Just back from the a.m. doggy-walk. Made it around the park and through the low-rent section of Upper Richistan. Whew!!! What an icky-sticky day!!!
It’s 95 degrees out there, at 7:00 a.m.
115 degrees predicted, with 3% chance of rain.
I’d say that’s a conservative guess: the air is damn near as soggy as the Americans’ digs on the shore of the Persian Gulf, out there where we lived in (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Yuck!!! The humidity could get so high that sometimes it would rain out of a clear blue sky.
No kidding. You’d be standing there under the sun and splat! It would start to rain.
What a horrible place!
My father was getting paid in spades as a harbor pilot working out of Ras Tanura, a port on the Gulf. Money was what mattered most to him. His most heart-felt ambition was to retire as early as possible. To meet that goal, he was willing to work like a draft-horse. And he did…
We finally got him to take us home after my mother came down (supposedly?) with amoebic dysentery. Her best friend was a nurse in the camp clinic. The two women persuaded said friend’s lover, a doctor in that clinic, to tell my father that my mother needed to be sent back to the United States. And left there.
😀
So we escaped from that little corner of Hell. My heartbroken father was forced to take a job sailing out of Northern California, and my mother and I got ourselves parked in San Francisco.
He labored on ships until he’d amassed enough in savings to justify quitting. Arizona was the proposed retirement venue, mostly because it was cheap to live here. They could buy a house in cash (he wouldn’t buy anything on time!) and bake their way through the final years of their lives.
Nevermind that it meant I couldn’t go to UC Berkeley, my target university all through high school and junior high school. Nevermind that my mother suffered extravagantly in the extravagant heat. Nevermind the endless roar of jet planes blasting out of nearby Luke Air Force Base. Nevermind the open, outright hate expressed by Sun City residents who deeply resented the presence of anyone under age 50. Nevermind that his decision permanently changed the trajectory of my life.
Oh, well. Who cares. She’s just a girl, eh?
***
So here I am, in a different corner of Hell. Arizona is decidedly NOT where I would have chosen to live.
But it’s where I ended up, where I married, and where our son grew up.
Said son decided, after graduating from a fancy private college, to take a job here in Phoenix. I’m not moving away from him. And so that leaves me here, still in lovely uptown Arizona.
What a place!