The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Yeah yeah yeah, I know the expression, behind every great man is a great woman. I even suspect they mean the Great One’s wife. Personally I don’t know a lot of great men, no offense to the folks I know. But I believe a lot of us down here on the South End, us artists especially, owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the woman beside us. Or the husband, case may be.

We got plenty of layabouts down here. Guys with no ambition, retired fellas at the ripe old age of 30, yo-yo’s who think work is for suckers and by god, they aren’t suckers. Some marriages fall to pieces, others get patched and sewn back together but never really well. A lot of single women down on the South End, easier to go it alone than live with some lazy good-for-nada yahoo who would rather drink with his lazy good-for-nothing pals.

The trouble with being an artist is really not so much lack of imagination but lack of money. Those years working at our art, well, those are years not earning an income. And believe me, there are plenty of partners who might look at their spouse and think, when is he going to give it up, throw in the towel and the paintbrush, pick up a shovel and help with the mortgage and the insurance and the car payments and all the rest. It takes more than love to shoulder the yoke and become the breadwinner while hubby noodles around in his so-called studio. It takes a kind of faith that some just can’t summon. A faith in the relationship, a faith in the art itself, a faith that this guy might just make something of himself eventually and even if he doesn’t, well, she loves the jerk.

I count myself one of the lucky ones. We lived in our shack for 17 years, scraping up mortgage payments and taxes, scrimping on clothes and food, worrying about the future when the shack would begin to cave in on itself. Back in 1990 I quit my two day a week job as orderly at the Everett Hospital with the promise to build a real house, even get permits and such, and in the meantime figure out a strategy to make my glass art pay. Karen had just taken on a full time job as a department head librarian down at the University of Washington, a long two hour commute going and coming back, plenty of time to mull over marital commitments to a so-called wannabe artist with virtually no gameplan for success. For better or worse might have seemed like a bad vow driving through rush hour traffic four hours a day.

There are folks who deceive themselves into thinking that what little success they have in life must be the result of their own perspiration, their perseverance, their skills and their imagination. Captains of their own destiny, they think. But most of them couldn’t be more wrong, these Marlboro Men, these macho American males who value independence over collaboration any day of the workweek. Looking back at my own luck and a happy tenure as a glass artist, I know it wouldn’t have worked out without a partner who did have a little faith, who took the risks and never complained, who made my life possible. A lot of it was luck, some of it was perseverance, but most of it was her. A smart man should be eternally grateful. Smart or not, I am.

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So I’m in the airport check-in line and the guy in front of me is giving the TSA an earful about his rights as an American citizen. He’s not wearing a plague mask even though we’ve passed 100 signs telling us travelers they’re required at all times in this facility. By the time he’s bending their ears about being forced by the federal government, the damn government, to drink his pop before going through screening I figure I’ll be here for another half hour while they put him on the floor and do a cavity search in front of the rest of us compliant citizens. I’m praying that he won’t be a fellow passenger on my flight, the one who gets the place turned around so he can be taken into custody back where we flew out of.

Freedom for some folks is just nothing left to complain about. No shoes, no shirt, no service must be practically a call to arms. A friend of mine has a neighbor who drains his septic into the ditch by her house, no doubt another freedom fighter. The guy next door on the other side likes to shoot his automatic assault rifle after midnight, testing the patience of the sleeping neighborhood, maybe see who wants to confront him. The cops don’t care to so why would she? I need to reread that second amendment, see if the right to bear arms means the right to shoot them night or day below my window.

This pandemic has certainly brought out the new Minutemen, folks who think the government has a boot on their necks. Nobody has the right to tell them anything. And watching them storm the Capitol a few short months ago, I got an eyeful of what freedom means to them. More for them, less for me. You wonder why I live at the end of an island at the edge of a continent, it wasn’t to escape the reach of Rome, it was to escape these yahoos. That kind of freedom, trust me, is getting harder to find.

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