were hard to rile. If he lasted long enough ….

“There ought to be an age limit. Reagan went out with Alzheimers. Biden’s a hundred years old, give or take. Trump’s going through his 10th childhood, the spoiled old fart. It’s time to retire some of these white dudes, put em in a Home!” Wally, I think her beau’s name was, took his hand home, wrapped it around an empty beer bottle and probably felt like he’d walked into an assisted living facility by mistake.

I wandered over to the fridge, pulled a beer, opened it and handed it to Willy or Wally or whatever. “New blood,” I said lamely. “Gotta say, we old farts are leaving you with a helluva mess. We didn’t do doodly about climate change, left you with more guns out there than most armies have. We had our fun and you’ll get left with the bill. Seems only fair you might have Senators or Presidents who had some new ideas. We seem to have run out of them. Can’t even come up with new candidates. Gridlocked Congress is our answer. History’s gonna be a little harsh with us,” I said, “but give us this, we gave you rock and roll.”

So okay, not a great trade-off.

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Down here in the soggy trailers of the South End we got plenty of folks who find it impossible to throw out anything. We call them Hoarders. Cars sit strangled by blackberry vines out back, garage is full of old parts rusting slowly, closets are jammed with clothes that haven’t been worn in years, sheds are piled high with lumber being eaten by powder beetles. You ask them why they keep that crap and they’ll give you the fish face like you were a complete idiot and tell you they might need that lawnmower that stopped running a decade ago for parts. The lumber they might build another shed with … you know, to store more crap.

Believe me, I’m not casting the first stone. I got way too many sheds myself filled with stuff from 30 or 40 years ago when money was tight and all those plumbing and electrical left-overs were kept ‘just in case’. Just in case comes along about as often as sunshine in November down here. Truth is, we’re too lazy to haul it to the dump. Although, some of us are serious and serial Hoarders. I have a buddy who has tunnels in his shack to navigate between the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom. He lives like an ant, burrowed into the ground. His place is a Black Hole, the gravitational pull sucking everything in, allowing nothing out.

We recently moved my old man from his house in Wisconsin to an apartment at the assisted living joint down the road, a downsizing that required tossing half his stuff. Considering that we moved him from Georgia over 15 years earlier and tried to downsize Mom and him then, encountering nothing but resistance, we told them we’d be back in 6 months with a U-Haul so they needed to do it themselves, no ifs ands or buts. We ended up needing two giant U-Haul trucks to move them. Most of what we moved was worthless junk. So years later we still had that worthless junk to sort through, toss, take to Goodwill or find someone to take the stuff. It took us nearly a week. Then a month later we had to move him again to a less independent apartment. Took us four days. And a month ago we moved him again into the nursing unit. Three days. Same drill, same junk.

Believe me, you do that for your parents, you’ll take an unjaundiced eye to your own closets and sheds once you come home. I took three large loads of clothes I hadn’t worn in years to the thrift stores. The dump loads barely make a dent, but it’s a start. Someone offered me a very nice cabinet the other day, something a few years back I would have grabbed, but not now. No more stuff! It’s the wrong direction now. It’s time to let go of these things. I don’t want to live in an ant farm when I’m decrepit. And I don’t have kids to clean out the debris of a lifetime.

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