“Leave us all enjoy it,” as one long-gone local radio personality used to intone, every morning.
Ugh! I’d like to leave it, all right.
But with M’hijito living here in town, I’m ain’t about to go anywhere.
Leave us all enjoy it. Sure. Right now it’s a chilly 95 in the shade of the back porch overhang. That’s at 8:05 in the morning.
Ruby and I just got back from circumambulating the park: an hour’s walk through the swampy morning. Ugh!!!
Oh well. At least we both got exercised.
Speaking of sons (as M’hijito happens to be, of mine), we walked (again) past the house where the couple’s son got caught in some sort of hijinks and was shipped off to the state prison.
They lost their home. The sleazy investors who glommed it have never tried to rent or sell it. It just sits there, deteriorating: falling apart. Neighbors must have complained, because now they’ve beat back the weeds and they keep the rotting wood picked up. More recently they did some repairs and painted.
But it’s still an eyesore.
In a fancy neighborhood of million-dollar homes. Right on the park.
Ruby-doo is still COOKED. She sitting here on the tiles, panting.
One of the advantages, I reckon, of not being covered in a coat of thick fur is that the fans in the house can cool you off.
Just now, though, I’m feeling kind of advantageless.
Those terrifying “social workers” who showed up here yesterday and gave me the third degree left me very scared. And by damn, I’m still scared.
Whatever they wanted, whatever they were up to: it couldn’t have been good for me.
This morning I tried to call a lawyer…and discovered my guys have evaporated into the fog! One has died. One no longer practices where he used to, and that place is not handing out his new phone number…if he even has one.
And..well… I must say, I am SO alarmed by the “social worker” visit, wherein a couple of officious types tried to quiz me and extract a bunch of private information from me, that I seriously do think I should pack up my car, throw the dog in it, and drive away.
Now, not later.
Frankly, if I had someplace to drive to, that’s exactly what I would do.
But…WHERE?
My California relatives are all either dead or gone. No refuge in those parts.
Reasonable out-of-state venues are in New Mexico, parts of California, Colorado, and maybe Texas. But…the Texas relatives are dead. I can’t afford so much as to camp out in California. And New Mexico? What would I do there and where would I go???
************
Later
Well…for one thing, calm the hysteria. 😀
No, I’m not real pleased with the visit from the “social workers,” or whatever-the-hell they were. And I’m concerned that they’ll descend on my son in the middle of his very busy workday.
He does work out of his home — on his employer’s dime, which fits out a nice office and electronics and phones. So if they show up there and start pestering him, they’ll chomp big bites of paid time out of his day.
Hm. If he tells them to get lost, that no doubt will be counted against him. So he’s in the damned-if-do/damned-if-don’t trap.
****
Lately, I’ve found my daydreaming moments haunted by my late mother. She smoked herself to death, y’know.
No kidding: the poor woman hardly passed a conscious moment without a cancer stick in her mouth. The first thing she’d do in the morning, the instant she woke up, is light a cigarette. The last thing she’d do in the evening, as she was turning out the light by her bed, is smoke a cigarette.
In between, she puffed away pretty much nonstop.
She must have been so dependent on the nicotine that she had to have a fix before any period that was likely to pass without a cigarette. And the damn things killed her.
Not a pleasant way to go, we might add.
***
In even flakier precincts, I find myself irresistibly wondering WHO sicced those flakey social workers on me.
If social workers they were. I suppose they could’ve been some kind of private snoops that someone sent over to poke into my business.
But I don’t think so. Probably they really were what they said they were: state workers sent to snoop. But WHY? And sent by WHOM?
Those are the nervous-making questions.
****
Welp…no point in obsessing about it. But…I’ll tellya, if I could afford to pack up and move outta here, I’d be on my way to Colorado as we scribble.
