I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual\u2026. He was living in a friend\u2019s camper, he told me, now that he\u2019d moved out of his mom\u2019s place. \u201cNot a real good situation,\u201d he said. The mom\u2019s place. He\u2019d been shacked up with her — he searched for the right characterization and finally hit on \u2018boyfriend\u2019 — out in a trailer in the backyard. She was, if I understood correctly, living in the house with her husband, apparently not my rider\u2019s dad. <\/p>\n
Extended families on the South End, you may have surmised, are slightly more, oh, elastic, than those further up island. But the ties are no less binding, I\u2019m sure. His roommate, the mom\u2019s beau, was a bad drinker, he confided, and arguments were becoming more heated in the late evening hours, so he decided to move along before the Law was necessitated. I said that seemed prudent to me.<\/p>\n
My passenger said his mom was upset at his departure. Misunderstanding him, I mumbled something insincere about mother\u2019s milk or some equally half-assed sentiment. To which he said she\u2019d thrown his belongings out in the yard during the previous day\u2019s rain squall. \u201cKind of a bummer\u2026\u201d he admitted. \u201cAll those wet clothes, man. A real drag\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
We discussed the weather awhile. Sun was out, the rains had subsided. Life was good, we decided, just two Gentlemen of the Highway cruising the backroads of Camano. I dropped him at the Elger Bay Grocery. He was, he grinned, getting some snacks and beer, and then \u201cI\u2019m gonna go home, kick back, enjoy the afternoon, man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yes indeed, sometimes life is as simple, as pleasurable, as uplifting as a friend\u2019s warm camper, some dry clothes, a working TV, a bag of Cheetos and a ride back to what, temporarily, is Home. Pop a cold one before noon and say goodbye to those morning blues. Attitude — and you can inscribe this over the trailer door — is everything. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I picked up a fellow South Ender hitchhiking this morning on my way into town. Not untypically, he was a little down on his luck. No car, license rescinded for DUI, out of work, all the usual\u2026. He was living in a friend\u2019s camper, he told me, now that he\u2019d moved out of his mom\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[2378],"class_list":["post-12552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-hard-times-on-the-south-end"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12553,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12552\/revisions\/12553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}