Coffee heat rising

Evening in the ‘Hood

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Dusk, with high thin clouds floating over the ‘hood. Wow! What a GORGEOUS evening as Ruby and her human stroll around.

This neighborhood gets tonier and fancier and more spectacularly expensive-looking by the day. If I manage to stay here until I die, my son is going to inherit the Asset from Heaven! Seriously: worth Gawd Only Knows how more than I paid for it.

Gosh, I hope I’ll be able to hang onto this place until then. Really, that only needs to be another eight or ten years. As we scribble, Zillow claims this place is worth about five times what I paid for it. My first house here is supposedly worth some four times more than I paid…and it’s almost two blocks closer to the spectacularly noisy Main Drag West.

And frankly, I can’t see a single sign that this area is likely to slide downhill anytime in the near future, barring a catastrophic recession. Which I kinda doubt is gonna happen.

The area is relatively safe, crime-wise.  And we’re within walking distance of three major supermarkets, a medical clinic, a veterinarian, two first-rate public schools, at least one good private school, a well-respected hospital, a beautiful neighborhood park,…on and on and on. Meanwhile, the county has run a swell new light-rail line up the west side, and busses zip up and down all the major main drags.

If things stay reasonably stable or, God and the Taxpayer willing, continue to improve in quality and public services,  M’hijito will inherit one HECK of an asset.  By then, it should be solidly ensconced in the tony district known as North Central, even the public schools (now a shade wanting…) brought up to par and beyond, and the property values hovering near the stratosphere. He’ll be able to claim a more-than-decent house in an upscale district, or else sell it and move to the retirement venue of his dreams, out in Colorado.

Nice thing to daydream about...as day fades into dusk…

😀

…And Day Fades into Evening

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My son will soon be over here to drag me over to the (hateful!!) physical therapy studio. Ohhhh  gawd how could I do without that place and its mindless routines?

Said routines do nothing to help the spavined hip and back. What helps, apparently, is Time and the River Flowing. And walking, walking, walking, walking…

Trotted up to the northside shopping center this afternoon. A beautiful afternoon, we might add. Enjoyed schmoozing with the employees. Eyeballing the weirdos who live in the slum apartment complexes across the road. Strolling around the rest of the mall. Headed back to the Funny Farm…

On the way, passed by the Ole Guy’s house.

The Ole Guy was a retired gentleman who lived in a corner house just to the northwest of our part of the ‘Hood. And he was on in years: I’d guess he was in his late 70s or mid-80s.

SDXB and I would march around the neighborhood every morning, by way of exercise. And generally he would be out puttering in his yard when we passed by. WHAT a nice man!!

His main concern, as the weeks and months passed, was for his wife. He felt she was no longer able to stay in the house unassisted. Wanted to put her in a venerable Phoenix old-folkerie called the Beatitudes.

She was having none o’ that!!

The quarrel…uhm, discussion…went on for months.

We would see him every day; say hello as we passed; get the current neighborhood and family gossip.

But..yea verily. One day he was no longer there. The only way he could get her locked up was to lock himself up with her, o’course. And so when the time came, they both disappeared from our parts.

Much missed, we might add.

Dunno who lives there now: one never sees them outside

Ruby the Corgi and I are outside in front just now…as befits old folks, I guess?  Ruby is telling every passer-by how the proverbial cow ate the proverbial cabbage. I am…umh…loafing

And waiting for my son to show up and tote me off to the endlessly annoying physical therapy gym.

My gawd, how I hate that place. Its exercising hassle truly IS the biggest waste of time I can imagine, other than solving algebra problems for your ninth-grade math class….

So this will blow away the evening, a pretty evening when Ruby and I should be strolling from one end of the ‘Hood to the other.

One night I got pissed off with the frustration and the time wastage and sneaked out the door. Took off down the road on foot.

M’hijito had gone home, I think (or somewhere), to wait out the time with less boredom.

He was mightily annoyed when he showed up there to collect me and discovered I’d escaped.

😀

So now he won’t leave. He brings something to read and wastes his own goddamn evening sitting there while nothing useful is being done to me.

Make it stop, God!

Okay okay…sooner or later He will. But…wouldn’t it be nice if that “sooner or later” time could pass without endless annoyance?

😀

Hmmm…  A neighbor’s fire alarm seems to be on the fritz. It’s going quack!….quack!….quack!…. 

Ah…apparently it either ran out of juice or somebody came along and shut it off.

Hmmm…  Speaking of front yards in the neighborhood, we could so with a li’l maintenance here at the Funny Farm. Couple of plants need some serious pruning. And a spot where another shrub died could be cleared out and replanted with something new and classy.

Well…we can pounce poor old Gerardo with that. Get him to work on it before the weather is too hot for working.

Hm,….quack! quack! quack! 

Dammit! The defunct fire alarm was not. Defunct, that is. It’s back to quacking…and quacking…and quacking.

Uh oh. Here’s the Kid. Sooo…bye!

 

 

 

 

One Ringie-Dingie…Two Ringie…

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Not even 8:00 in the morning and I’ve already had three hustling phone calls and hung up on the plumber, who was calling to see if I was here and would let him in.

Because I didn’t answer the phone — or rather, slammed it down in his ear, one of my favorite tricks for damned solicitors — he went on down the road. So who knows when the plumbing will get unclogged.

My fault, of course, for not being more patient with the unending deluge of hustling. Telephone soliciting is a prison industry — who could be better as a phone hustler than somebody who’s already a crook, right? And apparently their warders turn them out of the sack as dawn cracks, so they might as well start calling…

****

Ohhh ADORABLE plumber!!!!  The guy just showed up at the door. Tested the terlets…and found them both working just fine.

The one in the master bathroom damn near overflowed this a.m., which was why I called him. Guess it must have had a water-soluble clog, because by the time he got here, the thing was working just fine.

Sooo…Handsome as he was, that was a less than perfect opener to a day that promises to be..trying.

The plan for today is to…well, start laying plans. Plans to lay me out, that is: or to lay out my pile of ashes.

Anyway…not a very promising start to the day.

Anyway, today I’ve gotta confirm that I indeed do have a niche reserved in the church close. That should be the case — I’ve paid for it.

Then decide if I want to try to kipe my parents’ remains from the Sun City House of Gloom. No, I am NOT gonna be buried under the flight path of Luke Air Force Base’s jet planes, nor am I going to be memorialized forever in a box on a countertop.

By 8 a.m., the phone was already jangling with nuisance telephone solicitors. They start calling early, because they figure old people get up with the sun. And yeah: they do have telephone lists organized by age.

{GRONK!}  I should get off my duff and take the dawg for a walk.

But…

It’s kinda chilly out this morning, even tho’ it’s after 8 o’clock. Don’t much feel like stumbling out by dawn’s not-very-early light.

One of the grand things about this neighborhood is its amazingly central location. This house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, but three excellent grocery stores, one of which is a Sprouts. What more could one ask, eh?

Well…we don’t have to ask: we have two excellent computer stores, a Walgreen’s, a bicycle store(!), a Walmart, a…on and on and on. So, luckily for me (under the current annoying circumstances), I don’t need a car to live here very comfortably.

Okay, back to the morning’s Subject at Hand: Do I want to purloin my parents’ ashes from the Sun City mortuary and place them in the churchyard?

As questions go, it’s not as easily answered as one might guess. My father just REVILED organized religion. His mother was ripped off by a bunch of religious crooks — they got most of a large inheritance she had received from her father. And so he came to think of religion as the House of Crooks. And he absolutely positively would not want to be memorialized through predictable history in a niche at All Saints Episcopal Church.

Of that, you may be sure.

However, I do not wish to be laid to non-rest beneath the never-ending roar of fighter jets racing in and out of an air base.

Now…yes, I do grasp the concept that my father will never know, not at any time throughout coming eternity, that I snatched his ashes out of Sun City. Or that very probably no matter how much my ashes vibrate to the tune of passing F-16s, I will never know it.

But still…something about that plan seems kinda disrespectful. He and my mother dearly loved Sun City. So where their ashes vibrate beneath the engine noise of America’s fighting force, that’s where the dear parents wanted to be.

On the other hand, is it respectful to me to decide that my remains must be stashed in a place where I hated living and where, because of my age at the time, I was decidedly and vociferously not welcome? I just loathed living in Sun City after my parents dragged me there. You couldn’t get me to buy a place there now, not on a bet!

Good grief! Let’s get real here: When you’re dead, you’re DEAD. No part of you lingers after, floating around the mausoleum under the war planes’ flight path, socializing with your even longer-dead parents’ spooks. WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Right?

So I guess if I’m gonna make “pre-need arrangements,” I might as well make them at All Saints.

That could be more appropriate for my son, too, in the long run: assuming he stays in Phoenix for the rest of his adult life. He went to school at All Saints (they have a very tony private academy). Most of his friends went there, too. So it’s not unreasonable to guess that he might want to be interred there, some day. And totally reasonable to assume that he would have no desire whatsover to spend eternity in a box in Sun City.

Pool Dude!

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ARF! we say. ARF ARFETY ARF! IT’S POOL DUDE DAY!

Darned if I can imagine how Ruby the Corgi knows when it’s Pool Dude’s day to come over and shovel out the hole-in-the-ground-into-which-to-pour money. But by golly, she sure does! 

And she’s out there lurking by the gate — or in the house by the back door — waiting for him to show up.

Ohhhh how that dawg loves that Pool Dude!

So does the human… Bless’im, he relieves me of an annoying job. And, because he does the job SO much better than I can, he keeps that pool just spotless. Looking gorgeous. Free of casually growing sheets of green stuff.

Yeah: we’re both in love with Pool Dude. I’ll tellya: that guy is worth his weight in dollar bills.

Do hafta say: in the unlikely event that I were ever to buy another house, it almost surely will NOT have another swimming pool in the backyard. I do love having the puddle of cool water out there in Arizona’s gawdawful summertime. But..y’know…a shower will do the trick. 😉

Unless you have kids who play in the pool every day, owning one is hardly worth the cost. The pool really is an expensive nuisance.

It also poses a health threat that most people don’t think about: it’s a puddle spreading some very scary communicable diseases.

My next-door neighbor apparently decided she was done with maintaining and paying for her hole-in-the-ground, so she let the water drain out and then just went on about her business. Problem is: when you open the drain at the bottom of a backyard pool, not all the water drains out. 

Result: she had a nice little puddle sitting on the bottom of the plaster hole…and the mosquitos found it.

This created a fine mosquito nest, jacking up our buggy population handsomely.

Meanwhile, her other next-door neighbor, a European immigrant, had no clue about stale puddles, swarming mosquitoes, and their consequences. She liked to sleep with her windows open, and apparently had never heard of a window screen.

Next result: the skeeters flew right into her bedroom and made themselves to home, where they bit the bejayzuz out of her…and infected her with a fine case of encephalitis. She almost died from it.

Fortunately, she did recover after some time…even though her doctors had told her dad that she probably would not.

So…Ruby and I do not loaf around the backyard without being amply covered in clothing. We do have a mosquito-zapper out there. But most of the time, I stay indoors!

Therein lies one of the many drawbacks to having a swimming pool in your backyard…and it’s not even your pool!

Here in Phoenix, you’d have a hard time dodging mosquitos bred in one of the local holes-in-the-ground. Just about everybody does have a pool. You could probably evade the bugs if you lived in a high-rise apartment. But most houses…not so much.

If your pool is maintained properly, well then…no, it’s not breeding skeeters. But to take care of a pool properly is a PITA of the first water. You have to keep it steadily chlorinated. Sweep down the walls and steps. Vacuum out any debris that blows into it…. If you’re doing pool maintenance right, it’s pretty much a daily task. Or a stiff bill to a guy who comes around and beats back the dirt and the bugs.

Memories…of Nightmares

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{chortle!}  Sittin’ here over breakfast remembering my beloved San Francisco Bay Area relatives of the prior generation. They lived on the side of a hill in Berkeley, just below a tunnel where the train to San Francisco entered the neighborhood.

Those were cool ladies: my aunt Gertrude and her mother (my great-grandmother) Clarissa, lovingly known as “Gree” by the family.

By the time I came along — after nine years in Saudi Arabia — Gree was well into her 90s. That seems to have done nothing to slow her down. She walked up that (steep!) hill almost every day, headed for a little grocery store where she bought lovely fresh produce.

Neither Gree nor Gertude drove a car. They had no need for it, truth to tell: the train would carry them into downtown Berkeley or across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. On foot, a short climb up a set of outdoor stairs would deliver them into Gertrude’s son’s neighborhood.

At some point along the (very long!) line, though, they decided that Gree should learn to drive. I was not along on this famous ride: mercifully, I wasn’t born yet.

So Gree and Gertrude had acquired a car, and now they decide to hop into it and take a drive.

Yeah.

Somehow, they get on the Bayshore Highway — Gawd only knows how. It wasn’t designated a “freeway” yet, but that notwithstanding, it was already magnificently a main drag. This was all very Californian of them…except…well…somehow Gree made some sort of a wrong turn and drove the wrong way up an offramp! 

No kidding. There they are, two old ladies in a clunk, headed onto the Bayshore Freeway going bass-ackwards up the offramp.

They make it onto the road, and now they’re driving against the traffic on what was then one of the most dramatic freeways in the land.

Got it? Wrong way on one of the fiercest freeways in North America!

Somehow, Gertrude managed to coach her mother across the lanes of 60 mph traffic and get her to drive off the road and safely onto the shoulder. HOW…really, I cannot even begin to imagine.

If I’d been her in that passenger’s seat, I would have utterly panicked and probably been unable to utter a word. You have to say about Gertrude: she was one helluva woman!!

Why would she do that?

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One of the things that puzzles me, here in the wee hours of the morning, is why my mother killed herself that way?  

She knew what she was doing. She’d watched her mother die, hideously, of cancer.  One might say, of a self-induced cancer.

So she knew the horror and misery that particular type of suicide inflicted on the people around her — the people who had to care for her and clean up after her as she died.

She surely knew my father loved her more than life itself. She must have known she was imposing a peculiarly ugly horror on him.

She must have known — should have known, because she wasn’t stupid — that if I took off working on the Ph.D., I would be thrown out of the program. She knew that would mean eight or ten years of my life and effort wasted, thrown down the drain.

She knew — as we all had known since the late 1950s — that smoking causes cancer. She knew her gawdawful smoking habit made her little girl sick, chronically ill from the clouds of sidestream smoke filling the air in their home.

But still she puffed away. Puffed and puffed and puffed until she puffed herself into the grave.

Yeah, I know: it was an addiction.

But addictions can be overcome. She knew nicotine is addictive. She knew she could rid herself of it, even if the effort to do so would be hard and uncomfortable. But hey: harder and more uncomfortable than dying of cancer? Harder and more uncomfortable for the man who waited on her through all the vomiting and the gawdawful sickness and the horror? Harder for the daughter who watched her die and almost lost her own future to her mother’s suicide?

One wonders, here in the wee hours of the morning…