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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?

Hot and Wet!

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Nasty weather here in (un)lovely uptown Phoenix: hot and wet!

No, it’s not raining (yet). As we scribble by the 8:30 light of a stuffy dawn, the back porch thermometer registers a balmy 90 degrees. But Wunderground predicts a high of 108 — ah, lovely! Humidity: a mere 12%.

Things could be worse, as we well know. But still…it makes Prescott look damn good. San Francisco looks even better.

Hey! I can’t complain. We do not get snow here! Very rarely even a few minutes of hail. I’ll take a 108 degree day in trade for 32 degrees…any time!

Interestingly, when it’s customarily this hot, 12 percent humidity seems downright soggy. And that’s the case today: yep, t feels downright soggy out there!

By 7:30 the he hound and I had circumnavigated the neighborhood’s spacious local park — a stroll of bout two miles, I’d estimate. Ruby will take a doggy-walk over a loafing human, no matter what the heat or humidity.

Once again, some A-hole jangled me out of bed before 7:00 this morning, trying to subject me to a telephone sales pitch. I told him where to shove it, as I always do. That doesn’t seem to affect the jerks. Need to get a whistle or an air-horn to blast the ba*tards with.

We’re told most of those jerks are prison inmates. Apparently, nuisance phone solicitation is a prison industry. And where, exactly, are our legislators who could put a stop to that shenanigan?

Why the Hell not give these guys jobs they can do when they get out of the slam? Jobs that don’t infringe on anyone else’s privacy or business? Or…I dunno…just teach them to get better at burgling, so they have a better shot at staying out of the slam…

<<swishroar!>>

Watering system comes on automatically…odd time for it to turn on: 9:00 a.m. It normally turns on around 7:00…or sooner. Hmmm.

Ruby comes racing out of the back, demanding to go out and investigate the noise. Open the back door.

She charges outside and patrols the backyard. Finds nothing. Comes back in. Ambles back to the bedroom and flops back down.

NOT in the mood — patience-wise or finance-wise — to get the irrigation dude back here to figure that out. Sooo…what now?

Just let it run, I figure. If it doesn’t go off, I can shut the system down manually and call Irrigation Dude. But…with any luck, it will run through its cycle and then shut up.

I hope.

This is the sort of thing that makes an apartment in a high-rise look good.

 

 

Yuck! …and… WHY am I Here???

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Hot. Humid. Sticky. Feels almost like Arabia.

The park: overrun with early-morning dog-walkers, all trying to get the daily calisthenics out of the way before it gets seriously hot.

All these folks leave their IQ points at home when they take their dogs out. So, when you have an aggressive dog — especially one as cute as a corgi — you’re dodging morons to the right of you and morons to the left of you, all of them grinning stupidly and cooing Don’t worry! They just wanna pwaaayyy!”  Result: I get home plumb exhausted.

In the wintertime, I can wait an hour or so to take the dog out, meaning I miss the morning office-hour rush. But in the summer; forget about that. If you don’t get out the door before the sun is more than a few degrees above the horizon, you and the dog will be fricasseed by the time you get home.

***

This rumination led me to yet another tangent: Why am I staying here at all? 

SDXB moved to Sun City, there to join the beloved New Girlfriend. The two of them have been very happy out there, far as I can tell. My parents, who decamped to Sun City back in the 1960s (they moved there the minute they got me into college!), loved living there.

Still, my father would have been better off, later in his Sun City tenure, had he not remarried after my mother died. (And my mother would not have died had she not smoked herself into the grave…). But with those lessons in mind… set up and accept a few retirement realities for yourself. To wit:

  • Don’t be in any hurry to replace a dead or divorced spouse;
  • Buy a house with amenities comparable to your present castle (i.e., similar kitchen; about the same overall square footage — assuming you live in a modestly sized middle-class home;
  • Restrain yourself from installing a swimming pool;
  • Evade the grassy lawn;
  • Be sure the carport has a garage door;
  • Use Amazon and similar services to find and purchase the kind of household and personal items you’re used to buying;
  • Find a hobby or activity that will keep you busy several days a week — if at all possible, one that gives you some outdoor exercise;
  • Get used to having no privacy when you’re out in the yard;
  • Understand that you can’t, in any practical way, have a dog out there (no fences around the yards!);
  • Learn to golf…
  • Oh yeah: and don’t imagine you’re gonna get decent medical care. The doctors and medical facilities my parents encountered…oh my!!

Seriously: my mother would have died anyway of what ailed her, no matter who or what she had as a doctor. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Not. At. All.

If you’re female and American, your problem with doctors is that too many American doctors presume you’re a neurotic hypochondriac. So when you go in with a real ailment, real symptoms, real signs of something serious going on…they just pat you on your pretty little head and go “there, there little girl…” No matter what your age, gender, or ethnicity, you need a doctor who will take you seriously. And in my experience, the quacks in Sun City did not — and presumably still do not — take women seriously.

So…there y’are: The main reason I don’t move to Sun City is that my son lives within a few miles of the Funny Farm and can ride herd on my eccentricities. The secondary reason is that you have a much better chance of finding a competent doctor in the center part of the city.

***

Another potential retirement destination is a large development over on the east side of the Valley, Fountain Hills. 

It’s a little tonier than Sun City: still middle-class, yet more upscale than the west-side tracts. But…as far as I can tell (and yes, I have inspected), the construction in Fountain Hills is no better than what you find in Sun City, and maybe not as good.

Fountain Hills poses other issues , some of them similar to Sun City’s, some unique unto itself.

For example, it’s not in the city. Neither is Sun City, which itself is a bland (one could say dreary) suburb.

Fountain Hills is right under the flight path to Sky Harbor Airport, a huge commercial lash-up where planes fly in at dawn and dusk…just when you’d like to sit outside and enjoy your coffee or your bourbon & water. Both tracts are blasted with noise on a regular basis…especially in the mornings and evenings. Sun City gets its morning serenade from Luke Air Force Base, which exercises its fighter jets right at dawn.

While Sun City is whitey-white (don’t even think of moving out there if you’re of the duskier persuasion), so is Fountain Hills. I don’t know for a fact that darker-skinned folks are also chased off from Fountain Hills…but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s easy to find some indications that folks of the African-American persuasion might not be altogether comfortable in Fountain Hills. Far less easy to find indications of enthusiastic welcome….

So…uhm…to return to the fundamental question driving this post: Why am I here? 

Well, because there really isn’t anyplace better. Not here in the Valley of the Sun, anyway. Or for many leagues around it.

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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gaaaahhhh!!! At 5;40 in the evening, it’s 104 in the shade of the back porch. Wunderground says the chance of rain is 0% (ya don’t say, Jose?). We’re told the weather’s relatively cool for this time of year, though supposedly a blast of heat is due next week: around 110º. Uh huh.

Just back from circumabulating the park. I did leave the pooch  home: those asphalt roads will truly be tooooo hot for her li’l feet. But the park was not too hot for young people loafing and playing…so that was pleasant enough.

Blasting unsurvivable heat brings to mind one’s mortality. And this led me to try to locate a surviving partner of my recently deceased lawyer, the redoubtable Michael Kimerer.

He dropped dead in his office a few weeks ago. A former partner of my former husband’s, he was one of the most powerful and most respected lawyers in the state. Probably in the Southwest, actually.

Having been reminded of my own mortality by recent trips to the quacks, I wanted to be sure my will and other matters are neatly in order for my son. This stuff, I understand, is on file with the county…but damned if I know how to confirm whether that’s true.

Still nobody at Kimerer’s office; apparently his partners have scattered to the winds. So now, lhudly sing goddam, I’ve got to find a new estate lawyer (Mike had the advantage of being very talented in a number of legal fields…), have him or her check to be sure all that paperwork is done right, and that it’s filed where it’s supposed to be filed. And be sure my son knows how to find it…

 

Porch Pirate Heaven

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My house has a nice big courtyard in front, with two entry gates: one on the east side and one on the west side. This makes for a pleasant and welcoming front porch, and it also provides a nice fenced-in patio where Ruby the Corgi can watch the passers-by. And bark at them. Especially if they have a dog.

It also provides a nice sheltered spot for thieves. You know them: the guys who follow the UPS and U.S. Mail trucks around the neighborhood, watch for a driver to stop and leave a package at the door, then jump out, run up to the door, grab the loot, and take off down the street again after the delivery guy.

Many of the neighbors don’t have packages delivered to their homes at all. They rent a PO box and give out its address to people who send packages or important mail.

This, of course, means you have to get in your car — during business hours only — and schlep across town to the Mail Boxes USA store — dig out a special key, unlock the drawer, get your stuff (if it’s there…), close and relock the drawer, climb in your car, and haul the junk back to your house. What’s the point of having stuff delivered at all?

By way of addressing the porch pirate problem, I put up signs on each courtyard gate:

Welcome to Porch Pirate Heaven!
You’re Being Followed
Please Don’t Leave Packages
Outside the Gate
Place Them Inside the Patio
Ring the Doorbell!
Thank you! <3

You think I jest? Consider: A neighbor who put out cameras in front has caught videos of the local thieves following UPS and Mail Service trucks up to a front door, jumping out of their car as the delivery person trundles on down the street, running up to the door, grabbing the package, racing back to their vehicle, and continuing on down the road after the delivery truck.

Quite the little nuisance, eh?

Interestingly, I’ve found the Sign Strategy works surprisingly well. I’ve not had a single delivery stolen since I started posting this notice. Dunno whether the porch pirates just don’t want to come inside the courtyard, or whether they figure there’s probably a camera recording their antics. WhatEVER: since I’ve started with the sign, I haven’t lost a single delivery.

To my knowledge… 😉

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Remembering Paul P., my college boyfriend. How my parents hated him!!!  Mostly, I think, because of his ethnicity.

It would have made more sense to hate him because he introduced me to alcohol and sex when I was about 17 or 18. This was in my junior year, which would have been about 1964.

Paul was white, but he was Eastern European.

For reasons (if any) that escape me, my parents disapproved of Eastern Europeans. If you weren’t white and British or Western European – or a white American — you did not make the cut, in their world.

I was madly in love with Paul, who was handsome, fairly smart, and reasonably ambitious. His morals left something to be desired: fuc!ing an underage girl was questionable, as was his enthusiastic approval of his best buddy’s laying a barmaid because the buddy’s wife was so advanced in pregnancy that she couldn’t accommodate his dong.

If that latter episode hadn’t happened, I probably would have married Paul. It was just a little(!!) too revolting for my taste, though… Talk about your narrow escapes!!

But he seems to have turned out OK. He became a university administrator. And online there are pictures of him surrounded by his loving family (absent any barmaids). So I assume his life went reasonably well.

Hope he’s living happily ever after…