Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Headin’ Toward Hallowe’en!

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It’s only the fourth of October. But o’course, that means we only have about twenty-eight days till HALLOWE’EN!  My favorite annual holiday!!!

People here already have silly witches and wizards set up in their yards. This is a neighborhood that embraces pagan rites, bless’em! So we get a great deal of fun hootenannying going on around here. I love it!!!

Dunno if my son will invite me down to his house for the door-to-door festivities. Sometimes his friends throw a party…so if he’s over on the other side of the Valley, he and I won’t be watching ghosts and goblins running around his streets.

That’s fine, because the WonderAccountants — neighbors across the road — love to sit outside on their driveway and hand out treats. I bring some to add to the booty and go over to join them.

That is MORE FUN than Carter has oats. The neighborhood just north of ours is a low-end affair populated largely by poor whites and Hispanics. And THOSE folks do know how to have fun with their kids.

Hordes of costumed terrors show up, driven into the ‘Hood in their relatives’ or neighbors’ vehicles. And ohhhh! The amazing, the wild, the CRAZY costumes! 

Also, o’course, having all of us sitting out in front pretty much puts the eefus on the vandalism. We have fun, they collect loot, and our yards and homes stay pretty much intact.

Ruby the Corgi has already dragged the Human from the neighborhood ‘s northerly posts to its southerly pillars this morning. That journey takes us past the former home of an old colleague, Jerry Jacka — a historically spectacular Arizona Highways photographer. He is, alas, long gone…as we soon will be, too, no doubt. But you can be sure no one will remember my house as the abode of a historically spectacular Arizona Highways and Phoenix Magazine sub-editor. 😀

Ohhhhh well. If ya wanna be famous, you’ve gotta pick your poison. Or so it appears.

YIPES!!!!!

Sprinkling system just sprang to life in the front courtyard, whereinat I was loafing while scribbling this…AUGH!

Hound and I darted into the house, barely in time to keep the computer from getting drenched.

DARN IT! Such a gorgeous morning: all I wanted to do was sit outside, absorb coffee, scribble random thoughts, and enjoy the day.

But noooooooo….   😀

{sigh}  Jerry Jacka: one of the great (truly!) landscape photographers of the Western World…. Ye gods, was that guy good at what he did! And what a privilege it was to work on staff for Arizona Highways when he and the rest of that crew were freelancing for us. I will say: that is the one paying staff job, anywhere, that I really do miss and I really do wish I were still doing.

But…ohhhh well. Now I am old. Now I am tired. It’s comin’ on to ten in the morning and…egad! I wanna go back to bed! 

When did it become the style to take one’s afternoon nap at mid-morning?

😮

Ohhh well, indeed….the Human will be better served by laying its spavined hip under a heating pad than by dodging sprinklers or loafing around the living room. And Ruby would rather do her loafing job atop the bed than anywhere else in the house or yard. 😀

And so…to work! 

So it goes…and goes…

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…and goes.  

As I mentioned in my latest scribble here, the bastards at the Mayo Clinic have, for no good reason other than my age, nullified my driver’s license.

This, in my opinion, amounts to your basic discrimination. And if I had a little more energy and a little more sense of outrage, I’d hire my lawyer to sue the ba*tards and undo that mess.

But y’know what?

I don’t give a damn. 

The truth is, here in this part of town one scarcely needs to drive.

First off, my house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, not three, but FOUR major grocery stores. And a doctor’s office. And a beauty salon. And a dentist’s office. And a hardware store. And a computer store. And a light-rail train.

So: irked though I am, I’m not about to expend the energy to demand JUSTICE, by gawd.

Second off, the place is crawling with Uber cabs.

Yeah: the Uber fad has taken over the ‘Hood, and we’re inundated with folks who hope they can quit their jobs and spend the rest of their pre-retirement lives driving old folks around North Phoenix.

Fine by me, folks! 😀

Thinking about the Uber inundation led me to recall…ohhh gawd!…the horror of my father and his wife’s sojourn in the old-folkerie called Orangewood. It’s an apartment complex for the aged and the redundant, and overall…well…depends on your taste. He liked it. I thought it was Chez Pitz.

Bearing in mind that my father had gone to sea all his adult life and so was accustomed to — and comfortable with — institutions, Orangewood gave the two of them a fine array of benefits.

* A nice little apartment that gazed out upon the rolling greenery of a pleasant, golf-course-like lawn

* Central location: walking distance to bus stops (if you didn’t mind waiting an hour for a ride…)

* Constant supervision

* Accomplished staff to help you deal with bills, doctors, taxes, and whatnot

* An army of workers to see that you haven’t fallen or set fire to the kitchen

* And on and on…

To my taste, it was pretty awful. I can handle those things myself, and do not need to be treated like a child locked in a playpen to get them done. But…if you don’t want to be bothered or you no longer can handle that ditz, it was great.

And…well…I suppose even I will have to admit (sooner or later) that a point in life comes where you ARE essentially a child locked in a playpen.

* You’ve fallen behind the prevailing technology to the point where you find it difficult to operate the present array of household gadgets.

* You really (in reality, not in some moron’s estimation) shouldn’t be driving.

* You’ve become decrepit enough that walking even to the nearby stores is becoming a challenge…especially in bad weather.

* You forget everything and then some…

Yeah: at some point you DO need a younger mind and body to usher you along toward the final exit.

I don’t believe I’ve reached that point yet — and sincerely hope I drop dead before I do reach it. And so what I most want is to be left to get on with my life’s chores without Big Brother’s interference.

At any rate, back to the point formerly at hand: what does this have to do with whether senior citizens should be imprisoned in old-folkeries? Not much, except that it brought to mind this episode:

My father and his wife, the redoubtable Helen, had taken it upon themselves one morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. But by this time, they were no longer driving. So they took a cab to the doctor’s office.

Whenever they were finished yakking with the doc’, they called a cab to come pick them up and drive them back home. Parked themselves in the doctor’s waiting room and…waited.

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

Some time later that afternoon, I caught wind of this. Drove over to the quack’s office and found them sitting in his lobby.

Waiting

….and waiting

….and waiting….

They had been there something like FOUR HOURS and no cab had shown up. And no, it wasn’t because they hadn’t called. The doc’s staff had called the cab company several times.

Hey. It’s just old bats, eh? Who gives a damn about them?

And that is the attitude toward the elderly in our culture. We live in Old Folks’ Hell, my friends.

That’s why I don’t want to live in a prison for old folks. And why, in general when dealing with service people and other strangers, I try to obscure my age and my situation. The more they know about you, the worse for you!

Welp…if I were a snappy Old Folk just now, I’d jump in the pool & get some exercise. But…I ain’t snappy and my hip hurts and the dog and I walked for an hour this morning and soooooo….this old bat is on her way to hit the sack. Again.

♥

 

New Post? Nothin’ Much New…

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Gorgeous morning! Nothin’ new for October in Arizona.

Great doggy-walk, from one end of the ‘Hood to the other. Nothin’ new for Ruby the Corgi.

Yard dudes down the street ripping up the place with their LOUD goddamn hardware. Nothin’ new for this time of day.

Pool Dude in and outta here before I could catch him. Nothin’ new there, either.

E-mail all f**ked up… Well, yeah. That IS something new. Something that will consume about half the morning and probably cause me to grind my teeth halfway down to the gum line.

Yeah. TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY unopened message in the in-box, 98% of them junk. So now I’ve got to scan those and delete the hundred and ninety-nine that are trash. No idea what brought that on. And without a car, I can’t schlep the machine to my usual computer dudes to get them to figure out the problem.

This is, actually, one of the few occasions where an owned car really is NEEDED. Most of the time, I’m finding (to my astonishment!), you can get by without one just fine.

More than fine, actually.

Exquisite hip pain this morning. 

Dayum! It was about gone by yesterday evening. So I thought hallelujah brothers and sisters, i’m CURED. 

LOL! Not so much, eh?

I’m slated to accompany M’jito to the physical therapist this afternoon. His appointment, not mine. But since I’ve come to know those folks, I may work up the nerve to ask them what I can do to ease the current excruciation. Otherwise, it’s half a day wasted schlepping to the doctor’s office (again!), several days wasted waiting for an appointment, 30 or 40 more minutes wasted driving to the therapist’s gym and waiting around and waiting around and waiting around.

One of the signal fixtures of old age is the doctor’s office. Ohhhhboyyy! Am I ever SICK of visiting doctors’ offices. And since my son rests his faith in the august Mayo Clinic, a “visit” to the doctor’s office means a traipse to the far side of Scottsdale: 30 or 40 minutes on the road, each way. 

Old Age: what a bizarre land!!! 

This morning I was horrified to discover that SDXB does not remember the accident we were in a few years ago. I was driving & he was the passenger.

We were cruising through a dangerous slum, in the rain and in the dark. As we approached the freeway underpass — we were headed south on a six-lane road (seven, if you count the left-turn lane…) — the light changed.

The idiot ahead of me, seeing a yellow light, SLAMMED on her brakes. This caused her to screech to a halt in the middle of otherwise normal traffic. And that caused me to rear-end the moron.

And because I was the one who hit her, I was deemed to be at fault.

You can imagine what this exploit has done to my auto insurance — years later! Despite the fact that it was a minor fender-bender.

And now — years later — the frikkin’ Mayo is using it as an excuse to nullify my driver’s license!

WTF?????

I’ve about had it, and am beginning to think about moving to another state, just to get away from this BS. But of course — as you know — insurance companies follow you wherever you go. This means there’s probably no escape from my criminal driving record.

So I’m profoundly infuriated. Really, there’s no excuse for this crapola. Move to another state? How about Sinaloa?

Seriously: I may need to decamp to Mexico to get away from the bullsh!t attack. And frankly…that comes under the heading of “More Trouble Than It’s Worth.”

In brighter realms… Ohhhh my! I wish, Dear Reader, you could have been with me and Ruby on our morning hike. We passed a house where a young father had his toddler out in front. The kid was having a gay old time in a stroller. And…hoooleee maquerel! You have never seen a cuter, more adorable, more awe-inspiringly gorgeous little kid in YOUR LIFE!!!!! 

What a delightful young fella!

See, this is one of a jillion reasons I would never wanna decamp to Sun City. How can anyone live without the glory of little kids? Without the ever-entertaining lunacy of teenagers? Without the harassed joy of young parents?

This is life in the’Hood. And, in my opinion, it’s what makes life worth living!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Gorgeous morning

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It’s already 8:30 and the day is brain-banging GORGEOUS. Beautiful clear skies. Balmy temps. Dawg yapping at the passers-by. What more could anyone want, eh?

Well…hmmmm…  Absence of pain, for one thing. Whatever went wrong with my hip is still wrong. Hurts like the dickens to get out of a chair, to say nothing of limping across a room.

Ohhh welll…. Thæs overrode; swa may thisse…

Pool Dude came by this morning, bless him! (oooooohhhh beloved Pool Dude!!!!) He left a bill instead of waiting three minutes so I can write him a check. So, alas, the much-deserved payment for his work will have to wait a week to be delivered.

Rummaging through The Economist, one of my fave periodicals, I come across a spread on (un)lovely Saudi Arabia, the hell-hole where I grew up.

Doesn’t sound like it’s a whole lot better than it was in the 1950s. Sure am glad I’m not there now!

Hmmmm….here comes some sorta air-borne vehicle. ……naaaahhhh…. It drifted off to the north. Dunno what it was: not a prop-driven airplane or a jet, that’s for sure. ohhhh well….

The kids who bought Sally’s house (right behind the Funny Farm) put these stupid rotating vents up on the roof. They make a racket whenever a breeze blows. Dunno how the kids can stand it! I’d have blasted the things to Kingdom Come by now.

They also got some guy to patch the roof…with shingles that don’t match the ones that were installed when Sally lived there. That’s…cute.

What IS the matter with people?

Makes a high-rise on North Central Avenue look good. And that’s sayin’ something.

Hmmm…something terrible. 

Lately, I’ve been contemplating just such a high-rise as a possible alternative to moving into the horrifying old-folkerie called The Beatitudes. An apartment stuck on the N-teenth floor of an old-folks’ storage bin does NOT appeal to me. A private apartment in a 15-story rabbit warren doesn’t look much better…but…

On the other hand, I know my son would like to have this house — the sooner the better. And I’d sure like him to have it. But not at the cost of my having to move into some garden spot that I’d wish I’d never seen.

It’s crossed my mind to suggest that he and I trade houses. Then he’d have this place and I’d have his pretty little 1950s red-brick bungalow, within strolling distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Yuppie Supermarket.

Trouble is, those houses were built before there was such a thing as air-conditioning. They were “cooled” (after a fashion) with whole-house swamp coolers. These are none too efficient…as a practical matter, the residents in those days just spent the summers up north, in the high country were the weather was tolerable.

And the houses are, as is appropriate for swamp cooling, leaky boxes. So when you turn on the air-conditioner, you’re actually air-conditioning the whole damn block.

Hmmmmm….  Another strategy we could undertake:

  • I buy his place.
  • He moves in here.
  • I sell his place, and…
  • Use the proceeds to buy an apartment in a Central Avenue high-rise.

Probably couldn’t get enough for his house to get into one of those little boxes in the sky. But…hmmm…really, what do I care? I’ll only be here for a few more months or years — a decade at the very longest. No reason why I couldn’t decamp to a box in the sky, paid for on time. Lots and lots of time….

My mother and I lived in one when we took up residence in San Francisco after we left (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. I loved the place!

Now, I’m not a 12-year-old anymore, and so I no longer regard running up and down the interior fire escapes as an entertaining pastime. But still… Those places are just a few blocks down the road from the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store. The train goes right past the front and will drop you off at the store. Mwa ha ha! I’d never have to drive again!!

Friday Morning…

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Not yet 8:30…the Dawg and the Humann have rolled out of the sack, trudged around the neighborhood, perused the pool and the yard, chowed down on whatever was in the fridge, slurped up coffee, read the news (and then some) and now…

Now?  Wish nothing more than to go back to bed.

😀

I should give lessons on how to waste time. Wonder how much people would pay for a course in professional time-killing?

My plan for today was to visit a venerable old-folkerie called Orangewood, a single-story spread about three blocks up the road from the house where DXH and I lived while M’hijito was in high school.

Question: Do I wanna live in that place?
Question: Would there be any benefit to moving over there?
Question: Could I duplicate its services and benefits right here in my house?

Answers:

* Hell, NO! I hate loathe and despise institutional living and do not wish to spend the last months or (God forfend!) years of my life in a dormitory for old folks.

* Yes. Plenty of benefit. You have someone else to clean up after you. You have a cafeteria serving up piles of chow…a “benefit” only if that’s the kind of gunk you like to eat. You have a doctor on the premises, one who materializes, as he did for my father, the minute you have a stroke. You have lots of company. You have a taxi service that will schlep you to appointments off-campus — for “free.”

* Y’know…I’ll bet I can. Turns out my cleaning lady used to go into people’s homes and provide day-to-day services for the agèd and the infirm. If she was doing that, others surely are, too. I suspect I can hire someone to provide most or all of the services that Orangewood provides. Only…in peace and quiet. Without serenades from the half-deaf neighbor’s TV set. Without annoying rules. Without disgusting institutional food.

If she was doing that for a living, that means other folks are doing it. So…one of my assignments just now is to call around and find out how to find such folks, how much they cost, and whether they really can do a decent job of it.

So there you have it: the present Project. Find out if it’s possible to replicate the services of an old-folkerie in your own home. And if so: start getting into position to do exactly that.

The longer I can stay out of any such place, the fewer weeks and months I’ll spend in old-age misery. At least, so I figure. Stands to reason, anyway.

Really: There is no answer, is there?

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He had already decided that he wanted to move out of Sun City and into Orangewood, the old-folkerie of his choice. But she was having none of it.  Because he adored her, he wasn’t about to insist that she move someplace where she didn’t want to live. Surely 10 years in Saudi Arabia must have been enough of that!

So they stayed in Sun City until, eventually, her cigarette puffing and the effects of the gawdawful meds for the gawdawful gastric diseases she picked up in Arabia killed her. And he was ready: within hours after she died, he had the place packed up, an apartment rented at the old-folkerie, their house on the market: and he was ready to move.

I couldn’t have lived there, at that old-folkerie. It was institutional misery on a grand scale…just horrid! I could barely stand the rules in grade school, to say nothing of having to accustom oneself to living in a prison for the elderly.

The key, I think, was that he didn’t mind institutional living. He’d spent most of his adult life on ships, going to sea, What would have made me crazy felt like normal living conditions to him. And without my mother at his side, there was no reason for him to have to take care of a house.

To him, living in Orangewood, a holding pen for the elderly, felt normal. It must not, at base, have felt much different from living on a ship: Crowded conditions. Bad food. Someone else’s schedule dictating your life. He seemed to like it…and in fact, my guess is he may have liked it more than owning and having to run his house.

My mother, sadly, died soon after he retired — in her mid-sixties. She smoked herself to death. Her relatives — rabid Christian Scientists — didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. She did both: a-plenty. Basically, she smoked herself right into the grave.

Seriously: she was never awake when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. You knew when she woke up in the night because you could smell the stink from her f*cking cigarette. You knew that she was awake in the morning because the first thing she did before she lifted her head from her pillow was light up a f*cking cigarette. You knew when she was about to turn out the bedside lamp at night because the last thing she did before she went to sleep was to puff her way through one last f*cking cigarette. And that, amazingly, is no exaggeration.

He smoked, too, but not every living, breathing moment of conscious existence. He probably went through eight or ten cigarettes a day, if that many.

She smoked constantly.

Literally: she was never conscious when she wasn’t smoking. And no, she did NOT care that her sidestream smoke made her little girl sick. No, she did NOT care that I asked her to please not smoke so damn much around me. No, she did NOT care that doctors told her the smoking would kill her.

Not surprisingly, the habit did kill her. In a way, the surprise is that it let her live so long: she died on my birthday in her 65th year.

Sixty-five is a lot of years to puff your way through every goddamned conscious moment, eh? So you’ve gotta figure she was a pretty tough character…all things considered.

He loved her so. Oh, my, how he loved her.

***

No, he never complained about her f*cking tobacco habit. He smoked, too, but nothing like as much as she did.

He cared for her, lovingly and richly, through every ugly minute of the last weeks and months of her life. Did it even register with her that her idiotic habit created weeks of torture for him? If it did, apparently she didn’t care; no more than she cared that her fu*king clouds of smoke made her little girl sick.

***

After she died, he moved out of their sweet Sun City house. I’d say he couldn’t stand to stay there after the torment she’d put him through…but that wasn’t true at all. Before she fell ill, he had already decided to move into the (horrid, IMHO!) retirement/nursing home in town, an institution called Orangewood. It consisted of tiny apartments, barely big enough for one or two people, in an environment where you were watched every G.D. moment, regaled by the neighbors’ idiot TV shows, and fed disgusting institutional food.

Couldn’t have been much different from living on shipboard, I guess.

He seemed OK there, and before long took up with a hag whom he (foolishly!) married. And there he lived unhappily ever after.

Yeah. My mother killed herself. And she sure as Hell didn’t do him any good.

***

I never did understand why, when she knew she was making herself hideously sick, why she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was making her daughter sick. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was piling awful, ugly work onto the man who loved her more than life. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she’d have a shot at living longer if she’d quit with the cancer sticks. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew her whole home stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew he would have to watch her die, one ugly inch at a time. But she just kept right on puffing away.

WHY???? What on earth, what in the name of God would make you persist with that?

That was the thing that puzzled me, and still does. She must have known how much she was making him suffer. She must have known how miserable she was making her daughter. WHY would you do that to the people who love you?

Yeah: it’s an addiction. But y’know: people can get over addiction. When you can see you’re harming the people around you who care about you, the sane thing to do is to quit harming them. How hard is that, really?

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