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Month: April 2025

How to End a Love Affair

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It wasn’t what he did. It was what his buddy did.

And that he approved of what his buddy did.

Paul was the first Great Love of My Life. Handsome, smart, affable, sexy, upward-bound. Who could ask for anything more, eh?

Well…as extreme as it seems, you could ask for a little common decency…

***

Paul was madly in love with me, there in Tucson in our last years of undergraduate school. And I was madly in love with him.

My parents loathed him.

But it was our lives and our love affair, so I pretty much disregarded whatever they thought or said about him. He was upwardly bound, finishing an undergraduate degree, headed toward an MBA, figured to have a career as a business executive or a government functionary.

My mother urged me to let him go. I ignored her: my feelings for Paul were my business and none of hers.

So I thought.

Paul’s best friend was a married man whose wife was advanced in pregnancy. Very advanced: about eight months along. One night this guy was out on the town with his pals…when he picked up a chippy at a bar. Took her to a motel room and had sex with her.

Incredibly (to my way of thinking…), Paul thought that was just dandy.

No kidding. He felt the guy was fully justified in jumping into bed with this whore, because, said Paul, “his wife isn’t giving him any.”

Got it? She’s on the verge of giving birth, bloated up like a watermelon, sick most of the time…but it’s her bounden duty to put out for her horny husband.

I thought, Y’know…dude, if you think it’s OK for him to do that to his wife, someday you’re likely to do the same to me.

And the next thought was Bye!

Want to end a love affair? Show your partner exactly what you’re capable of doing…

***

So my mother got her fondest wish: I flang him out.

Was that a good thing?

Probably. The man I did marry was a far, far better human being. The marriage lasted about 20 years. No doubt it would still be going if I’d been in love with him. Unfortunately, I never got over being in love with Paul, and so after all those years I wandered off on my own.

 

And…A Different Viewpoint

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The other day I was holding forth about my puzzlement over my parents’ loathing of my undergraduate boyfriend. And yes, they did hate him, and hate is the operative term. That post speculates that it was because of his Eastern European ancestry.

Could be.

But this morning it occurs to me that there was a different reason. A better reason.

Paul was the one who introduced me to the use of alcohol. Make that the daily use of alcohol. (I was about 17 years old at the time…)

You understand: my parents were no teetotalers. They generally had a cocktail or two before dinner, and they were known to get extravagantly sh!t-faced on the bootleg booze passed around at gringo parties in Saudi Arabia. But they didn’t give it to me, nor did they invite me to join them in their informal pre-prandial whiskey-swilling, not even as an adult.

Yes: they did drink whiskey, a variety of which we could distill in lovely Araby. My father had a still on the stove and a couple of huge jars in the janitorial closet for that purpose. This was vastly against Saudi law. But nothing was done about it, presumably because the Kingdom was making too much money selling oil to the apostate gringos to make a fuss over their drinking habits.

When we got back to the States, my parents continued their pre-dinner-hour swiggling. At that point, they were never getting drunk. They were just having a cocktail with food and cigarettes, unwinding before dinner.

Meanwhile, though…back at the college campus: Paul and I drank all the time. We would start when classes were over — often as early as 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon — and tipple until we tipped over into the sack. That that meant he and I were drinking a lot more than my parents were, and we were doing it every day.

Once I got quit of Paul, I did quit drinking that much. I continued to have wine with dinner, but I rarely drank hard liquor, and I didn’t swill wine all afternoon.

However, to this day I still pour a glass or so of wine with dinner.

And…Lookee Here!

Turns out chronic alcohol use can lead to neuropathy.

No wonder my hands and feet and lips tingle!

If that article is accurate, my case must be pretty mild. But the booze habit may very well be the source of the buzz in the paws!

Of all those melodramatic symptoms, the only one I’ve encountered (so far) is tingling in the hands, feet, and lips.

Hmmmm…  It looks as though you can make this ailment remit — at least to some extent — simply by going on the wagon. This may or may not work…but apparently for some folks, it does.

I’ll be damned…think o’that!

And how hard would it have been for one of those MayoDocs to simply ASK me how much I drink and then suggest I climb onto the wagon?

Pretty clearly, the treatment is to quit swilling booze every day. 😀

Whether this will stop the current tingle-fest is unclear. But apparently if you quit boozing, you can at least block the neuropathy’s progression.

LOL! Welp, my dear late parents didn’t have the right reason for disliking pore ole’ Paul. But they were right that I should have gotten quit of him as a boyfriend. No booze-swilling boyfriend: no booze-swilling.

😀

Why Did They Hate Him So?

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It was in the summer of my sophomore year that I took up with my college boyfriend. We met at the University of Arizona’s swimming pool, where we each had taken to hanging out when we weren’t attending summer-school classes.

Paul was eastern European. I wanna say he was Bohemian or Slovakian. What he was, though, was American. His family had been here for a couple of generations, and he grew up in Chicago

Nothing about him shouted ALIEN!!! If no one had told you his predecessors had immigrated from Eastern Europe, the idea would never have crossed your mind. If it did and you had stared carefully at him, you probably would have thought his background was middle European or maybe British. English, that is.

But…

I brought him home from school one weekend, so as to proudly show him off to my parents. Little did I know…

They were shocked and dismayed, I tell you: shocked and dismayed. Seriously: it was instant hate…the minute they saw him.

I knew my parents were wracked with racial hatred. They would have disowned me if they’d caught me dating someone of the African persuasion. Or Chinese. Or Japanese. Or…apparently anyone even faintly different from themselves. My guess is, British was the desired ethnicity, and American the only acceptable nationality. My mother’s antecedents were English with some French thrown in. My father’s: Germanically English.

I met Paul in the summer between my sophomore and junior years. After having spent my first college-age summer at the new parental home in Sun City, I realized living in a ghetto for old folks was not for me. So, the following summer I engineered the opportunity to stay in Tucson and go to summer school. There, I used to hang out at the campus swimming pool. And that’s where Paul and I met.

How he triggered my parents’ racist instincts mystified me. And it escapes me to this day: he was as white as I was. The damning difference was that his family came from Eastern Europe.

Whaaa?

They had trained me up effectively to hate racial groups that were Not Us. But European nationalities? Huh?????  I had no idea we were also supposed to hate people who came from certain regions of Europe.

WhatEVER…. /eyeroll/  They were just abhorred when I brought Paul home one weekend. And from that moment on they launched a campaign to get rid of him.

I was madly in love with the man, myself. He was handsome, smart, fun to be with…what more could a college kid want? And as for our family’s tradition of rock-solid racism: to my eye, he was as white as me.

Having seen The Enemy and realizing he was about to be Us, they set out to get rid of him. I resisted for quite some time, even though I understood that if I married Paul, I might never see my parents again.

No, that is not an exaggeration.

What did in poor ole’ Paul for me was this:

His best buddy — closest male friend on this earth — was married. This guy’s wife was advanced in pregnancy. So much so that she could not accommodate him sexually. Determined to get what he believed was his by right, he took up with a bar maid, whom he met one evening while out drinking with his pals.  So now he’s having grand fun fu*king this chippie and bragging about it. Paul thinks that’s just hunky and dory.

No kidding: Paul saw nothing wrong in his pal’s philandering with a chickadee the guy picked up in a bar!

Because, after all, his wife couldn’t “give him any.”

This episode removed the scales from my li’l teenaged eyes: my parents’ racism aside, the guy was an immoral lout. So I dumped him.

Years have gone by — a lifetime of years, eh? He went back to the Midwest and became a university administrator. Had a successful career. Photos on the Internet show a handsome man; reports indicate he did well for himself. And incredibly, for awhile he was working in the president’s office at the Great Desert University. That was during the time when I was working on the campus editing a research publication for the graduate college.

I had no idea he was there. I must have stumbled across his path now and again, but never noticed him or heard his name uttered. Did he know I was there? Dunno. Probably: he was smart, and that publication did ultimately come out of the university president’s office. But…possibly not: there was no reason he would have known my married name, which I was using by then.

On reflection… Today, I think my parents were right, in a way. Given his morals — or lack thereof — he would have made an undesirable husband. At least, for me…

Another Day from Hell, y-Cumen In

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A bit past 7 in the morning. The phone has already jangled: nuisance telephone solicitor.

Can you imagine? The bastards call you BEFORE EFFING 7 A.M.!!!

Put a generous spin on it: the guy is probably calling from a prison in some other time zone. (Phone soliciting is a prison industry, interestingly enough.) We don’t have Daylight Savings. so if that nuisance has kicked in where he lives, he thinks it’s 8 o’clock.

YE GODS. though, am I sick of goddamn phone solicitors. And I really, seriously HATE them when they ring up the phone at this hour.

Today M’hijito and I have to drive a-l-l-l the way across the Valley to the Mayo Clinic, where I have a nuisance appointment with a doctor. Or more likely with a nurse practitioner.

Dammit!

It’s an utter waste of time, a good  hour’s drive each way through cut-throat traffic. I just HATE driving out there. Particularly since they do have a clinic here in town. That one is no fun to reach on the effing freeway — especially during the rush hour, which seems to be the Clinic’s favorite time to schedule appointments…but at least it’s only about 20 or 30 minutes away.

I am fricking STARVED, and not allowed to eat until my blood is drawn. What a goddam nuisance!

Totally gorgeous morning! I’d like to take Ruby for a walk. But if M’jito shows up and finds me gone — he’s bound & determined to schlep me acrosss the city to the Mayo — he’ll get all worried.

<!!!RINGY DINGY DINGY!!!>>
{arghhh! NOW what???}

M’hijito on the phone. I’d asked him to call to remind me of this morning’s torture appointment.

<<chortle!>

Think o’ that… It isn’t even 7:30 in the morning, and the goddam phone has already jangled twice.

The telephone, IMHO, is not one of Humankind’s better inventions!

For reasons unknown, I do get many fewer phone solicitations that I used to. So that’s a mercy. Back in the Day — when I was pregnant and wanting desperately to sleep in the afternoon — we would get four to six nuisance calls a day. I got to the point where I would just unplug the phones for several hours a day.

This was shortly after plug-in phones became commonplace. Before that, your phone was hard-wired to the wall. So, you couldn’t unplug it. And then, as now, the phone soliciting bastards would jangle you up several times a day. That problem, I addressed by storing the damn phone inside the freezer.

{sigh}

Ruby, patrolling the front patio, flies into a soaring RAGE.

NOW what???

Some woman walking by on the other side of the street, in tow behind a huge and magnificent husky. GORGEOUS dog! And totally unfazed by Ruby’s barking frenzy.

😀

Holeee maquerel! Lookit this fiasco!

That’s the road we would normally take to the ranch. Sure am glad I’m not driving up there today!

😮

{sigh} It was a pretty drive, up a steep hill to reach the plateau above the Valley. Our acreage stretched to the rim of that plateau. So if one had nothin’ else to do but ride a horse half the day, we could amble over there and gaze down off the Rim.

So beautiful! I sure do miss that ranch.

 

 

Personicane!!!

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LOL! You’ve heard of “hurricanes”?  What we have here this evening is the politically correct version: a fine personicane.

Wind is wailing, whaling, howling, yowling, blasting, bumping…auuughhh! Unclear whether we’ll get any rain: the wind is carrying on so dramatically it may freakin’ blow the rain away!

The house’s rafters groan. The trees dance and bend. The back-porch ficus plants flap back and forth in their pots. Wunderground predicts winds of 13 to 17 mph…  Yeah: sure, fellas. When 13 mph reaches escape velocity, you’ll have that right!

Ohhh well.

Think the daawg is wrung out — hope so, anyhow, ’cause I don’t wanna go out in that again this evening and you can be DARN sure she won’t go out there cheerfully.

Or., most likely, at all.

 

Chaos in Hevvin…

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Well… {ahem}…one wouldn’t exactly call Conduit of Blight Boulevard “Heaven.” But it’s not too bad, as Phoenix-area main drags go.

Apparently some new catastrophe has taken place, though, amid the fine rush-hour traffic. Sirens have been yowling up and down Blight Blvd for the past half-hour. Probably a moron drove or stepped out in front of a train.

Conduit of Blight is one of the main routes for the accursed light-rail road-blocks….uhm, “trains.” They get in the way of everything and slow traffic on the main drags inexcusably.

This being Arizona — Home of the Rabid Driver — morons dart around the things and out in front of them and…HOOOlleee mackerel! You wanna talk about traffic hazards? Egad!!

That’s why I won’t drive on 19th Avenue, Camelback, or Central Avenue: not  along any stretch where the accursed light-rail trains run. Those fine politically correct conveyances have turned all of those main drags into clogged messes.

This adds considerably to the congestion and the frustration factor. Basically, to keep from tearing out all your hair, you have to drive anywhere from half-a-mile to a full mile out of your way to avoid the tangles along CofB .

Hmmmm… Speaking the local road-morons…someone just cruised up the alley behind our backyard. Sounded like they stopped at the trash cans or nearby. So…did they dump their trash outside my gate (again)? Fill up the freshly emptied garbage can with a gigantic pile of debris (again)?

Can’t tell by peering over the wall.

And so…awayyyyyyy!

Nope! If they dumped it in any of the other trash cans, it wasn’t here.

And speaking of trash accumulation:

Arizonans are now required to replace their (perfectly valid…) driver’s licenses with a new annoyance called a “Real ID.”

Jayzus Aitch Keeeerist! If the card with  your photo on it, acquired by taking a test and standing in line a good 40 minutes, does not suffice to show you’re who you say you are, then NOW what is?

***

That notwithstanding…

It’s an incredibly BEAUTIFUL day. Clear, with a few fluffy, cottony clouds drifting overhead, and cool.

Yea verily, I’m even thinking of getting off my duff and trekking around the nearby North Mountain Park.

Maybe.

But maybe not. The last couple of times I went hiking up there alone…well… I swore never to do that again. At one point I had to dodge down into an arroyo, tuck my  bright blue backpack underneath me and lie down on it, and pray the jerk who started following me didn’t see where I went after I ran around a bend.

No kidding. The guy stood on the trail a good ten or fifteen minutes, scanning the landscape and altogether too obviously searching for me.

{sigh} This is why every woman needs a German shepherd…