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Car Hijinks: Is this even possible?

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Y’know…   It’s kinda embarrassing to have a son (even a magnificently grown one) who’s a lot smarter than you are. Eeps!

The other day, my son purloined my car out of my garage. He refuses to bring it back. So here I am: carless in Gaza, having to do errands on foot and hire an Uber driver for more involved appointments.  I thought the car-grabbing maneuver was just a moment of nastiness, or else the kid was trying to pull some sort of demented power play.

Uhmmm…. Not too swift on the uptake, am I???  :-

In fact, what he has been doing is demonstrating that he’s about 50 times smarter than his agèd muther!

Here’s what has happened since we took that car out of my garage:
* Not a dime has been diddled away on gasoline, car servicing, or anything else of a vehicular nature.
* The guy who lives catty-corner across the street revealed himself as an Uber driver.
> No kidding!!!! He uses his personal car as a taxicab…and he lives all of 30 seconds away.
> Took a ride with him: He appears to be a good, safe driver, and the inside of his chariot is spotlessly clean.
* I have not tried to kill a single one of my Fellow Homicidal Drivers.
* I did NOT, as had been planned, schlep the tank to the Ford dealer for updated maintenance work. $$$
* With the car locked up my son’s house, I’ve no concern about the passing burglars visiting my garage.
* The garage has been incredibly easy to keep clean (who knew???)
* Walking to the Albertson’s, Sprouts, or El Rancho provides a highly satisfactory amount of mild exercise.
Who knew, indeed? In a highly urban environment, the benefits of going car-free outweigh the benefits of owning a car.
That’s assuming you don’t use your car for regular commuting and you don’t have to drive to any destination every day.
Y’know what? I’m thinking we should get rid of that car altogether. Sell it and bank the money. Then I get M’jito or the Uber dude to drive me to the (relatively few) destinations I need to go to these days.
Whaddaya think? Am I crazy?

Inauspicious Morning

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Ugh! Not 7:30 yet, and we’ve already had one Drama of the Day. More to come, no doubt…

Ruby and I were headed homeward from the morning walk, when we came upon a favorite neighbor. This lady lives alone. She’s very smart and very charming and just the sort of person you enjoy having as a neighbor.

As we greet each other, she trips on a heaved slab in the sidewalk…and DOWN SHE GOES.

She whacked the heck out of her head. I wanted to go get my car and drive her up to the ER. She declined. Which was good, because in the heat of the moment I’d forgotten that my son has stolen my car.

Another neighbor came along. She also proposed that we take our friend to the ER. Again, Friend declined.

Reluctantly, we complied (what were we gonna do? Tie her up with a clothesline??). And our group dispersed.

***

And this is why I need my car. You never know when some emergency, small or large, will arise.

If my son persists in refusing to return it, I’ll have to go rent a car. And I may report him for stealing my car, which will cause him to lose his job. I hope the principle of the thing is worth it to him.

***

Ugh. Hot and humid out there: 99% chance of rain.

I should get off my duff and walk to a grocery store, since a few things are needed…and I sure don’t want to be prancing around in 100-degree heat…or 100% rain.

But ohhhh…how I am not in the mood! 😀

***

Reminded of where we lived in San Francisco, a sprawling middle-class apartment development called Parkmerced. Loved living there!

One of the amenities was a huge underground parking garage. My mother would park our car in its slot on the 6th floor (that’s 6 floors down), and we would rarely use it unless my father was in port. (He went to sea; we had to pick him up when his ship docked in the far East Bay, but otherwise, we had no real need for a car).

Frankly, it was cool not to need a car. Well: not “cool” in a social way but in a day-to-day lifestyle way. We could walk to the grocery store. My mother’s job was within easy walking distance. The city busses had a stop right outside our building: I could jump on a bus and ride to school.

If we were going anywhere outside of Parkmerced, my mother would drive us. But that amounted to surprisingly few trips! Mostly, the car sat in the parking garage…day in and day out.

Wish we could live that way now.

A Plan!

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So…here I am, stuck in the house with no car in the garage and 112-degree heat outside. I need groceries. But ain’t about to get them in this weather.

Ooohkayyy…. So what AM I gunna do?

Welp, truth to tell, of late I’ve come up with a New Plan.

The basis of this Plan is to limit the number of times a week that I need to go to a grocery store or a pharmacy. With a set number of junkets for any given period, I should be able to arrange with a local driver to pick me up on specific days at a specific time. Say, Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for a trip to Sprouts. Wednesdays at 2 p.m. for a trip to Albertson’s.

And so on.

Not very much so on, I hope.

That way, I would know what I can buy, where, and when. And also have a pretty fair idea of how much it’s going to cost. If the trips are arranged with Uber (or some such), then I would always know when I’m gonna head to a store and always know approximately when I’m gonna get back.

If we discover that the local car-for-hire drivers are reliable (yeah…big “if”), so that they show up about when they say they will, it would be very easy to keep the pantry stocked. And I wouldn’t have to trudge through the heat, dodging panhandlers and sh!theads, to get to the store. Let’s say, at 10:00 on Monday morning, the Uber driver who lives across the street will pick me up and take me to the local grocer. He’ll wait till I’ve loaded up the groceries, and then he’ll bring me and the loot back home. Voilà! Chore done!

With any luck: chore done in ONE trip per week!

How awesome would that be, eh?

How DO they know???

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LOL! Just as I was about to stroll off to the Sprouts, along comes 

ROARRRRRR ROAARRRR ROOOOAAAARRRR!!!

Dayum! It’s Gerardo and his boys. 

Raising the question: How do those guys know when I’m in the middle of something that I can’t easily knock off, or just about to head out the door and need to get going?

They must have some kinda mental telepathy. ‘Cause it never fails. 

No kidding. Absolutely NOTHING can be going on, but when I get up to haul on some clothes and trudge to…where?

* a grocery store
* the Walgreen’s
* the veterinarian
* the dentist’s office
* a doctor’s office
* or just to a trailhead on the side of North Mountain…

THERE THEY ARE!

Sheeeee-ut! 

Now I’ve gotta sit around for 45 minutes, serenaded by leaf-blowers, weed-whackers, and assorted other noise-makers…waiting for them to get done so I can pay them for their (back-breaking!!) work.

Seriously: How these fellas survive a summer in this place just plain escapes me. It is hotter than the Hubs out there — I believe 112 was predicted for today — and they are working like mules. Even with top-of-the-line gasoline-powered tools, that job is best described as A Bitch. I can’t even imagine trying to do it at 11:30 a.m. on a 112-degree day with a 24% chance of rain.

And, since my Dear Son has kiped my car, to do the couple of local errands I was about to launch into, I’ll have to walk through even more ungodly heat, or else hire an Uber cab and pay for two rides (one to the stores; one back to the house). Neither of those are appealing options.

Apparently, a few of the grocery stores around here will deliver. But that poses its own problem: Most Americans do NOT know how to select produce. And since most of my diet consists of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats, about 2/3 of what I order is likely to be…uhm…somewhat wanting.

*****

Our boys FLY through the (gawdawful) yard clean-up. And they charge me $100 for a job that the boss usually does for $80.

Grrrrr.

But truth to tell: I ain’t complaining. It’s hotter than hell out there, and they do a damn good job…

but…

OH HELL AND DAMNATION!

They’ve gone off and left the side gate open!

RUBY!

RUBY!!!

WHERE ARE YOU????

Shoot out the door, trying to chase down the dog!

Incredibly, she hasn’t gone far. Matter of fact, she’s in the house. Thank the Gods and all their angels.

Once that little dog takes off down the street, she is GONE. And unassisted, she’s unlikely ever to make her way back here.

*******

Godlmighty. MAKE THIS DAY STOP!!!!!

Back from the Hubs of Hades…

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Holeeee sheee-ut! Is it ever HOT out there!  Hotter than the hubs, and damp as the inside of a shower stall.

Seriously: it’s nowhere near as hideously hot ad humid as an Arabian morning used to be. But it’s close.

There, you’d get out of bed and peer out the window to see water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained during the night.

No, it had not: the sky was clear blue and no clouds floated in the sky. It was just SOOOO HUMID that the dew would settle on the roof, flow toward the eaves, and drip off onto the ground.

Miserable place.

Just now, lovely uptown Phoenix ain’t much better. It’s soooo hot and soooo wet out there, it does remind you of grody Ras Tanura. But I must say: water is not actually dripping off the rooftops, they way it used to on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

Even this much humidity is out of the ordinary for lovely uptown Phoenix. It does get damp in late July and August, but not wet enough to make you feel downright soggy. Certainly not wet enough for the dewfall to drizzle off the houses’ eaves.

Anyhoo, we circumnavigated the ‘Hood in a kind of shortened route — east toward the rising sun, north toward my old friend Jerry Jacka‘s house (he’s now long gone), back south toward a beloved old neighbor’s place — she, also long gone.

I fear I will soon be next to be “long gone.” My son would like to lock me up in an old-folkerie called the Beatitudes: a horrible prison for the useless elderly. My plan is to take a flying leap off the North Rim before that can happen…but frankly, I’m not in any hurry to go.

I deeply loathe institutional living. Hated hated hated living in the university’s dorms and do NOT want to spend the last months or (hevvin forfend!) years of my life in some gawdawful old-folkerie. Presumably I’ll have to calculate a way to achieve a final exit…but just now, that is not anything I want to contemplate.

Man! That sky out there is clabbering up! Let’s see what Wunderground calculates that we have in store for today…

Hmmm… 96 degrees as we scribble: at 7:18 in the morning. Predicted high: a chilly 105. “Air quality alert” (what else is new?). Ten percent chance of rain.

In other words: “hot and humid.”

Hungry. Might’s well get up and see what’s in the fridge to eat…

hmmmm… Leftover baked potato, swathed in cheese. Ohhh lookee here! A whole new package of loverly bacon! A package of sweet bright red little tomatoes. And berries, berries, and more berries.

Things are lookin’ up!

Guess I should “look up” and fix a pot of coffee. That would require movin’ around though. Am I capable of that just now?

Dubious.

Did She Know?

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The murder weapon…

Did the woman who murdered my mother know what she was doing?

Well…there is an element of ambiguity there. Luella was, after all, stupid as a post, a perfect match for her less-than-brilliant spouse.

But Jeez! How hard is it to understand “You must clean all produce thoroughly AND sanitize it, lest you come down with amoebic dysentery, which will put you in the hospital and may even kill you”?

Really, how hard IS that? Especially if you’re sat down in a classroom and made to WATCH the process, step by step, for sanitizing contaminated produce?

Back in the 1950s, American wives who were sent out to Saudi Arabia to accompany their spouses, on contract with Aramco, were required to take classes in how to prepare food safely and how to keep their families well. One point of those classes was to convince you to clean your food thoroughly before cooking it or putting it (raw, as in the case of salad greens) on the table.

There was nothing difficult about these lessons:

*Germs
*Germs make you sick
*Germs make your kids sick
*Germs can even kill you and your kids.
*So you must wash all your food thoroughly to get rid of the germs.
*This especially applies to things you eat raw, such as salad greens.

Does this seem hard to you?

Seemed pretty self-evident to the ten-year-old me. But I do remember my parents’ idiot friend, Luella, standing in the kitchen and preparing a cabbage salad…without ever so much as rinsing off the leaves. And I remember her handing me pieces of raw, unwashed cabbage greens to munch on, as she puttered about the kitchen.

This treat did nothing to me. Not unduly surprising, since I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a two-year-old and, during the time we spent there, was exposed to every Middle Eastern germ known to personkind.

But…that yummy salad made my mother very, VERY sick. Desperately sick.

The company sent her back to New York, where she was hospitalized for weeks and dosed with every treatment known and imagined to beat back the microbes.

She spent a good two or three weeks in the Ras Tanura hospital before the company doctors felt it was safe to fly her back to New York, where she spent the better part of another month in in treatment – drastic treatment.

That STUPID, evil woman apparently poisoned my mother on purpose.

What did she think it would do to her? Probably nothing. She was so stupid she didn’t understand difficult concepts like the germ theory. But she had been told about it. And told about it. And told about it again and again. If she’d had a synapse between her ears, she would have understood that unwashed produce grown in fields fertilized by human feces was likely to make you good and sick. How hard IS that to understand?

To this day, I remain convinced that Luella quite deliberately sickened my mother by quite deliberately neglecting to sanitize the dinner produce. What…A…Witch!

At any rate, my mother did survive, though she was never fully well again. Eventually she did die of a gastric cancer – to what extent it was related to the parasitic infection and the ferocious treatment, I do not know. But…I do remain convinced, to this day, that Luella killed my mother.*

I don’t get unconvinced easily, y’know…

*Actually, while Luella had a lot to do with it, the tobacco manufacturers went a long way toward killing my mother. She was addicted to nicotine, and so, thanks to that habit, she smoked herself into the grave.