The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus drop-off, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

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Today we’re going to my wife’s father’s funeral. She’s been out here in Wisconsin three weeks while he died a lingering and painful demise, probably memories she’ll never erase but hopefully not permanently scarring. I arrived here in Oshkosh a week ago after flying into Madison to visit my 98 year old dad in the assisted living place we put him six months ago, only to walk into his apartment to find him flat out on the floor half dressed, moaning from where he’d fallen. Welcome back!

I’m not accustomed to Death or Dying. Although … I suppose nobody is. Wars maybe. Pandemic hotspots, possibly. Having worked in a hospital as an orderly for ten years, I witnessed plenty of horrors but those were strangers, brief brushes with fellow earthlings leaving their mortal coil, just part of the job, nothing personal, no need to turn it into a philosophic inquiry.

This is different. It feels as if we’re all dying. Which, of course, we are. If we care to view it that way. People like to say — and even believe — a funeral is a kind of Closure. I’ve never understood that word ‘closure’. A door closing behind us, shutting out the past? Turn off the lights, lock the door and leave the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob?

We’re going to the cemetery where Karen’s mom was buried years ago on a similarly cold bleak and windy November day in Wisconsin, the sky the color of Lake Winnebago, spitting snow over an open grave, soon to be filled back in, grass growing again in spring, all of us back where we came from, back to the business of living.

I’m no longer a philosophic enquirer. Explanations are the faux news of my existence. For those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries, no need for answers. Life, I think, is more like a music, not a riddle. The dead dance with us, the living. They’re never really gone and the door we thought we closed was never really soundproofed.

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Let me say right off the Get-Go, I’m no spring chicken, although my behavior might lead folks to think I’m in late-stage adolescence. I never went through a mid-life crisis, never left the mizzus for a college intern, didn’t buy a sports car and never thought I should’ve gotten a career … or even a job. In other words, I feel young.

Or at least did until these past few months, and no, it wasn’t Covid that made my bones feel brittle and my mind sort of squishy, it was all the folks around me who have cancers and aneurisms and busted appendixes and chronic back pains and diabetes and bi-polar disorders. For the first time in my 71 years on this planet, folks I know are dying, some younger than me, most through no fault of their own, just bad luck, crummy genes, who knows? Something in the water, toxins in the house, crap in the air, don’t ask me, I’m not a doctor and you couldn’t pay me to play one on TV.

But … mortality sits perched on my shoulder these past few months, a black crow or a shadow of one, a dark daily companion right out of Poe, hard to shake, impossible to ignore.

I just put my 98 year old father into an assisted living complex. Hard to feel bad for a guy who’s about to hit the century mark … unless you’re one of those who want to live forever. All I can say is be careful what you wish for. Quality of life diminishes a bit for the Methuselahs of this world. Volunteer at one of these places and see if you still want extended longevity when you piss 200 times a day and you eat more meds than food. Me, I’ll pack it in when the check-out time arrives and the maid needs to change the bedding for the next guest.

Not to sound morose, mind you, just that we all have a Best By date and I’m okay with that. But dammit, these early birds leaving lately, well, it’s a phase of life, apparently, that’s here to stay. Maybe I should consider that sports car after all….

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