The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Some of you less fortunate few who may have followed this little blog for probably too long won’t be surprised to know that I am actually a stained glass artist. You may even know that I came to my profession in the unlikeliest of routes when, back at the time I bought my old shack with plastic on the windows instead of glass, I chanced to see an item in the Stanwoodopolis Gazette for a night class at the high school to learn the lost art of stained glass. Who lost it, I never learned, but I can tell you one of the lucky ones who found it again. I took one lesson, went home and before the second class the following week my continuing education had terminated once I had finished two windows and a full size door. I never went back for that second class.

I’m a couple of beers past turning 71 years old. I started breaking glass back in 1980 or slightly before, so it’s been 40 plus years. All I wanted to do was replace that plastic in my drafty shack’s windows, but a funny thing happened on the way to a warmer house, I just got hopelessly addicted to stained glass, its design, its unique interaction with light and with seasonal shifts, its uplifting spiritual presence, corny as it sounds coming from a secular yahoo like me. I built a glass studio out back in the woods, piddled around selling show-and- tell stuff at the hospital where I part-timed as a graveyard shift orderly on weekends, then fortunately fell into public art with a small commission by the WA State Arts Commission.

Public art was what I loved. What I love now. When work was slack, I donated public art around the area, nearly 20 large murals with the last one for the new Island County Administration Building. If I were a better musician, I would give free concerts if the paying gigs weren’t coming in. Actually, the South End String Band has. Or if I were a writer, I might write blogs or maybe humor sketches for the local Pulitzer-prizeless Crab Cracker, not for any money but because, well, a writer should really write if he wants to call himself a writer. Because we so-called artists didn’t become artists to get rich, we followed a different piper.

We’re in the plague years now and when it subsides, just as it was after the Great Recession, money for government spending will be too tight to mention. Public art — which is based on construction of public buildings — will grind to a halt the way it did after 2008. I had a few commissions lined up before the drought hit me, kept me going for a few years, then the work was sparse and the competition for the few remaining jobs was ferocious. I expect this will be a repeat performance.

But … before it all goes to hell in an unsanitized shopping cart, I received notice that I was a finalist for three different WA Arts Commission projects. Well, I thought, long shots but maybe one more before forced retirement. And sure enough, I won one. And that one was for, maybe you guessed it already, the Stanwoodopolis High School. If you think we’ve come full circle, I couldn’t agree more. If you think maybe sometimes the planets line up and the stars shine a bit brighter, I’m thinking so too. If you think I’m grinning from ear to ear under my battered old hat, you’d be absolutely right. Life is full of surprises, probably the only thing you should count on.

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