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funny

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Why?

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I do believe that she knew what she was doing.

She knew smoking causes cancer. That revelation was in every print and broadcast medium in the English language.

She knew what dying of cancer was about. She had watched her mother die of it as she attended the woman on her deathbed.

She knew her sidestream smoke was making her little girl sick. And sick. And sicker.

She knew her effing cigarettes infested every air-conditioning system, from the car’s to their apartment’s to her new home’s. She knew the car stank and her home stank to high heaven because of her smoking habit.

If you knew your toxic habit was making your kid sick…if you knew it was stinking up your home and your car…if you knew it was killing you…WHY would you keep on with it?

Seriously: no matter how much your smelly habit pleased you, no matter how much it distracted you from the petty miseries of everyday life, no matter how much you loved the stink of burning tobacco…WHY would you stick with it when you knew it was poisoning your child? The child you wanted so much that you went through three failed pregnancies to get her?

That just mystifies me. She couldn’t NOT have known. And so the only conclusion you can draw is that at some level she was doing it on purpose. She wanted to die.

She smoked herself into the grave because she welcomed the grave. 

She welcomed it so much she didn’t care whether her daughter went there with her. Hey—maybe so much the better, eh? She wouldn’t be lonely there…

Seriously: I was sick all the time I was growing up, living in the stinky houses where she poisoned the air with her stench.

There really is no other explanation than that, at some level, she welcomed death — the death she knew those fukkin’ cancer sticks would bring her. Why she would put her beloved daughter and her fine husband at risk, too: that mystifies me. Suicide is one thing; murder is another.

She did succeed in killing herself. She died of a tobacco-induced cancer.

She seems to have failed at doing me in, too. So far, I haven’t developed a terminal cancer. That we know of…

***

I never could understand the stupidity of it. But I never did well at understanding stupidity in general.

Seriously: she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew her habit would kill her and, at best, make her child sick. So…why??????

What on earth possessed her?

Yeah, I know: addiction.

But she was amply endowed with psychological resources. She was smart — you can be sure she knew what she was doing to herself. She was capable of making up her mind to accomplish something and then doing that something. She doted on her child and surely didn’t want to make the kid sick on purpose.

She was aware that I was sick all the time with chronic respiratory ailments. The connection between the mom’s cancer sticks and the kid’s constant coughing was obvious.

We live in a society that criminalizes self-harm by addiction to various drugs. Why do we tolerate self-harm by nicotine addiction? Why do deliberately harming children by choking them with toxic smoke?

Oh yeah. Why did I need to ask?

$

 

 

Soggy Doggy Day

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7:34 a.m.   Another soggy-doggy day in (un)lovely Arizona.

Just back from the morning stroll around the neighborhood with Ruby the Corgi.  Ugh!!!!  It’s sooo hot and sooo wet out there it feels like a seaside morning in accursed Saudi Arabia.

Not quite that soggy, though. There, you’d wake up to clear skies in the morning to see water dripping off the eaves like rain. By the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was so wet that literally you could see it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. The morning drizzle, though, wasn’t rain. It was just humidity. So humid was the air that water would coalesce on the eaves and drip off in a nearly convincing simulation of rain.

Horrible place!

Arizona has its moments of horribleness, too. Fortunately, those don’t occur year-round. In another couple of weeks, the current damp spell will have dried out, and even at 80 degrees or so, an early-morning walk will be just fine.

Contemplating the fact that our corner of the ’Hood was built by the same company that built out Sun City, where my parents dragged me when they retired early. What a place!

No one under 50  was allowed to live there. But because my parents had enrolled me in the University of Arizona a year before I finished high school, technically I didn’t live there. I lived in Tucson. Right?

Far as I know, no complaints were lodged. I was a bookish kid, very quiet, so presumably none of the neighbors were discommoded. And yes: I spent 9 months out of 12 in Tucson; make that 11 months after we’d been there for awhile and I’d learned I could extend my escape time through summer school.

Anyway, my present house is remarkably similar to the tract shacks that filled Sun City. Ours are a little better than those — by the time Del Webb got to the Sun City phase of his career, he’d learned all the corners to cut. My house, for example, has a garage.

Yeah. You know: a place to park your car, with walls and a ceiling and a door that opens and closes?

Their house had a carport: an open shade structure with only enough space for one car. Mine holds two, in theory.

But the overall appearance is similar: low-slung single-story tract houses built with gray cinder-block walls and gray asphalt roofs. Ugleeeee.

But affordable. WTF.

Anyway, the dawg and I have circumnavigated the’Hood. That, at least, was a halfway decent way to start the day.

This is not a day I’m looking forward to. M’hijito is dragging me out to the Mayo Clinic this afternoon: a trip I hate for another visit I will hate. The doctors there are wonderful, of course. But my gawd! That drive!!! And doctors are not folks I wish to spend a lot of time with…they make me want to run away! 

The Mayo is almost an hour’s drive from here, through horrible traffic. Hit the road at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be plodding along for a lot longer than an hour.

My local “doctor in the wild,” as  the elite set at the Mayo calls doctors with their own practices, has moved to freakin’ Sun City! That’s an hour’s drive in the other direction from the Mayo. And…well…  Lemme tellya: the horror show that we experienced with my mother and the damned doctors out there left me convinced that I would NEVER, EVER go to another doctor who practices in Sun City.

The quacks who attended my mother as she was dying of (obvious!) cancer were so incompetent, so lazy, so arrogant…  The quacks out there are such ba!tards that…well… The medical “care” is among the top reasons that you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City.  Horrible beyond horror.

So my son and I go just as far in the opposite direction. Certainly the Mayo is one helluva lot better than anything in S.C. But I’ll tell ya: overall, the Christian Scientists have got somethin’….

Anyway, just now the Out of Doors is hot, wet, icky. Pool Dude was just here slaving in the backyard: another of many jobs I’m glad I don’t have. Forked over $150 to him, for the privilege of not having to do that damn job for another month.

Honestly. If I weren’t pretty certain my son wants this house, I would sell it right now and move to a nice high-rise apartment on Central Avenue.

Heh! Or at least buy a house here in the ’Hood that’s free of a swimming pool.

After several years in apartments in San Francisco, I’ve had my fill of high-rise apartments and garden apartments and…whatnot. Gotta have SOME space between me and the clowns next door.

😀

At any rate, in a block house on a quarter-acre lot, Ruby the Corgi can bark merrily and not bother the neighbors. So for the nonce, that makes this house worth the hassle of pool care and yard care.

ARF!

 

Back at the Hubs…

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Quarter to eight in the morning. Hot. Sticky. Yucky out there.

The balmy weather blocks all but the balmiest of dog owners from circumnavigating the park, so Ruby the Corgi and I had the place almost to ourselves.

Traipsed down Main Drag Central. Eastward across Fancy-Dan Street South. Back north along Palm Row…passed the lady who HATES me because I asked her to please quit shoving junk-food “treats” in Ruby’s mouth.

Some people just flat refuse to believe you. Ever notice that?

Gosh, but humans are stupid. As animals go, that is.

The house once occupied by the young guy who got in trouble with the law and bankrupted his parents with legal bills (he still ended up in the slam) is vacant. Those poor folks lost their shirts!

Apparently a speculator bought the house. The pool is all torn up and it looks like the same is true of the interior. But then whoever got the place abandoned it. So it just sits there. Hideously.

The neighbors must just love it.

Eastward, eastward…that street reminds me of the exceptionally tony Palmcroft district, one of the Fanciest-Dan neighborhoods of Phoenix.

We used to live in a lesser neighborhood just to the east of Palmcroft — I could walk over with the dawgs to that park and its surrounding Richistan, and did. Still very nice. Still highly unaffordable for the likes of moi, today.

We moved out of our beautiful historic house there just in the nick of time. About six months after we escaped, the city bought a house right behind ours and turned the damn thing into a FIRE STATION!

Yeah! WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEE-UUUU…all hours of the day and night.

Couldn’t believe it…y’know, there were plenty of commercial slots on the surrounding main drags where the city could have parked that thing. And the huge regional hospital with a gigantic parking lot that could have accommodated a fire station. And a defunct shopping mall with its own huge parking lot: perfect for a fire station. But ohhhhhhh no! The city has to stick the thing next door to or across the street from NINE residential lots!

Natcherly.

Honestly, I really think the City Fathers deliberately work at downgrading the quality of living in the beautiful old central neighborhoods. My guess is, the developers who build out the surrounding suburban tracts fund election campaigns for their stooges, to get them on the City Council and into county government. Once there, these sleazeballs work actively to trash centrally located neighborhoods, so they can be converted to commercial properties and generate $$$ for their sponsors and emptied of less-profitable private households.

I love my present neighborhood, though. And would like to stay here until I die.

Exactly how to pull that off kinda escapes me. 

My son wants to consign me to a high-rise old-folkerie called The Beatitudes. Ugh!!! Just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.

I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. 

* No, I do not want to listen to your effing TV blatting away all day and half the night.

* No, I do not want to eat disgusting foodoid dumped out of cans and boxes into steam tables.

* No, I do not want to have to pretend to be nice to you as I hover, disgruntled, over a plate of disgusting foodoid.

* No, I do not even faintly care about your Ailment of the Day.

* Yes, your bird-brained politics make me want to bite you.

One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t last long in a place like that. I would die of depression, if nothing else.

Speaking of the Joys of Old Age, my son is dragging me out to the damned Mayo Clinic again this afternoon. Why, I do not recall. Just now, whatever Blessing of Age was afflicting me seems to have gone away. And frankly, I don’t even remember what I might have been whining about that would have led him to make an appointment.

Ugh!

Arf, we say. ARF!!

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Too, too WONNERFUL!  

M’jito brought his beautiful new puppy over this afternoon! The little gal is a lovely little white golden retriever, fluffy all over and cute as can be.

Friendly. Cute! Unfazed by Ruby. Cute! Full of ginger. Cute!

Everyone needs a puppy. All. the. time. Right?

This little pooch will be a worthy successor to the illustrious Charley the Golden Retriever, who recently passed on to his furry fathers.

Charley was an old man. I sure hope this pup lives to a ripe old age, too. Can’t see any reason why she wouldn’t: she looks healthy, happy, and NO ONE can take care of a dog the way M’hijito does.

Charley in the car

Ninety degrees at seven-forty…

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Yeah, you read that right, far as it goes:  Just now it’s 7:40 in the morning, and the thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch.

Ugh!

Dawg and I just returned from a stroll around the park — about a mile or so. Ruby is SO ridiculously cute and adorable that every passer-by has to pause and coo over her. So that tends to slow things down a bit.

Gawd, it feels like effing Saudi Arabia out there.

Not quite as colorfully wet, though, as when we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Come a summer morning, literally the humidity would drip off the eaves like rain. Houses out there had swamp cooling, so the “air conditioning” was marginally helpful, at best.

Jayzuz! What a place to grow up! 

And Jayzuz! What a pair to grow up with as parents!

Not that they were bad parents, exactly (except when they were pounding on me). What made me resent them was their idiotic smoking habit.

Both of them smoked and smoked and smoked! The house stank from rafters to floor. The carpets stank. The furniture stank. The drapes stank. The air-conditioning system stank. We stank. Ugh!!!!!

What possesses people to do that?

To be fair, at the time — the 1950s — people didn’t understand (or believe) that smoking causes cancer. Seriously: When the word came down and reports appeared in women’s magazines and on the news reports, my mother discounted the whole idea. She believed it was Big Brother trying to tell us all what to do.

And, to continue being fair, she was deeply addicted to nicotine. She would have had a bitch of a time stopping, even if she’d wanted to — which, you may be sure, she did not.

But…jeez…  Wouldn’t you think the fact that everything stank of tobacco smoke — your clothes, your hair, your kid’s clothes and hair, the carpets, the furniture, the draperies, the bedding, everything — would register with a person?

If it ever did, she didn’t give a damn. If her cigarettes burned down the planet, she was not a-gonna stop smoking.

Wouldn’t you think she would have made the connection between the house’s saturation with stinking smoke and her little girl’s chronic, awful respiratory infections? I was sick ALL THE TIME that I was growing up. “Ohhhhh,” she used to simper, “you’re so susceptible!”

Yeah. Not so susceptible to viruses, dear muther, as to the poison you puff into the air all day and half the night.

I have no clue whether the addictive quality of nicotine was widely known at the time. Hard to imagine how anyone could miss it…to get the picture, all you’d have to do is watch someone try to kick the habit. She knew, all right. She knew she was addicting herself and she knew she was making me sick. She just didn’t care. Those fukkin cigarettes were more important. Far more important.

Ugh! That’s what I’m led to think about, when the morning breaks to a hot, muggy, stuffy Arabia-like day. Fukkin’ cigarettes. And a woman laying in her bed dying in agony as her husband worked like an animal to care for her.

Guess I should have more empathy for her dying throes. But…she knew what she was doing. She knew tobacco could and probably would kill her. She had cared for her mother as her mother lay dying of cancer, so she knew what that was about, too.

{sigh} It’s hard to work up a lot of empathy for a person who deliberately kills herself with a toxic product. Just really hard.

What Happened to Her?

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Yknow… Sometimes in idle moments I wonder what happened to my mother to make her SO SCARED.

Something must have happened. You wouldn’t be that terrorized of ordinary daily living unless something had happened to you.

When DXH and I lived downtown, we had a beautiful old classic rich person’s house in the historic part of the city. It really WAS beautiful. And the people who had it before us added on to it, creating a little mansion with a huge living room, huge dining room, large breakfast room, vast kitchen, large laundry room, separate TV room, and four bedrooms.

The house was first-rate. The neighborhood left something to be desired, though. Like…basic safety. The place swarmed with scammers, rapists, and burglars.

DXH traveled off and on for his job and his civic volunteerism. When he would leave town, my mother would get all upset.

No kidding: she would be nigh unto frantic when he absented himself.

She lived, with my father, in Sun City, a mausoleum-like retirement tract that stood a 30- or 40-minute drive from our house, through unpleasant traffic.

But whenever DXH would leave town, she would volunteer to drive into the city and stay with me while he was gone. What on earth she thought she was going to do if the dread burglar/mad rapist actually did enter the house escapes me. But there she was.

What she thought she would do is shoot the ba*tard. She would always show up with a nice little revolver, which she would set on a TV table next to the fold-out bed where she slept. This would give me the willies — she did not have formal self-defense training, and I don’t even know if she had formal training in the use of a pistol. But my father did: he was a licensed firearms instructor. So…I expect she knew how to pull the trigger.

The question, o’course, was whether she knew when to pull the trigger.

And when not…

Most of all, though, what worried me was that she was so scared. 

Now, in those days, women were scared. I was, too, when left alone in a house that any passing sh!thead could easily enter. And occasionally did enter…  But…but…why was she SO damn scared she thought she needed a deadly weapon at her side, even when a large dog was sitting there guarding her?

Yes. “Scared” was why we owned a German shepherd…

I figured something must have happened to her. You surely couldn’t imagine yourself into a state of fear so elevated. She must have had something real to cause that terror.

If so, she never told me what it was. (Thank goodness: if she had, I would have been just as terrorized.)

One of the reasons my parents retired to Sun City was that people believed those stodgy realms were safer than safe. What could happen? Who would want to rape a wrinkled, gray old bat? Who would waste their time burgling the home of some wretch trying to live on Social Security?

Well. Stuff happened all the time. Overall, the public imagined that Sun Citizens were fairly affluent. They weren’t, but compared to someone living on welfare in South Phoenix, they appeared to be. So burglaries did happen. Stick-ups did happen. And the occasional bizarre rape did happen.

So the truth was, our house and neighborhood were at no more risk — or not much more — than their little retirement dream house out in the far western suburbs. But I didn’t know anyone else who felt called upon to keep a revolver at the side of their bed.

Here, where Ruby and I live now, is…safety-wise? About the same. Certainly no safer than anywhere else. Certainly not as safe as a place in a gated community or a high-rise with a security guard posted in the lobby.

But hereabouts I don’t feel at anything like the risk we sensed downtown. We have deadbolts on every outside-facing door and on every security screen door. Alarms on every window. And a dog that barks like a banshee. You couldn’t get in here without giving me plenty of warning to get out a different door or to lock myself and the dawg behind a solid-core interior door and call the cops.

{sigh}

But really: what a place we live in, eh? The Land of the Free and the Home of the Terrorized.

When I was a kid, my mother was wary…but we didn’t live inside a barricaded fortress. What do you suppose has changed? And how?