The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

It has come to the Crab Cracker’s attention that a petition to boycott Halloween this year has been circulating since summer. Supported by Pastor Paul of the Little Church of the Stingless Nettles, it decries demon worship, gross-out costumes, sugar gluttony, crass commercialization and yoga, particularly Hot Yoga, what the Reverend calls Satan’s Sauna. The anti-goblin signatures numbered in the many dozens.

The Mabana Institute, the South End’s not quite non-partisan think tank, has been conducting its own polls regarding Halloween this past month, according to Prof. Lawrence Glewkose, former director of the American Candy Lobby and now a permanent board member of the Institute. Prof. Glewkose reported that in their admittedly non-scientific poll of children at South End Elementary, 69% were in favor of Halloween as a national holiday while 11% supported having 2 or more Halloweens a year. 11% of the survey responders believed Halloween was already an ongoing event 365 days a year, judging by the proliferation of zombie movies and candy machines and their siblings’ Goth wardrobes. 9% couldn’t read the survey.

According to Joan Hypoglyseemly, spokeswoman for the Pro-Diabetes Foundation, anti-Halloween sentiment is based on  superstition and fear of high fructose sugar perpetuated by the ignorant and the dietary obsessed. “What these people need,” she suggested, “is a Paleo diet exorcism followed by the first ten episodes of Walking Dead.

Prof. Glewkose, unmoved by her sense of humor, suggested she might consider removing her witch costume next interview. Needless to say, Halloween started early on the previously zombie-free South End. According to a Stanwood General Hospital nurse, Prof. Glewkose will recover from his bite wounds, but probably not in time to take his kids Trick or Treating this year.

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A full month of Sunday sermons leading up to Halloween, Pastor Paul preaches mightily against the demonic holiday, pounding his pulpit with his leatherbound copy of the King James version of the Lord’s scripture. “Blasphemous!” he hollers to the assembled congregation. “Devil worshippers! Beggars in obedience to Beelzebub!” Pastor Paul unleashes a stream of caustic invectives to the steady tattoo of his Bible slapping the plywood podium.

“This unholy holiday,” he exhorts, “is an affront to God himself!” In every pew and folding chair, the Little Church in the Ravine’s dutiful members hang their heads and avert their eyes, probably half with kids who’ve already bought skeleton costumes, Star Wars regalia, vampire teeth and wolfman masks. Hypocrisy be damned, they’re not about to tell little Jimmy or Brenda they can’t join in the national gathering of candy, c’mon, they all wandered the streets of their own childhood with a grocery bag or a pillowcase to collect their bribes. No harm done.

If you don’t count cavities and a spike in dental fees by Christmas. The era of juvenile deviltry has long passed into faded myth — even the elders never followed up on the threat of a trick. No outhouses were moved back six feet, no buggies were parked on a shed roof, no bags of dog pop were set on fire on the offenders’ porches to be stamped out after the doorbell was rung and the goblins had fled.

Pastor Paul, unfortunately, every year thinks he’s preaching to the choir, but most of the squirming congregation think he ought to lighten up a bit. Fun is fun and dressing up like a zombie doesn’t make the kids prefer human flesh over Snickers bars and Milky Ways and whatever high fructose treats the suburbs of Stanwoodopolis are parceling out mostly before dark. Even the kids and their parents know the vampires come out after sundown when, hopefully, they’re safely home spoiling an appetite for a healthy dinner. Paul, of course, thinks those parents are boiling up eye of newt soup with a dash of bat blood and who knows what hell broth added too. Same recipe as last year….

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I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South End Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

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I don’t care WHAT T.S. Eliot says, November, not April, is the cruelest month. The bottom drops right out of autumn along with all the leaves, then the rains come and so do the winds. Up here in the northern latitudes, the sun sets further and further south and earlier and earlier. God help the poor folks who live on the north side of the hills — they might as well be in the Arctic.

Humans, or so the scientists tell me, aren’t programmed to hibernate. That may be true, but you can’t tell me there’s no vestigial urge to hunker down and wait until spring brings my sap back up with renewed energy. I know folks who sit in front of a full spectrum lamp trying to fend off the winter blahs, hoping to trick the hormones that trigger the blues into thinking it’s a summer morn. Some of them revert to alcohol, balm of all us northern climate dwellers, probably just a self-induced hibernative state. And the neighbors who can afford to, they just pack it up and leave. Head for the sunshine of Arizona or Nevada, figure a trailerpark in the desert beats what we got.

I spoze we all have burdens to bear. Tahitians got coconut grenades dropping, Hawaiians got island fever. If there was a paradise, the cruise ships would ruin it in a season, the investors would cover it with resort hotels and Vegas-style casinos, the residents would work as maids and valets. Count yer lucky stars, I tell the mizzus, if there was Garden of Eden, we’d be the landscape crew, minimum wage, with Adam and his cranky wife barking orders, never satisfied with the weeding and edging, always wanting that damn apple tree pruned half to death, no wonder it never produces fruit. Naw, a month or two of rainy, windy weather, what the hell, maybe ought to catch up on our reading. And … a little extra sleep wouldn’t hurt either.

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My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

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