If there was one show, besides westerns, i loved more than all of the rest when television became another resident of our household from 1954 until i went to college in 1962, it was Red Skelton.

We are hunkered down. During the day, i attack many things i previously have intended to accomplish but have had other things to do like golf, dining out, golf, Balboa  Park, golf, the Zoo, golf, visiting friends and places, golf, walking on the beach (which i almost never do), and golf. i still have a lot of tasks remaining.

By dinner time, i’m sort of worked out. Our tradition is we dine on dinner trays in the family room and watch as much local news as we can stand. We, then, used to watch sports mostly. In spite of the sports sequestering and having our fill of covid-19 updates and advertising stuff that this hunkering down is supposed to make more attractive, we have maintained our tradition. But we are into this seriously for about two weeks. Maureen and Sarah watch their movies and television shows mostly during the day. They allow me to watch my preference at night, which often is none, so i read, listen to music, and  write.

But as noted earlier, i go to oaters, especially when i need a picker-upper. We also go back to old movie favorites. “Casablanca” (thanks, Judy Gray, for bring this one to the fore) with Sarah. Sarah had us watch a show from the “Mandalorian” series. And i’m sure “The Quiet Man” is not too far away. We found “Cheers” reruns. Then, the other night, i found “3rd Rock from the Sun.” i searched fruitlessly for one of my favorite series until i went to Youtube. Last night, we watched the first show of the series “Evening Shade.” i had forgotten how star-packed that series was: Burt Reynolds, Marilu Henner, Ossie Davis, Hal Holbrook, Charles Durning, Elizabeth Ashley, Ann Wedgeworth, and my favorite Michael Jeter. So now, we have those three and westerns to choose from each evening until this thing blows over.

But sometimes, even all of that seems to be missing something, especially in this re-run of drear in the Southwest corner rainy season where we have gone over our annual average of rain of ten inches by almost two inches already with at least one more of these Pacific generated wet weather patterns, which will generate all of the weather guessers after screaming about a possible drought now warn us that all of this rain will make a lot of stuff grow, turn green, then brown, and be superb fodder for wildfires by summer’s end, a pattern the weather guessers love, a circular soap opera suspense story.

But in an almost funk last evening, i went to my go-to time killer, spider solitaire on my laptop, but spied something in a sidebar. i checked it out even though i had no clue who Dini Petty was, a  rather remarkable woman it turns out and hostess of a Canadian television show of her name. But this one show caught me.

It was an hour-long — almost, they cut out the commercials — interview with an older Red Skelton.

i was entranced. His bubbling humor and adlibs did not fade with age. He was a showman and a promoter of the old school and his claim to the amount of work he accomplished in so many pursuits was a little bit too hard to swallow. As he spoke and Dini laughed and swooned over him along with her audience, i was taken back to all of Red’s shows. They were clean (for the most part as there were some innuendos funnier than what was the literal interpretation), inventive and more difficult for a comedian to keep ’em laughing than with the foul language shock of the later comedians. And he did it for twenty years. Twenty years every week.

But the other thing that kept coming through was his humility, his genuine caring, his humanity, and yes, his sadness in his personal life.

The world was better with Red Skelton. i wish i could go back to those years when i watched. i could miss Milton Berle, Martha Raye, “The Ted Mack Amateur Hour” (where Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, Jose Feliciano, Irene Kara, and Tanya Tucker debuted — looking this up in Wikipedia, i found Louis Farrakan played a violin under his birth name Louis Walcott —  and others. But not Red. No, not Red.

If you are too young to really know about Red Skelton or wish to reminisce a bit in this sheltering, i recommend Dini’s interview. It’s a bit long, but i think worth it:

i thought this was in my poetry book but i couldn’t immediately find it. It is one of my favorites. While going through yet another folder of stuff, writing mostly, throwing most of it away, i ran across the original. It was written in a wheel book while my ship was en route Pusan, Korea from Vietnam. On December 31, 1970, i finished it on a flight to Seoul after we had docked in Pusan, and eventually tore out the pages and put them together with a paperclip.

Now, i have to go through that poetry book again to make sure it’s not there.

one hundred miles at sea
this morning
i saw a gull
flapping white
against the cold, harsh rays of sun
and
tremolo wind,
whitest i’ve ever seen
out of how many thousand,
i wonder;
the gull was captured
in a prism of time
from which i shall soon escape
and
then watch the mockingbirds.

Dark grey clouds like a lazing, sulking cat hung over the Mexican mountains to the south and the precipitous hills east before Mount Laguna. Before long, as it has been frequently over the last fortnight, the cat will quit lounging, stalk, and attack with fury. Rain. Ain’t like my Southwestern corner.

But the weather is fitting for this thing they are calling social distancing. The governor of California has issued an edict for all Californians to stay at home. i am obeying because a higher authority has declared i will obey. That would be my wife. So i have gone beyond “social distancing” and am now damn close to sequestering. i think i am wise enough and healthy enough to not become part of the problem, but i am also positive i do not wish to be a bad example. So, bristling as usual when someone tells me what i should do, and not really blaming Maureen, i will do what i feel is the right thing and stay home. There is some leeway for exercise and going to parks . Eventually, i decided to forego golf, even though there is enough leeway to justify making it to my Friday Morning Golf round. i didn’t go and by the time my stalwart golf buddies finished their round, we knew all the courses out here in the Southwest corner will be closed by tomorrow. And i have a hard time bucking authority, even if the order is dubious — government men and corporation men have this penchant for relying on statistics, and those statistics come from “yes men” surrounding them who have agendae of their own: believe me, i know, seen it in action, but it ain’t pretty — but that obedience has been fostered by parenting and the Navy over about fifty years. So i’m staying home for now.

On my walk before the cat clouds struck with the rain and during the governor’s speech, i thought of my little cabin, the one i’ve dreamed about for a long, long time. i am not against being alone.

In the summer of 1984, my father called me. i was with Maureen in our relatively new home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Daddy was calling to explain why he was selling the lake cabin.

The cabin had been our playground, our relaxing place, our escape for us, extended family, and friends. In the sixties, my parents and my aunt and uncle bought the cabin on one-acre of lake front property on Denny Road, which was located on Barton Creek about a mile from the Cumberland River. It was a continuous gathering place with steaks grilled by the men and the rest of the supper fixed by the women with lots and lots of iced tea with lemons and sugar long before they began to make “sweet tea,” and we all sat at the table enlarged by card tables on the kitchen and dining room side of the one-room cabin with a outhouse out the side door but with running water, a toilet, sink, and shower, and  after supper proper, the women brought out banana pudding, prune cake, pies, all kinds of pie with milk and coffee and we played games, mostly cards and board games with the kids, and we laughed and we frolicked outside, often rolling down the tiered-slope yard to the dock where there was a cool spring just off the end of the southern slip of the dock, which made you feel refreshed when you jumped or dove off the dock in the hot summer months, and we fished mostly fruitlessly off the banks and the docks and we water-skied around the largest pool of the Barton’s Creek, and Daddy would take one or two of us out to the river and troll for the striped bass, and we would plug the banks for the smallmouth bass and brother Joe would even play with the water moccasins, catching them with his hands out of the rocks piled high on the bank to prevent erosion, and we sunned on the dock, and the children and women would laze in the floats off the dock over the spring and the world was right and we didn’t know all of the nastiness, the prejudice, the hate going on in the world, and we laughed and dreamed and at night, we caught the fireflies or lightning bugs and put them in Mason jars with holes punched with an ice pick in the top and watched the sparkle in the night with the stars brimming over the heavens because there were no city lights to interfere with our vision, and we caught June bugs in the daytime and tied one leg on a string and let them fly around our heads in endless circles while we danced our young jig. And all of the world was right at the one room cabin on the lake.

But my uncle had died and the young ‘un’s moved away, and fewer people came to the cabin, and Daddy stored his boat in my aunt and uncle’s original garage for they had expanded and added another garage in the back, and my uncle was gone so my aunt lived alone with the old garage empty except for the washer and dryer and the Christmas decorations upstairs, and Daddy liked his boat there so he could go fishing somewhere else besides Barton’s Creek and Old Hickory Lake, like Percy Priest or Center Hill but he tended to the lake cabin and laid out a garden plot and grew his tomatoes. Then in ’84, he was 70 and he told his oldest son it didn’t make sense to keep the place just to mow and keep it up and tend the garden, especially when he and “Mother” were on  the road a lot in their camper. And so, he said he was selling and told me he would get $44 Thousand.

And i gulped and understood and thought hard about buying it from him. i even had dreamed about becoming the owner and living there full time. i had drawn my plan, which added a couple of bedrooms upstairs extending over the parking area and turning that into a carport or garage and enclosing the outhouse into the house and extending upward for an upstairs bathroom; i also (knowing me) included a fireplace downstairs and upstairs. i wanted to buy it from him but i wouldn’t let him give it to me even if he offered and forty-four grand was quite a figure for a lake cabin second home when i was a commander and my new bride had left her job to be with me across the country and we didn’t have a lot of extra cash and even that did not play as much as my knowing him and knowing he would not allow me to get someone to maintain the place because he wouldn’t want me to pay for that and he would do the maintenance and that was the reason he was selling it, so resignedly i nodded approval of his decision.

And then it was gone. Many years later, Daddy and i went for a ride around the county and ended up on Denny Road. He stopped on the other side of the gravel road and told me what he would have done had he kept it. It was exactly the same plan i had without the fireplaces. After all, our Castle Heights home in which the parents lived for 62 years never had a fire in the fireplace, but still, our conversation brought back my thoughts of a cabin.

i wrote a column about this lake house for the Lebanon Democrat several years ago and received an extremely nice note from Linda Garvin Everette who lives there now with her husband. She had the column and the old photo framed and her husband was thrilled. And i was even more thrilled: good place from my past for good people.

And today, Linda sent me a photo from her house looking down on the dock and the creek.  The dock, although i’m sure it has had loads of maintenance is still the same configuration as when it was our escape.

i still think about that place, but i ain’t moving out of the Southwest corner, at least for the meantime. Still, the idea of having a getaway cabin remains a dream.

This dream has been an off and on thing with many variations. When i was single, i dreamed of it being a romantic place i could take ladies and grill a steak and toss a salad and dine with wine with a cheese and sauterne after dinner moment with soft lights or better, candlelight and some classical guitar on the stereo. And then, i thought such would be for my wife and i to get away from the world and later take our kids so they could enjoy childhood on a lake like i did.

This dream morphed when i was in Watertown, New York. While i was the sports editor, i became friends with Earl Weideman, a teacher. Earl was a character, John Johnson, my friend and eventual publisher of the Watertown Daily Times who got me to come north for the job, introduced Earl and i. Earl and i ran a lot together and one weekend, we and my wife drove to one of the smaller towns on the St. Lawrence River, i’m guessing Cape Vincent. And we boarded a boat and drove out to the Thousand Island Earl’s family owned, and i fell in love with the place, not to mention i acted a bit goofy in my green Texas Boot softball jersey, which my daughter still wears around the house even though her sister Blythe was not quite yet on the way seventeen years before Sarah was born. Later in the winter, Earl drove me out there on the iced-over river in his car. i didn’t wear shorts then. And i started wanted a cabin for escaping the world again.

About ten years ago, Pete Toennies joined me on the last five days of a early March ski trip in Park City, Utah. It was a grand man trip. We skied daily at Deer Valley and went out for dinner each night. Stories abound. But one afternoon we were having a drink after skiing in  the bar of Deer Valley’s Snow Park Lodge. A woman began talking to us about her home, which was out in the toolies, forty acres, only accessible by horse and sleigh or snowshoes in the winter. Then we went back in September with our wives and played golf and i dreamed again of my cabin, this time in Utah.

Now when i dream, i admit it is not reality, but it’s still in my mind. i think of taking all my old, not too pretty stuff, especially for a designer wife, currently filling up my garage and getting 40 acres with a one-room cabin and a big fireplace and living like Thoreau. It doesn’t have to be Utah. There are other places, and Tennessee lakes come into my vision again, and the small mountain town of Idyllwild about ninety minutes east and up from here is attractive.

Of course at my age, medical facilities would have to be near, preferably Navy, and a couple of decent golf courses with decent green fees also would have to be accessible. Although i want the heat to be mostly from the fire in the hearth, i will need heat, and probably air conditioning and…

Ah, hell. i ‘m sequestered right now, and we don’t have or need air conditioning, and the fire in the hearth is just right, and if i want to be alone, i can go out to the garage.

So i don’t think a one-room cabin is in my future.