The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny M’jito, ever wiser than his de-marbled muther, advised me to delete the most recent post, the one about today’s Adventures in Medical Science.
NATCHERLY, WordPress won’t let me just kill it.
ohhhhhh nooooo…that would be easy, eh?
So: let’s delete the content and replace it with blather: Herewith.
Stop the world…i wanna get off!
Ever have anything dawn on you, or strike you with an unnoticed significance, years after the event? Betcha most of us do. But…I’ll bet this one takes the cake.
My mother died of self-inflicted cancer — she smoked herself to death — when I was pregnant with my son. Said son is now around 40 years old.
That means she died about four decades ago.
At the time, my parents lived in Sun City, Arizona — a revolutionary dwelling arrangement for the still-kickin’ elderly and retired. Their dearest friends from their ten-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia had joined them there shortly after they found the place. Ruth and Hollis, this couple were named.
Ruth and my mother were like sisters. The four of them — the two women and the two men — formed a tightly knit unit, almost as close as a family. When my parents retired to Sun City, Arizona, Ruth and Hollis soon followed, buying a house in the same tract a couple miles from my parents’ place.
Over time, my mother smoked herself to death.
After it was discovered and announced that tobacco smoking was linked to a number of cancers, my mother went meh! and continued to puff away. WTF? It was coming from Big Brother, after all, and his evil Gummint Agents who desired nothing more than to control our lives. Right?
Yeah. Right.
She smoked constantly. No joke: She never spent a conscious moment without a fu*king cigarette in hand. First thing she did before she lifted her head from the pillow in the morning was light a cigarette. Last thing she did before she turned out the light at night was light a cigarette. Hell, she even smoked in the shower! She smoked every goddamn one of her cancer sticks down to the filter. Or, if it had no filter, until it was about to burn her fingers.
Not surprisingly, she did indeed develop a nasty cancer, and it did indeed kill her.
***
Some years before then, Ruth and Hollis had moved to Sun City, where they passed much of their time in my parents’ company.
My father struggled to care for my mother through her hideous last months, weeks, and days. And when she died…
…when he most needed a friend…
…those two moved away.
Ruth remarked to me that the horror of my mother’s ugly death was more than they could cope with.
Uh huh.
And how was my father — their alleged dear friend — supposed to deal with the horror?
Let me tell you what I think about that:
A thousand curses upon them
Damn them, damn them, and damn them again.
He needed their friendship.
He needed their support.
They didn’t have to do anything other than BE there, out in ugly Sun City, to be his friends, to say they cared, to assure him that (maybe) life would go on. Yes, even without Julie.
But they yanked that out from under him.
Ruth told me they couldn’t stand to watch my mother die.
For the LOVE of God, how the fu*k did they think my father felt, watching my mother — the most profound love of his life — die in horrific, terminal agony?
The cruelty of their abandonment, the meanness of their behavior, has only recently struck me…come back to smack me upside the head.
Damn them!
I never knew what happened to them, after they left Sun City and fled back to Texas. Sincerely, I do hope they each suffered horribly. But…rather doubt it. If they were smart enough to stay out of an HMO (my parents had no clue!), maybe they got decent medical care in their last days. But…who knows?
A thousand curses on them, and may those curses ring down through Eternity.
I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!! Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.
Arizona…what a garden spot!
Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.
Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.
Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.
Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.
ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.
See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.
😀
Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….
Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!
Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.
If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.
But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.
Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!
😀 😀
Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.
Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.
I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.
Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.
***
Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…
7:45 a.m. Ninety degrees in the shade. 41% humidity.
I’m so parboiled I can’t think: don’t know why WordPress is letting me write in this post, since apparently I’m not actually logged in. Or something.
But lo! It let me out AND let me back in. Weird!
Just back from a truly unpleasant doggy-walk. The heat and the sogginess would be quite enough, without the fellow moron dog-walkers. Where does it say that stupidity is part of the job description of “human being”?
**************
Never did get around to posting this.
ohhhh well…
Now it’s a few days later. The weather has attenuated some. Actually pretty pleasant out there this morning: much drier than it was when this post started. Just finished wrestling with the pool, to little avail. Hope Pool Dude shows up shortly to get it set up properly.
Where were we?
**************
Ah yes: the junket with VC. My friend VC and I went over to a classic old Phoenix shopping mall (believe it or not, we were around when it was NEW!!). Roamed through a couple of tony upscale department stores; then roamed up and down the mall and peered at the tony individual stores. That was fun.
Who has the money to shop in those places? More to the point: these days who has the TIME to do so?
Our stroll brought back memories of my mother, who dearly loved to putter around a shopping center that contained a couple of big department stores and a slew of expensive little stores. In Long Beach (where I went to high school), we lived within walking distance of a sprawling mall. She was a bit too crippled up (from the malnutrition she suffered as a child) to walk from our apartment to that mall, so of course she would drive us there. Occasionally, though, I would walk over there by my li’l teenaged self and roam around the place.
One of the large department stores there — I believe it was a Broadway — had a classic department-store coffee shop/restaurant, up on the third floor. She dearly LOVED coffee shops! So, not surprisingly, we ate there fairly often…maybe once a month or so.
Yesterday, after I dropped VC off at her house — she lives in a historic downtown neighborhood — I drove back up to my parts through the Central Avenue corridor.
Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve cruised around those parts! I used to live in the historic mid-town district. We had a beautiful old house west of Central Avenue and south of Thomas Road, one that I miss to this day. It was so pretty, and the neighbors were so nice!
Unfortunately, we moved out. I stupidly thought we would send our son, who was coming onto grade-school age, to the well respected public schools in the Madison District, up on North Central Avenue.
Yes. Central Snobsville…
Unbeknownst to me, my husband had NO INTENTION of sending our son to a public school, no matter how well rated it was. If I’d had any idea that he would flat-out refuse to put the kid in a Madison school, I would never, ever have lobbied to move out of that lovely house.
The mid-town Encanto area, though, really wasn’t very safe. We had several hair-raising incidents while we lived there, as did some of our neighbors. The most unnerving adventure, though, really was our fault: Having come home late from a Bar Association shindig, very tired and pretty drunk, we left the back door open so our German shepherd could go out and get herself back in, allowing us to go to bed without waiting for her to do Her Thing.
Mistake!
Shortly, DH started to snore: a roar like an 18-wheeler’s. I got up to sleep on the living-room sofa, since sleeping next to him in the bedroom was out of the question.
Sometime after I dozed off, we were awakened by an ENRAGED ROAR from Greta the German Shepherd. She exploded like a cannon, taking off from her snoozing site outside our bedroom door.
A local sh!thead, exploring for places to burgle, had hopped over the six-foot backyard fence and lo! Found that back door open!
YaHOO!
So he walked right in and made himself to home.
He got well inside the house before he woke up the German shepherd and she registered that whoever was in the kitchen was not DH and not me.
She ROARED after the poor son-of-a-bitch, getting between him and the door he came in. By the time DH woke up and came out to see WTF was going on, the chucklehead had found the side door. DH got there just in time to see him dart out the door and slam it in the dog’s face.
When I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen to see what was going on, DH said, sounding outraged and suspicious, “Who was that man?”
Welp. That was the beginning of the end. Who was that man, indeed.
This episode accelerated our desire to move uptown, and within a year we were outta there.
Mistake, IMHO. No place in the Valley is safe — as one of the cops who rescued me from the home invader in my present house remarked. You can not get away from it, no matter where you are. Hence: the proliferation of walled, gated “communities” hereabouts.
So, would I move back down there?
Hmmm…. Probably not.
Yes, I do love those beautiful old custom homes and the park and all. But… The crime and the transient issues are still there. And it’s noisy. Very noisy.
The lovely Encanto district is trisected by a one-way road leading downtown, a one-way road leading uptown, and Seventh Avenue, a main drag that runs from points WAY north to points WAY south. So the traffic is pretty much constant, and so is the noise.
Add to that two major hospitals: one up on Thomas road (north border) and one down on McDowell (south border). The one on McDowell is east of Central, so ambulances headed there rarely cut through Encanto. But the one on Thomas is right on the north border, and it’s HUGE. Ambulances and fire trucks race up and down those two one-way “neighborhood” streets all hours of the day and night, all the time. Plus shortly before we moved, the idiot city bought a private home on the street just north of us and about two lots to the west, and they turned it into a fire station!
Yes! Fire trucks and ambulances roaring back and forth, 24 hours a day! Not to mention the helicopters.
So…that, along with my hallucination about the school, was why we moved out.
To this day, I miss it. We no doubt would still be married if we’d stayed there, because I would never have become quite so discontent if we still lived in a beautiful house with beautiful neighbors.
Not that the house we bought up on North Central wasn’t beautiful enough. But the neighbors? Not so much.
North Central truly would be better named Snobsville. With one (count her: one) exception, our new neighbors were roaring snobs. And they knew a blue-collar girl when they saw her. They treated me like white trash…which, I guess, is not far off the mark. But my mother taught me to be polite to everyone, not only to the wealthy and the fancy. Those people around us were just horrid. Nouveau riche parvenus…
Cruising through the beloved old neighborhood, I thought maybe I should sell my house, here on the fringe of Sunnyslope, and move back into Encanto. We certainly have our share of crime and cop copter fly-overs and roaring ambulances. They seem to have moved the Fire Department out of that house around the corner from the old place, so that problem presumably is resolved.
But…truth to tell, those old houses entail even more work and more expense than this place. So that would be ill-advised, as moves go.
Really, the only practical moves at this point would be either to move into a high-rise on North Central or to a patio home in the Biltmore area. And neither of those appeals very much. I don’t want to live in a hive.
Besides, my son wants this house. He doesn’t understand about the longevity issue on my side of the family: women who had reasonably quiet lives lived into their 90s. With no medical care! They were Christian Scientists!
My mother died in her mid-60s…but she smoked herself to death.
Literally: the woman was never conscious without a cigarette in her hand — not even in the shower! So, no surprise, she died of a fine visceral cancer. That and the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Saudi Arabia picked her off relatively young.
****
For me, sometimes I do wonder…what next?
If there is a next, that is.
There may not be: it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion.
Truth to tell, I surely would not mind moving out of this neighborhood. The presence of the Romanian Landlord represents, IMHO, an ongoing threat, even though he’s presently quiescent and has been for quite some time. He’s closed the juvenile delinquent home across the street and turned it into a rental. Just now the tenants are quiet and the yard is well kept up. But…yeah: what next?
Just to the north of the hood, a dangerous slum spreads up to the foot of the North Mountains. To the west: banks of deteriorating apartments, running down as fast as they can run. To the east, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.
It’s not the worst place in the city. But there are better places — at comparable prices.
Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.
Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.
There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.
Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.
Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!
😀
Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.
Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.
Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.
But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.
?????
Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?
Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.
A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.
Horrible.
After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.
Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.
Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!
No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.
***
Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.
What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.
Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:
*****
Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it. A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.
Ugh! This was NOT the morning for a doggy-walk! By the time we got back — it’s only a mile around the park — my clothes were drenched in sweat. No exaggeration: just SOAKED.
Fortunately, the weather was hot enough and wet enough to keep the worst of the Dog-Loving Morons inside. We had to dodge only a few nose-to-nose encounters, and there was just one idiot out in the middle of the park with his pack of dogs off-lead, chasing around after the toys he was throwing for them. You know the type: that sign reading
DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH!
doesn’t apply to them.
This is the problem — my problem, evidently — with taking Ruby into her profoundly beloved park: People are fukkin’ STUPID.
And boy, am I tired of stupid….
So, say you with sterling common sense, why don’t you walk her someplace other than the park?
Well, I do. But y’know, she SO DEARLY loves that park! Because it has this green, grass stuff all over the ground! Ohhhhh that GRASS stuff!
Our yard is desert-landscaped — that means gravel in front and quarter-minus (finely ground gravel) in back. It’s hot, it’s hard on the feet, and it’s not something you want to roll around on or loaf around on. Most people here have desert landscaping, unless they have agricultural irrigation left over from the time when these tracts were citrus orchards. Tap water is prohibitively expensive.
Ruby has learned about the park and its grassy carpet, and that’s where she heads — like a rocket! — the instant we’re out the door.
Very cute and charming, except when it’s 110 in the shade….before the sun even comes up to make shade. No kidding: as we scribble, it’s not eight in the morning, but it’s already 84 degrees out there (feels like 87, sez Wunderground), with 31% humidity.
Welp…it’s 8:00 a.m. now, yea verily. A friend is coming over this morning…so I’d better get moving around. Onward!