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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…

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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…

Never a Fukkin’ Dull Moment!

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Saturday noon…and now I’ve got the plumber on his way over here.

The toilet in the master bathroom is totally clogged. The one in the center bathroom, which drains through the same system, is barely working.

Jayzuz! Another pile of obscene bills, galloping down the pike!!!

Just talked to their dispatcher: she says they’re on the way.

Goodie. I had nothin’ else today than fart with that. As it were….

My son is gonna yell at me, as he always does every time I call workmen. That will add a little more fun to the day.

Ahhhhh homeownership!

Y’know…I had the strangest nightmare last night. 

It concerned my long-gone relatives in Berkeley, California. They had a pretty little bungalow in the foothills, just the sweetest house you ever saw.

When my great grand-mother passed away, her daughter (who lived in that bungalow with her and had a high-test job with Crocker-Anglo National Bank) sold the house and moved to a nice apartment downtown. The Realtor who put the house on the market explored around and discovered that its basement was full of termites!

Apparently it had been, for some time

So after they killed off the livestock, they had to get carpenters in there to rebuild the beams and stuff in the basement and attic. WHAT a mess!!!!

So…last night’s motion-picture show brought that misadventure to Arizona. Lo! in that dream a workman climbed into the attic and found it swarming with termites.

This, you understand, is not an unlikely scenario here in Lovely Uptown Phoenix. We do have termites, too, and they have been known to excavate people’s houses. And in fact, this house has had its own visitations.

The place has been sprayed several times, attic included. Far as I can tell, termite spray doesn’t last long. Apparently you have to spray a couple times a year. And since I’m royally allergic to that stuff, I tend…well, NOT to do that.

So…boyoboy! Here we go again!

Bug guy will have to spend half the day or more climbing around spraying the attic, the roof, and everyplace else he can reach…thereby rendering the yard toxic for the dog.

And toxic for me: I’ll be sick for three or four days.

Once again I’ll have to sign on for regular bug spray, so the dog and I can get sick for several days every six months. Wheeee!

It’s the “sick” part that causes me to “forget” to call our guy or to sign onto a regular contract. I don’t happen to like to get sick from breathing the fukkin’ air. Nor am I fond of cleaning up the dog barf that happens when Ruby is exposed to the stuff. Or having to take her out for doggy-walks several times a day for a week or two, until the poisoned air clears out enough that she can navigate the yard safely.

Anyway: the crisis of the moment concerns running water, not poisoned air. We shall see what happens next….

Bring Her Back

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I want my mother back.

She was murdered by the tobacco merchants of death. It was an effective way to kill her: get her hooked on an addictive, toxic weed and let her puff herself to death.

She never saw her grandson. But oh, my! How she would have loved him. How she would thought he was cool! Because he is cool.

They killed her before he could be born. She knew I was pregnant with him. But by then she was so sick from the murderous tobacco products she so loved that she simply did not care that she was about to have a grandson. And she was right: she didn’t live to enjoy him.

What the hell is wrong with our society that we allow murderous products to be manufactured and sold on the open market?

Money:

More important than life.
More important than health.
More important than our children.
More important than our families.
More important than common decency.
More important than anything, eh?