The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Unless I miss my guess, most of you out there in Blogland are dreading the coming New Year. You’ve had a dose of impeachment hearings, you’re sick to death of politics, you’re probably already making a New Year Resolution NOT to watch MSNBC or Fox News this next year. You’re like the moth that vows NEVER to fly toward the candle again.

But you will. The impeachment trial is coming, the 2020 elections will heat up, Rudy Giuliani will never go back to his coffin even in daylight. A dystopian grimness has spread dark wings across the land and the warring tribes huddle by campfires in their separate valleys of darkness. A minister from our island mega church up north walked into the Tyee Store a month ago wearing a red Make America Great Again cap and immediately found himself in a verbal joust with Charlie, a self-appointed gadfly for the store. I’ve known Charlie for 40 years, back when he was a bit more spry than the arthritic old codger he is today, but I couldn’t have told you his political leanings although I would have guessed he was a Trump man. Apparently he isn’t. What that makes him, I would hate to hazard a guess.

But he took umbrage to that hat and apparently he felt called upon to berate this new customer. Shyness was never one of Charlie’s personality traits. He’s opinionated, he’s aggressive, he’s a fixture down at the store. Like a lot of South Enders, maybe too many, he’s what we call a Character. For good or ill. The good chaplain, evidently unfamiliar with our ways down here, declared he had the right to wear whatever he damn well pleased on his righteous head. Charlie begged to differ.

Well, one insult led to another and the argument spilled over the milk coolers, past the condiment shelves and onto the café tables. Charlie, I suspect, already thought America was great, or at least good enough. He didn’t need some outsider telling him it wasn’t. Finally the debate became so heated that the store personnel asked the reverend to either take the hat off his head or take his business elsewhere. Charlie, of course, offered to help him with that decision.

The man of the cloth, mightily pissed now, revealed that he was, indeed, a minister and that the store would sorely rue this day when his flock was informed of his mistreatment down here in the sin-socked South End and Gomorrah. Boycotts were hinted at not too subtly. Business would suffer from this iniquity. The wrath of Trump lovers would visit misfortune on our heads. So saith this man of the Lord.

Obviously he didn’t grasp that business was already suffering. That misfortune was something we were accustomed to. That voodoo quasi-religious threats were more comic than something to be taken seriously. That we would probably do just fine without the congregation thronging down to the Tyee Store for their cigarettes and beer. I don’t know if the coming year will make America great or if it will make America a poorer nation. But … I do know this: The South End doesn’t need anyone to tell it anything either way. So we’ll probably skip the resolutions and just muddle along in our little Shangri-La-La.

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