The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down at the Cupcake Hut, the South End’s only bakery, the talk over the Hobart bread mixer consists mostly of yeasty gossip and glutinous outrage over fears of being asked to bake a gay wedding cake. Rita Mae, the current owner and born again Christian, was slapping dough down on the kneading table the way a sado-masochist masseuse would pound a hated client.

“No way,” she was fuming for any and all of us pastry lovers standing in front of the display case filled with bismarks and jelly rolls, danishes and apple fritters, muffins and doughnuts, worrying we’d never get our orders until Rita Mae was finished slapping that loaf silly. “I won’t do it. My beliefs come before the law and my law is Higher than theirs and that’s the real truth,” she grunted with a ferocious fist to the lump on the table.

But she wiped the flour off her hands on her apron and slid behind the pastry case to take our orders. Ronnie took a few doughnuts for his landscaping crew and I ordered a fritter and a cup of coffee. To go. I sure didn’t want to sit at one of the little round formica tables while Rita Mae was in one of her Full Rants.

“What’s next?” she shouted and at first I thought she meant what else did I want. “That’ll about do it, Rita,” I shrugged, wishing I was already out that front door.

“Boy oh boy, that’s the truth,” she retorted, ringing up my coffee and fritter. “Next thing’ll be wedding cakes for polygamists. Who knows where this is going? Sodom and Gomorrah right here and I’m supposed to cater the orgies??”

I could feel my sweet tooth going rotten, decaying faster than civilization. “I don’t know, Rita, maybe it’s not really that big an issue. I mean, you don’t get all that much call for wedding cakes, do you? Much less same sex ones.”

Rita Mae shot me the evil eye and I shut up. Ronnie, always the provocateur, turned at the doorway, his bag of pastries held high. “Love thy neighbor, Rita Mae!” Rita Mae grabbed a day old muffin from the tray beside the register and just missed Ronnie as he slammed the door on his way out. The muffin exploded against the back of the sign that said WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. That was probably going to be my last fritter, I decided. I can read the writing on the wall about as well as Rita Mae can read her Good Book. “You have a nice day,” she frowned as she gave me change and somehow I knew I wouldn’t.

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Some researcher, no doubt hunting for a good topic for his PhD thesis, did a follow-up survey on high school seniors, asking them before they graduated How Important they considered themselves. In the Gallup study 65 years ago, only 12% answered Very Important, probably the kids on their way to Harvard, Yale and maybe the Korean War. In 2005 80% of seniors responded with high marks for themselves. This kind of tectonic shift is what gives sociologists tenure. And tenure probably gives them a sense of being Very Important too.

My boomer generation has spent decades instilling self-worth into their prized progeny. Every crayon drawing is framed before mounting on the refrigerator. Classes in ballet and gymnastics and soccer and flute and yoga for kids and golf and tennis and art … all are vehicles for discovering that special talent we let lie dormant and hidden until it was too late for us, too late, but not, by god, for our kids.

Now, of course, the little peepers got Facebook. Everyone is his or her very own press agent, forever updating the photos, refining the resume, bragging on-line. If you spent hours every damn day of the year looking at your Bragbook, wouldn’t you think you’re Very Important?

Gonna be a total shock, the real world, for those 80% when their new boss doesn’t give a rip about their Facebook page except to ferret out reasons not to hire them in their interview, when they discover ‘friends’ aren’t, when they’re confronted by bad jobs or no jobs, high rents, bills, health issues, lowered expectations, the tsunami of stuff that knocks the feet from under VIP’s as well as the losers with low self esteem. Go back to the high school reunion, the one for the class of 1950. I bet the % of us folks who answered Very Important back when went down even further. Life is good at one thing — at least down here on the South End — it teaches us modesty. Those 80%, trust me, they’ll learn it the hard way. But they’ll learn it.

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I just got off the phone with my airline companies, you know, a couple of the ‘friendly skies’ folks. The flights I’d reserved needed to be canceled, long story I’ll spare you temporarily. I got the computer first which gave me plenty of options to choose from and only took 3 or 4 minutes to listen to first, then answer the multiple test. Five minutes later I was shuffled over to a human. Cindy, her name was, although, given her very indecipherable accent, it was hard to tell. If I thought getting her name right was difficult, understanding her questions was impossible.

I think she understood English. I’m pretty certain she couldn’t speak English. Most of our conversation was me asking if she could repeat what she just said. Finally, totally frustrated, I just guessed. Would I like to cantigate my frist? I said okay. What slingbash was my conflastation? I gave her a flight number. She seemed to accept it as an answer.

I’m assuming, if my airline hired her for customer service, their strategy was to frustrate me to the point of hanging up. Save them any additional bother. But … I wanted a refund, money, moolah, greenback of dollar, whatever Alaska Airline deposits with whatever butchered name they give it. Finally Cindy or Candy or Karla managed to garble the word ‘credit.’ No, I said, I wanted a refund. She repeated ‘credit.’ Gleddit. Or keepit, but I got the message. No refund. I tried 2 or 3 different tacks, but like I said, she understands just fine. It was me who didn’t….

I’m what you call an Infrequent Flyer. Who knows when I’d want to fly Alaska again? And I didn’t want to ask about the expiration date on my gleddit. I asked Cindy if the mizzus — who IS planning a trip — could use that gleddit. I think you know what her answer was even if none of us could understand it clearly. She burbled a few more unintelligible phrases, asked hell if I know what, then paused, obviously waiting for an answer or a dial tone. “Okay,” I said, “we’re done. You, me and that crappy outfit you work for.” Cindy said, “Hap a niece drive” … or something equally inscrutable.

I don’t know about the rest of you in the flying public, but I can’t wait until computers replace some of these jobs completely. I don’t think they’ll be any more empathetic, but at least I’ll be able to understand what they’re saying when they screw me.

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The stock market dropped over 1000 points the other day. Japan’s dropped 12%. The Tech stocks took a dive and immediately the day traders did too. Plenty of hair on fire, pundits weighing in, money lost, money moved, money bouncing up down and sideways. Gee, after a long upward climb, folks thought there was only one direction, same as the evangelicals, Up.

I keep hearing about the middle class, got to help them out, need to pull them up another rung on that upwardly mobile ladder. I don’t hear so much about the bottom rungs, the homeless, the jobless, the minimum wage worker who can’t afford rents and groceries much less any kind of health care. You think they have money in the damn stock market? They can barely afford to shop the food market.

Shelly, newly hired at the deli of one of Stanwoodopolis’s ‘super’ markets, makes better than minimum wage with a few benefits to boot. When her deadbeat husband left her last month for a floozie a few trailers down from theirs at the Tillicum Village, she went into shock, then grief, then anger, then despair. Two kids, no alimony — at least not until she can afford an attorney to draw up the divorce papers — plus a pile of credit card bills. Her mother takes care of Julie and Billy the days she works at the store. Daycare wasn’t much of an option.

“I’m treading water, Skeeter,” she told me in a whisper at the checkout line. “This job barely pays the bills and Frank won’t even return a phone call now that he’s shacked up with that drug addict bimbo he’s ….” She let that drop when a customer neared hearing range with a cart loaded to the top rails.

Shelly’s the daughter of Carl, a fellow school bus driver from back in the late ‘70’s who was a fellow part-timer, both of us able to keep our own heads above water, could even afford to buy our own houses. Shelly will never own hers. And it sounds like she may not be able to afford the rent on her mobile either. My guess is she and the kids will end up with her folks in a year, maybe less. If Carl were still alive, he’d be down at this husband Frank’s new address giving him a much needed ultimatum. I suppose there are plenty of folks who would say the blame lies with Shelly, bad choices in life, what do you expect? I hope I never get so high up the ladder I’ll think the one on the lower rungs got it coming. Or the ones at the top either….

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Crab season just closed after being open for two whole months, what used to be open pretty much year round but now has shrunk to 5 days a week for those two measly months. Which, if you’re a pot crabber, means you have to pull your traps Monday night and reset Wednesday morning and start all over. I guess the Fish and Game folks want to give the Dungeness a fighting chance against a weeklong onslaught.

Personally I’m a great believer in equalizing the odds too. So much so, in fact, that I wade into their eelgrass domain barefoot, mano y mano and toe to toe with the crustacean monsters. No sissy traps for me, fancy rigs baited with Trader Joe yuppie blends of smoked salmon and brie, dropped from party boats, passing yachts, high end fishing boats and vacationing sailboats. Factor in the gear, the gas, the bait, the GPS fish finder, license and trailer, those Dungeness run about two bitcoins apiece for these folks.

4th of July I was wading into the Dungeness jungles, unarmed except for my rusty potato rake, a bucket and my wits, okay, not much of a match, bare feet crunching on clam shells and the occasional crab, just me and 18 herding herons for as far as the eye could see, about a 3 mile stretch from Pebble Beach to Mabana. Mt. Rainier was perfectly framed in the straits, the Olympics were jutting up beyond Whidbey Island, the tide flowing out through the eelgrass looked like mermaid hair. Sand dollar colonies had expanded another year and moon snails had showed up too, big goopy bodies in giant shells eating god only knows what. Flounders, sole, rays and passing fish, all of us working the tideflats. With the gulls and the crows and the eagles waiting for scraps.

Oh … and of course, the crabs. Some folks crab for food and some crab to justify the expense of their boats. But me, I’m after the adventure. And even if I come home empty handed without dinner, those couple of hours out in the water, putting toes in another world out by the drop-off, four football fields distant from shore, I think is plenty enough. Course, it’s even better when I bring back a few specimens to study. And hopefully to eat….

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