When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.\u00a0 Just me and my baby.\u00a0 Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.\u00a0 Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.\u00a0 Like making a living.\u00a0 Or needing a few skills.\u00a0 You know, how to build a shack or repair a roof or pluck a chicken or grow a garden or fix a well pump.\u00a0 Basic stuff like that.\u00a0 I guess I believed the A.M. radio bubblegum songs:\u00a0 Love will find a way.\u00a0 Or all you really need is love.\u00a0 Or love is the answer.\u00a0 Love love love.\u00a0 Oh baby oh baby oh baby.<\/p>\n
Oh brother.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be the first to admit I daydreamed my way through school.\u00a0 Stared out the window all day and missed, apparently, the crucial message education had for me.\u00a0 Which was learn some skills, get a good paying job, conform and be happy.<\/p>\n
You can learn life\u2019s lessons the easy way or you can learn em the hard way.\u00a0 Oh baby oh baby oh baby.\u00a0 Abject poverty never intruded on my boyhood fantasies.\u00a0 But it sure did on my adulthood dreams.\u00a0 Or nightmares, really.\u00a0 Still, I was knock-headed persistent.\u00a0 Bought my shack and 7 acres on the South End and proceeded to the task at hand:\u00a0 Hand to Mouth Survival.\u00a0 Karen, my wife now of four decades, left a world of security for a vow of poverty.<\/p>\n
The years passed and we tended our homestead, built a house, grew vegetable gardens and flower gardens galore, planted orchards and arbors, and like most folks in the Land of Plenty, we managed to survive.\u00a0 I suspect each of us down here has an island dream, a fantasy that filled the sails of our imaginations,\u00a0 that took us on a unique journey to this exotic archipelago in our minds.<\/p>\n
We each learned how to live our lives here on the islands, even though we each could tell a different story\u2026with an ending not yet written.\u00a0 I think, though, and this is the hopeless romantic still staring out the schoolroom window \u2013 I think we all know it\u2019s really, on some level, still a love story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a pimply teenage pup, I had a fantasy of living on an island.\u00a0 Just me and my baby.\u00a0 Robinson Crusoe and his sweetheart.\u00a0 Like most fantasies, it skipped a lot of important details.\u00a0 Like making a living.\u00a0 Or needing a few skills.\u00a0 You know, how to build a shack or repair a […]<\/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":[5401,5400,2271],"class_list":["post-16386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-island-paradise","tag-me-and-robinson-crusoe","tag-no-job-no-cry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16386","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=16386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16387,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16386\/revisions\/16387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}