The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old man just turned 97. He still lives alone in his own house, still cooks for himself, watches way too much television, still drives his car to the grocery store, doesn’t go out much, grows a garden in the backyard. He strictly keeps his routines, likes a bowl of ice cream every night and cookies after every meal and has pretty much given up on politics. If you were to ask him about the Pandemic or Trump or the coming elections, his answer, now a mantra, is invariably the same: Crazy World.

It would be easy to suggest that his lack of interest in the world of current events is primarily the result of short term memory loss or merely boredom with the nonsense of our politics these days. But … I prefer to think maybe he has hit on the Correct Attitude, one that might help him make it to 100 without the stresses we politically involved –or political junkies, more accurately — have weighing on our daily grind. Possibly, I think hopefully, there comes a point in the affairs of men where the ugliness and the vicissitudes of the world recede into the background, just another commercial before the next episode of whatever TV mini-series he’s watching any particular night on his too complicated to operate big screen.

Crazy world. Yah. Even with this Pandemic raging, the petty politics rear their heads. Folks are dying in unheard of numbers, at least in my short 70 years, and more are going to follow. Fear has been unleashed on the land and those that fan those flames are blowing hard with all their might. My father fought on a PT boat in the Pacific during World War Two, an 18 year old kid with a mounted 50 caliber machine gun on the bow, saw plenty of what war buffs like to call ‘action’, and came home to a fairly long run of peacetime. I suspect the vagaries of our partisan political shenanigans seem a bit less earth shattering to him than to me and my pals. Korea,Viet Nam, Iraq One and Two, Afghanistan, they all pale compared to his war. The Pandemic? He remembers polio. Folks want to throw open the restaurants and the movie theaters, he could care less. Folks want to re-elect Trump? Crazy world, he’ll say. Who among us would disagree?

There are days when I can hardly wait to get old.

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