The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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When I was a young guy I used to think a bit about Death, capital D. Kind of a melancholy waste of time, I finally decided. You spend much time on the subject and pretty soon you’re down the dark alleys of heaven and hell, God and Satan, reincarnation and ghosts in the attic. I finally decided that there are some things in this world I’ll never understand, probably plenty I won’t even imagine, worlds beyond witnessing, universes within universes.

I decided reality is more than enough. Lately I’ve been talking with friends who are taking classes in Mindfulness, whatever that is. They tell me it’s a focus on shutting down their thoughts long enough to pay attention to the world that isn’t our own jabber. Used to be we would sit in a lotus position and chant OM, the original sound, the first noise, be still, be aware, be here now. Be mindful, I guess.

Swami Betty was over the other day, I guess is why this is on my mind, mindful or not. Betty is forever searching. For answers, for cures, for God, for something to fill her life up with meaning. It’s not a bad quest, you ask me, but it’s not my quest. I’m not looking for answers any more. In fact, I’ve even quit looking for questions. The world isn’t a puzzle to be figured out, at least not one I’m going to have any luck solving. I’m no Zen detective.

Betty’s husband died a year ago and her kids are estranged. She asked me last week, over her fungus tea she grows in a gallon jar on the kitchen counter, some concoction that she’s been keeping alive for ten years or more, while I had a cold beer, if I believed in God. We were out on her back porch, sitting on the rickety steps that led to her gardens, and the sun was full on our faces, the bees were humming as they slipped flower to flower, the world seemed plenty full to me. Betty wants to believe, but what kind of deity kills her husband and lets her children abandon her as an eccentric old South Ender? She’s a bit adrift and I know I would be too.

“Well,” I said, “ I would hate to run into God if there was one. I could do a better job dreaming up a world than that cruel fool. I’d ask what was He thinking? Just what the hell was he thinking?”

Betty chuckled. “Tough guy, huh? Kick his ass, maybe?”

Well, in the end we came to the usual conclusions. Just a couple of old friends sharing a porch, idling away our brief time in this hard old world. Life, I think, is more a music than a riddle. And if maybe shutting up for awhile, if being mindful or quiet helps us hear it, I guess that’s fine with me, just don’t ask me to whistle the tune….

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Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crack—up,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

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Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

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One of the curses of being wired to the world in our modern, advanced civilization, the one we think of as the zenith of mankind’s endeavors, is feeling like what happens in some village in Indonesia somehow should be of interest to me. ‘Honey, I shrunk the world’ should be the theme song to every YouTube, Yahoo News, Facebook and Google feed. It’s important to stay tuned in, I suppose, maybe know what the folks in Tierra del Fuego think of the recent killing or the Estonians are doing about Russian meddling in their politics. Hard enough when we’re swamped with news stories here in our own little country, everything from impeachment hearings to the latest mass murder in some town we may or may not have heard of before the media rolled in to cover the mayhem.

It’s not only exhausting, in case you didn’t notice, but … well, it’s a constant distraction from living your life. When I first dropped anchor on the South End, I didn’t have a television, much less a computer. We had a telephone and a stereo that played cassette tapes and records. The telephone was on a party line with a mom and her teenage daughter. In other words, we really didn’t have a telephone that was usable, not with that single mom and her chatty daughter using it 24/7. Not that we really had many people to call anyway….

I bring all this up because the last few days I’ve been sliding back into those early years. It’s winter and the days are short and getting shorter. Back then we did a lot more reading, I played a lot more music, we did a lot of hiking the beach and the woods, time was plentiful and we had to find ways to fill it without resorting to the babysitter we call internet. Early this morning I walked down to the beach with some crab bait, rolled my boat over and lowered it into the water, then rowed out to my pots. Mt. Rainier was perfectly framed in the Straits, golden glaciers in the sunrise glowing majestically. A half dozen cormorants watched me from a raft moored far out from shore and the gulls waited to see what I would toss them from the bait traps when I got to my pots. The now familiar seal that follows the wake of my rowboat kept popping up and checking on me, each time eliciting a bark from me, not maybe a real good impersonation of a seal bark, but he was listening. A fogbank beyond Whidbey lay like a dropped blanket at the foot of the Olympics, those mountains now immaculate with new snow after a summer of melt. Nothing much but me made noise. My oars dripped a line of water each stubborn stroke, circles falling back following small whirlpools both sides. The world was perfect. And I was in it. Not distracted, not jumping to the next crawler or ad, just a tiny sliver of the world with me pulling at the oars, gliding through it.

We’ve lost that, I think, now that I’m back on shore, back up at the house. We’ve let it slip through our fingers because we’re bored, we’re lonely, we’re forever looking for something to fill up the space between the last thing and the next thing. But it’s like calculus, the intervals get smaller and smaller, but they never become Now. Now is now. Some days, like today, I remember where to find it.

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