Ugh! It is SO HOT outside that it’s not even 9:00 in the morning and the thermometer in the shade of the back porch registers 95 degrees.
What do you suppose the thing will say…oh…along about noon? Or better yet: at 3:00 p.m.?
Not even Rasty Nasty, the garden spot occupied by ARAMCO employees on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was this hot as the sun was rising.
I hate Arizona. If my son weren’t here, I would be SOOOOOO LONG GONE!
But he is here. This is where his job is and it’s where his dad’s family is and it appears to be where he’s staying. So…it’s where I’m staying.
Ugh.
That doesn’t deflect me from stating that yes, I do hate Arizona.
My father dragged me and my mother here when he retired. They had spotted Sun City as we were driving cross-country back in the day — they would drive around the country when he took his lengthy, hard-earned vacations from Aramco. He would get three months off every two years. Their idea of “fun” was to buy a car in New York City and take off across the country. They would drive at top speed to Texas to visit his brother and then race across the country to Berkeley to visit my mother’s California relatives; then shoot like a rocket back to New York, where we’d board a plane to fly back to Dhahran.
What a horrible existence.
Other Americans found better ways to enhance their leave time. They would go to Switzerland, for example…or to the south of France. Or whatnot. But I do hafta say: I do not remember any of my little classmates saying they flew back to America, grabbed a car in New York, trekked across the continent and back; then jumped on a plane for Dhahran.
It is, in a way, kinda puzzling that they decided they’d found Nirvana in Sun City.
Y’know why they were so delighted?
No kids.
My father abominated children.
When they found a whole, gigantic housing development out in the middle of the Arizona desert, devoid of kids, my father thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
Forthwith, before he retired, they decided to move there as soon as he could quit his job.
It was another few years before they managed that.
They waited until I could get into the University of Arizona: you weren’t allowed to live in Sun City unless you had no kids or your kids were out of the house. Farming the brat out to a dormitory in Tucson did the job.
So much for any ideas I had about going to UC Berkeley or to a tony private liberal-arts school. Hah!
As soon as they could shove me out the door, then, he quit his job and they moved to Sun City.
‘Twasn’t long before a major recession hit. He had all his money invested in insurance securities, which went right down the tubes.
So the poor guy had to go back to work, leaving my mother in lovely Sun City while he shipped out of southern California. A fate worse than death, to his mind… Seriously: what he most wanted in life was to QUIT WORKING. and when he got his chance to retire and move to Arizona, he thought he’d fulfilled his life’s dream.
So you can imagine (or maybe you can’t…who could?) how he felt when he had to go back to sea, after watching his investments melt away.
Awful! Awful to contemplate, really.
After another three years, he was at last able to retire permanently. They lived in quaint and snobbish Sun City until my mother died of the cancer induced by her ceaseless smoking and probably also by the gawdawful treatment for her amoebic dysentery.
She died horribly, with him waiting on her through every hideous moment of her final illness.
And — no exaggeration — the day she died he was getting himself moved into the old-folkerie: the “life-style community” called Orangewood where she had declined to take up residence.
Would she have died if they’d moved in there when he asked her to do so?
No doubt. They might have found a doctor who was smart enough not to dismiss her symptoms as old-lady neurosis. But evidently by the time the cancer was symptomatic, it was too late to save her.
What a way to end your working career, eh? Some retirement.
Occasionally I wonder…. If they had retired to the Bay Area, where my mother’s family lived, would she have gotten treatment for the cancer that would have saved her life? Or at least might have beaten it back long enough for them to have another few years of retirement together?
Anyone’s guess, of course. Probably not, I imagine. Cancer is the Family Disease, so one would suspect a doctor would have had little luck treating it.
But maybe if events had unrolled a little differently, at least he wouldn’t have met the Dragon Lady and married her. Then the last few years of his life wouldn’t have morphed into years from Hell.
Maybe.
