Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

ARF! we say….and GLUB!

by

Loafing on the front porch this gorgeous morning…waiting for a workman to confront the day’s catastrophe.

Boyoboy, am I tired of catastrophes. This stuff makes a box in the sky down on Central Avenue look good! Nice aspect of apartment living: someone else takes care of the damned repairs.

This morning the irrigation system sprang a leak. I found out about it only because the neighbor across the street, one of the WonderAccountants, came over to tell me the road between our houses was flooded from curb to curb.

Looovvveeeleeeeee….

So now we’re waiting for an irrigation plumber to show up. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

He probably has several other jobs to attend to this morning. So it’ll be half the day before I can go on about my business. And by then, waaayyyy too hot for Ruby the Corgi’s morning walk.

Contemplating: Maybe SDXB was right to sell up and move to Sun City. 

Even though he still ends up with a free-standing house to take care of…a gravel yard presents almost zero maintenance issues. Taxes out there are lower. Burglars are pretty much uninterested in you. Two hospitals — neither of them very good, but neither of them much worse than most of the others in the Valley — await your next stroke or heart attack. Not a bad deal, overall.

If M’hijto weren’t here in town — conveniently located to both me and to his father & stepmother — I might very well have followed SDXB back out to the far, noisy west side.

Or not.

I did hate living there when my parents owned their end-of-life home…ah…here’s our plumber!!!!!  Awayyyyyy…..

****

A-a-a-n-d… Now the plumbers are here. They’ve dug up the yard around the side gate. Hevvin only knows how much they’ll charge for this little adventure!

I sure don’t wanna know.

Ohhhhhh man! What a job! Wayyyy up there in the Department of Jobs You’re Glad You Don’t Have!!

Seriously, though, these guys have amazing skills. Not only did they figure out the problem within a few minutes of attacking the watering contraption, now they’ve taken it apart and are merrily (uhm…welll…) reconstructing it.

****

JAYZUZ! Two hundred and seventy bucks!  To repair a leaking pipe!

Sheeeee-ut!

Well…to be fair, they had to dig up a corner of the yard. Excavate the equipment that regulates the water flow on the west side. Install new parts…in the mud…

Gawd only knows how much this little cavort will run up the water bill. Literally: the road was flooded curb to curb before Tom (neighbor) noticed  and called me.

Honestly, sometimes I do think a box in the sky would be a better habitation for an old bat. But…then I remember living in one.

My parents and I lived in a box in the sky in San Francisco, in a tract called ParkMerced. It actually was a cool place to live: I loved both of the apartments we occupied successively: first a high-rise and then a pleasant little two-story garden apartment.

But…y’know… Apartment developments are crowded. They can be noisy. And expensive: monthly rental can add up. And add up. And add up. Here the only payments I make — on four bedrooms plus a diving pool and two patios and four citrus trees — are for taxes and utilities. This house really is about as ideal as it can get, for an old bat and her dawg.

Hmmm…. Yep! Count up the blessings of a high-rise apartment, the blessings of a cheaply built tract house out in Sun City, and the blessings of this house…and this house wins, paws down.

  • Decent neighborhood
  • Low-maintenance landscaping
  • Block walls around the back & side yards
  • Orange trees
  • Lemon tree
  • Lime tree
  • Climbing roses
  • Cute little kids living all around in the neighborhood
  • Lightrail train running up and down Main Drag West
  • Two major regional hospitals — one of them within walking distance
  • One of the best public school districts in the city
  • Three middle- to upscale shopping centers within walking distance

I’m sure one could ask for more…but personally, I can’t imagine what that would be. 

Time to Move to the Old Folks’ Home?

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Stay? or flee?

Do Ruby and I want to sell up, pack up, and move? Shift our base of operations to an institution for the elderly, where staff babysit you 24/7? Or…well…stay here, keep dodging the burglars and the sh!t-heads, keep managing crews of yard guys, housecleaners, pool dudes, repairmen…on and on and endlessly on?

One advantage of living in an old-folkerie: someone else rides herd on the hired help.

Here, I do have a cleaning lady who does an excellent job. Most of them don’t: they appear not to know how to clean house, at least not to middle-class American standards. So the presence of Wonder Cleaning-Lady is a huge privilege…and very possibly a rarity.

You shouldn’t have to ride herd on a worker doing a job that your mommy taught you to do when you were nine years old. In Wonder Cleaning-Lady’s case, I don’t have to…but too dam many of them don’t even seem to know how to use a dustrag.

Move into one of those old folks’ warehouses, and (in theory, anyway) you have an employee riding the herd.

Whaddaya bet, though, that you still end up with imperfect cleaning, dust still sitting on the bookcase shelves, dust still hiding behind the sofa, grease still sitting on the stove burners…on and on and on…  Y’know…if I have to deal with that, I’d rather deal with it in my own home,  not in some unholy institution.

But…Jeez!!

This morning Ruby and I repaired to the neighborhood park for our morning perambulation. And there was some guy out there, yelling suggestive obscenities at us. Yeah: at an 80-year-old bat!!! 

You can’t get away from the bastards!

Wait…isn’t that what the cop said after the Great Home Invasion Adventure?  😀

Seriously: you CAN’T get away from them.

If I’m going to stay here and if I imagine Ruby and I are going to continue our walking routine, maybe I ought to get us a pistol. One that’s small enough to fit inside a pocket.

On the other hand, I don’t want to shoot some jerk just because he asks me if I wanna f*ck. That wouldn’t be nice, would it?

😉

Home, (Not So…) Sweet Home

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Ugh!  This is where my parents and I used to live, on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Hard to describe how richly we were hated by the locals, who considered Americans to be emissaries of Satan. So, SOOO glad not be there anymore.

My father was paid some ludicrous amount of money to shepherd tankers and freighters out of the Ras Tanura harbor. He was an ocean-going pilot of some prominence, and when he hired on out there, he figured to earn enough to finance a spectacularly early retirement.

Didn’t quite work out that way. I was a weird little kid who couldn’t get along with my normal, very sosh’ classmates. Imagine: a girl child in the 1950s who wanted to grow up to be, of all things, an astronomer! 

😀
not to say
🙁

So the kids hated me and tormented me every day from the fourth grade on, day in and day out of awful misery.

My mother realized how horrible life had become for me out there, and she managed to maneuver my father into retiring from ARAMCO and coming back to the U.S., whither he shipped out of California for Standard Oil.

Whew! She saved my sanity with that. 

Didn’t do his career a whole lot of good, though…

So I was in the 6th grade when we landed back in San Francisco. Couple years later, he got a higher-paying job with Union Oil shipping out of Southern California, and that allowed him to retire permanently much earlier than planned.

Thence, it was off to Arizona, where he had discovered the phenomenon known as Sun City. They shoehorned me into the University of Arizona a year early (skipping my senior year in high school), bought a house in that dreary old folks’ suburb, shooed me off to Tucson, and lived happily ever after.

Well… Until my mother’s incessant goddam smoking habit caught up with her. After it had made me sick (and sick…and sicker) for several years, it gave her cancer and killed her.

My father was soon glommed by one of the predatory women in the old-folkerie to which he had recourse after my mother died. She maneuvered him into marrying her — one of the biggest mistakes of his life — and he lived miserably ever after with her, in that dreary retirement home in uptown Phoenix.

Hafta give him this: he was a far stronger human being than his daughter was or is. I would have picked up a pistol and blown out my brains if I’d been stuck with that lady in that hideously depressing prison for old folks. She was mean, meaner, and even meaner, and she openly hated me because my husband and I were traitorous LIBuhrals. (She was a right-wing crazy; my hubby was on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union, if you can imagine anything so Communistic!). I soon learned to detest her, and so I stayed away from my father most of the time.

Grand way to wrap up a life of amazingly hard work, eh?

Poor man! His life should have been better than that…especially the last few years of it.

He spent those last few years in misery, because he refused to divorce the Dragon Lady. This, despite urging to do so from me and from my husband, one of the most prominent lawyers in the American Southwest. “She’ll get all my money!” wailed he. Forgodsake, Daddy: some things are more important than money. 

Well. He thought not, having toiled throughout his adult life to collect that retirement fund. So he stayed married to the witch, on and interminably on. He predeceased her, which meant the last few years of his much-coveted retirement were passed in glum, tedious depression.

Ugh! What that said to me is no matter how much you covet married bliss, NEVER remarry in old age! 

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Here we are in Coyote Hell again. 

Actually…I get a kick out of the coyotes and do not consider their presence to be Hell-making. But ooooh my, how they terrorize the local gringos. Get on the neighborhood Facebook Page and it’s oooohhhh eeeeeek aaaaawkkkk eeeeek ohhhhhh!!@!!! Squalls of terror from all directions.

Humans sure are stupid, aren’t they? Especially the ones that live in cities…  😀 Nary a one of our FB correspondents seems to register that a coyote is more scared of you than you are of it.

Just now — the loveliest cool of the day, when Mr. Coyote is likely to be out taking the morning air, I would not leave Ruby to roam the backyard alone. She is, after all, a tempting little morsel.

But let the heat come up, and Mr. Coyote will repair to the shade of the shrubbery and the trees. And he will not bestir himself to chase after a ludicrous thing like a corgi.

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here. She likes to have the back door open while she’s working. So Ruby is out on the patio, loafing in the shade. For the nonce, none of her wild cousins are visiting, and so I reckon she’s safe enough. Hope so, because just now I’m altogether too lazy to get up and establish myself out there.

Mmmmm…. I figure the best thing about pain is that it reminds you that you’re alive. And just now, by damn, I am SOOOO ALIVE! 

The spavined right hip joint is particularly lively… HOleee shit, does that hurt!

***

Just now, if I were a responsible human bean, I’d get off my duff and stroll over to one of the three(!!!) grocery stores within reasonable walking distance. But really, I do suspect that I’d find myself crippled by the time I got halfway to the nearest one.

{heh} Good excuse, ain’t it? 😀

I may ask WC-L to drive me over to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s.

Or maybe not.

***

What a weird thing it is, to realize that now — today, here in Two Thousand and Aught-Twenty-Six — I cannot remember off-hand what I wanted to buy at the grocer’s. Am I that superannuated, that worn-out that I can’t remember a grocery list of two or three items????  AUGH!

😀

When I first moved into the “Hood,” lo! these decades ago, I was a young pup surrounded by aging, long-time North Central Avenue residents. Now I’m the Old Bat — the historical relic — and all the neighbors look like they were born about ten days ago.

And oh! How can you not love them! Our beautiful young people: the handsome young marrieds, their adorable children…gosh, what a joy!

I wonder if the old ladies who lived here when I moved in — the dignified and historically experienced Mrs. Wilson, the lively and eccentric Fran, the great old gals on the street behind us — enjoyed us as much, when we moved in here as a wave of Yuppies.

Oh, well. I’m old now. Tomorrow they will be. So it goes.

The House on the Park

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Every time Ruby and I head out into the’ Hood and circumnavigate the park, we pass a house that makes me think We need to move out of this place! 

It’s a beautiful house: two stories, facing right on the park. About as upscale as you can get.

But…

A friend of mine was living there with her husband. They were high-school teachers: quiet, conservative types. One day they answered the door when somebody jangled the doorbell.

Two guys were out on the front stoop. They shoved their way into the house, grabbed my friends, tied them up, dragged them upstairs, and threw them into a bathtub. There the two resided, in terror, while the home invaders ransacked their house.

Eventually the thugs exited and my friends managed to work themselves free of their bonds.

Not surprisingly, said friends promptly sold that house and moved as far away as they could get while still remaining in the Valley.

And THAT is why I think I should follow them out of these parts.

Yeah. I mentioned that thought to a cop who was working the crime scene that day. And he said, “Don’t do that! We come to these things all the time: almost every day, all over the Valley. You can’t move away from it.”

Jayzuz!

Well, I figure he should know what he’s talking about, and so I did follow his advice and stayed put.

Still: it gives me the willies.

What a critter the human is! What a society we live in!

Speaking of the which: here we have R-O-O-O-O-A-R! ROAR! ROAR! ROAR!! 

Cop helicopter blasts in. Takes up his position over the neighborhood just to the north of us. And charges back and forth, forth and back, back and forth…roar roar roar! 

Get up. Close and double-lock all the doors.

keeerap! Am I tired of this!!!!! 

Trouble is…like the cop said: You can’t get away from it. 

And I need a $15,000 car…WHY?

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If you read Funny about Money all the time, you know my honored son made off with my car some weeks ago. Purloined it right out of the garage, and stole the keys that go with it. 😀

Did he think this would create some lesson-building entrée into my life?

Hevvin only knows. Minds, I do not read.

But I’ll tellya, it has taught me a lesson: a very important lesson. And that is…HANG ONTO YOUR HAT!… as a resident of a major Southwestern American city, forhevvinsake I don’t need a car!

Got that? And can you believe it?

Four or six weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed it: not on your life!

But now, today, after several marvelously car-free weeks, I’ve come to exactly that conclusion: I don’t need a car! 

And in fact, it’s very probable that any one of us who lives in a major American metropolis does not need a car! 

Can you imagine? Two or three months ago, I sure couldn’t have.

Now, it’s true: when my mother and I lived in San Francisco, we did have my father’s beloved sedan at hand. But we regarded it not as our car but as his car. It resided several stories down in an underground parking garage. My mother would get it out when she and I wanted to traipse across the Bay to our relatives’ house in Berkeley: maybe once every two or three weeks. But otherwise: it just sat in there while he was off at sea.

When his ship came into port, she would retrieve his Chrysler, fill up the gas tank, and off we would go to pick him up at whatever dock his ship came into. But otherwise? The thing just sat there.

And now, here in Lovely Uptown Phoenix, I find I need a car even less than she and I did Back in the Day. No kidding:

  • Three major grocery stores within easy walking distance
  • A hair stylist about four blocks down the road.
  • A veterinarian right next door to the stylist’s salon.
  • Two major computer stores in the cluster that houses the grocers.
  • A lawyer a few blocks to the north.
  • A doctor’s office to the south
  • Two accountants straight across the street from me.
  • An Uber driver next-door to the accountants’ place….

Seriously: it goes on and on. I don’t need a car! If, by some fluke, I should need the services of a business or professional who’s not within walking distance, all I have to do is call one of the Uber drivers who live here in the ‘Hood.