Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Really: There is no answer, is there?

by

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?

###

Morning Does Not Become Us…

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Ayup! It’s another gray, soggy morning in (un)lovely Arizona.

Hot
Muggy
Stuffy
Dim
Whatever you touch goes HAYWIRE

Why is that? The Haywire Effect, I mean. Most of the time, life the universe and all that goes along peaceably enough. But nay verily! Not today!

It truly is an unpleasant morning. Hot and overcast. The air: just sticky. 

Ruby and I need some grocery-store loot. But what with His Lordship having kiped my car, I would have to walk to the nearest store, a quarter-mile or more from the Funny Farm. And weirdly enough, I do NOT want to traipse around out there in that wet, soggy heat.

Blech!!!  I may call our Uber guy a little later…see if I can persuade him to schlep me to a grocer and then sit around twiddling his thumbs while I traipse through the store. Just think how well THAT will go over.

Oh, well. Later. Some things will wait until later.

Much later.

I had planned to pester M’hijito this morning by jangling up his phone and inviting him to visit the Old-Folkerie of my father’s choice, Orangewood: now much spiffed up since his day. And, you can bet, much increased in price. They gave it a pricier-sounding name, too: The Terraces. La de da!

How can I count the ways I do not want to live in an institution?

Almost as many ways as I don’t want to live in an ordinary, noisy, boring, annoying apartment house.

Ohhhh well. The Funny Farm continues in excellent shape. It’s paid for. The neighborhood is relatively safe (except for Gangland Central, a couple miles to the north). All that’s lacking is a car (my son having extracted mine)…and given our location, the truth is that you don’t need a car here to get by just fine.

Frankly… I’m now thinking that it would cost a whole lot less and and annoy me a whole lot less to hire workers to come in and provide the services that you get from an Orangewood-style old-folks’ warehouse.

Roof over head…much nicer and much more generous than one through which the folks upstairs are blasting their TV set and tromping around.

Proximity — as in “walking distance!” to not one, not two, not three, but FOUR top-notch supermarket and gourmet grocers.

A neighborhood doctor’s office, just sitting there by the sidewalk. Dang! Goodbye to those hour-long drives to the Mayo!

These are perks of living in the middle of a large, middle-class metropolitan area. Most of what you need is within walking distance.

What help would you have to hire?

* Cleaning lady  — already have one of those
* Driver — one lives catty-corner across the street. And he’s among a half-dozen who live in the ‘Hood.
* Yard guys — have those. Have hired them for years.
* Handyman — the guy across the street will do little fix-it tasks for me. But when I tire of imposing on him, the place is swarming with people who will repair and build things.
* The usual array of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and the like — already have them all on the string.
* Someone to supervise these folks — Heh! This is why we  have a son, right? 😀

****

Hafta say… It really never occurred to me, before this, that I really do not need a car here. This ain’t San Francisco, after all.

But…apparently while I was paying no attention, the place has taken on more and more characteristics of a large, sophisticated city.

“Sophisticated” will never fit Phoenix as an adjective. But “car-free” surely could. The roads are laid out in a standardized grid pattern, north-south streets intersecting and overlaying east-west ones. So wherever you are,  you certainly CAN get there from here. With rather little effort!

As long as you can walk (admittedly, not everyone can…and I won’t be able to, not for much longer), wherever you’re goin’ you indeed can get there on foot…with surprisingly little effort.

What will I do when I seriously can no longer walk five or six blocks?

Well….an Uber driver lives right across the street. Several more live in the neighborhood. I figure their phone numbers will be saved to my iPhone. And when I need a ride, I just press a button and roust one of those guys out!

Not only that, but the major grocers nearby — Albertson’s, Sprouts, El Rancho — have taken to delivering groceries!!! All you have to do is call up a web page, charge up a passel of products, and stand back. Shortly, they’ll appear at your door with a week’s worth of food and household loot.

Et voilà. Conveniences like these will — I think…I hope — delay having to move into an old-folkerie for several years. Yeah…

I hope.

Beloved Neighborhood, Beloved Neighbors

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The ineffable Josie was out in her front yard, yanking weeds as Ruby and I ambled back home from our morning circumnavigation of the park.

Josie lives in SDXB’s old house. She came up from the daunting slums of South Phoenix — the house purchased by the city and donated to her after the city glommed her property to build an airport runway. (What a place, eh?) I do enjoy Josie: a denizen of an entirely different culture. Hope she hangs around for as many years as I last here. 😀

Meanwhile, neighbors were walking their dogs at the park. The sky is dappled with low-hanging cumulus, incredibly beautiful in the dawn light. Weather is on the high side of warm, humid, a bit sticky. But not really uncomfortable. Yet.

I do love this place.

And do NOT want to be moved out of here. How exactly I’m gonna manage to “age in place” with my son already beginning to lobby to move me to an old-folkerie kinda escapes me.

But…we shall see. I haven’t been legally declared non compos, so I imagine (hope) I’ll be able to stay put until such time as I can barely stumble from the bedroom to the bathroom. Or until I die, whichever comes first.

When I first moved into the ’Hood, back in the Dark Ages, a number of elderly women lived in these houses, on their own. One was right next door to my first house here. No doubt into her 80s, she was a lively character. Every day, she’d be outside blowering and sweeping her patio or fiddling with the yardwork.

I want to be that lively character. 

Now, it’s true: I don’t enjoy yard work. But I can afford to hire people to keep up the property:

* Yard dudes
* Pool dude
* Arborist
* Cleaning lady
* Electrician
* Mechanic…

On and on. So with any luck, I hope to stay put until I die. That would be ideal.

Second best would be to hang in here till I have a stroke and lose track of who and where I am.

And yeah: one can only hope…

Meanwhile: what a GORGEOUS morning. High cumulus glowing white and pearl-gray by the dawn sunlight. Temperature: perfect. Kids and dogs outside playing: moms and dads watering yards and getting ready to fly off to work. Crew of workmen heaving around the new mansion someone is building in Lower Richistan.

Amazing.

Why would anyone ever wanna live anywhere else???

Another Day, Another Thunderstorm…

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Welp, I never did make it over to The Terraces (formerly Orangewood Retirement “Community”). Just as well, I suppose.

Seriously: I do NOT want to live in an institutional environment. And especially not an institution designed to warehouse the elderly until they die.

Given what those places cost, y’know… I could borrow against the paid-off value of the Funny Farm and collect enough to hire someone to come in and care for me — for as long as I’m likely to go on living.

Which ain’t all that long. 😀  One would hope not, anyway.

Actually — as I mentioned in passing yesterday — longevity was a tradition in my mother’s family. Seriously: most of those people lived into their 80s and 90s. A few lived well into their 90s. And they were nut-case Christian Scientists: nary a drop of medication nor a preventive shot blemished their lives.

The exception was my mother: she smoked herself to death. NOT a pretty way to go, by the way…

Some of the relatives on my father’s side lived seemingly forever, too — most notably, his brother. My father smoked, though not heavily…but he was submerged in the stinking smoke from my mother’s obsessive habit, and so over the long run no doubt was harmed, from that. But despite that and the misery he suffered in his late-life marriage to the Dragon Lady, he still lived well into his 80s.

Oh, well: neither here nor there.

In the Here and Now, what I’d most like is to be able to hang onto the Funny Farm, keeping it debt-free until it can be passed along to M’hijito. Then he could move into a very nice, very economical house, essentially at no cost to him. Or he could sell it and invest the proceeds toward his retirement. Either way: just now it’s an asset I want him to have.

Ohhh well… Also in the Here and Now, I can’t hold my eyes open another minute. And so, it’s off to Naptime! 

Report from the Hubs.

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It’s not that hot out there, really. At a few minutes to 8:00 a.m., the thermometer reads a mild 98 degrees. But it’s WET. High, filmy white clouds lurk overhead. Apparently they’re ushering in a ground-level cloud of sickening humidity. So…what we have is hot…wet…and miserable. 

Dawg and I are back from the morning park circumnavigation. As usual, anyone who spots Ruby  has to fall in love with her. But…for a change and probably because of the miserable climate, nobody stopped us to coo and simper over her ineffable cuteness.

For reasons unknown, I spent most of the hike speculating on the character of my long-late grandmother, a chippie whom I never knew. Well before I came on the scene, she died of a uterine cancer supposedly induced by the many abortions she had, around the time my mother came on the scene.

So, as a little girl my mother was sent from New York State (where the surprised paternal grandparents most decidedly did NOT want to raise her) to California, where the maternal grandmother absolutely did want her. So we’re told. Truth to tell, apparently the poor child was about as unwanted as any bastard child could be. But because the California grandmother was willing to bring her up, she landed on the West Coast. So that made the California grandmother my great-grandmother, whom I rarely saw until we came back to the States after spending ten years in Saudi Arabia.

Strange people, those. The grandparents were Christian Scientists, a sect that, from what I’m told, was regarded as extravagant crack-pottery at the time. I do know that my great-grandmother lived well into her 90s, believing she could pray herself well whenever she got ill. Same applied to her daughter: my great-aunt. They thrived…whether because of innate constitutional strength or because Christian Scientists really can talk to God is unknown.

😀

All of which is hardly here nor there. Except for the weather. Today it feels surprisingly like Saudi Arabia out there — where I grew up while my father worked for ARAMCO (Arabian-American Oil Company). Hot. Stuffy. Wet.

Not as wet as lovely Rasty Nasty (my father’s sobriquet for Ras Tanura, the American camp where we lived). There, you can see the condensing humidity literally drip off the roof like rain. Clear blue sky, and water is drizzling off the eaves!

Ugh! WHAT a place!

Oh well: thank the Gods we’re not there.

****

Sometime today — or at least this week — I want to make my way over to The Terraces, the old-folkerie where my father retreated after my mother died. At that time, it was known as “Orangewood.” Why they changed the name, I dunno. But it looks like rather little else has changed over there.

Unlike the daunting Beatitudes, most of the apartments at The Terraces are at ground level. Or, at the worst, in buildings that are no more than three stories high.

As a practical matter, I don’t wanna live in either one. But my mother and I lived in a high-rise in San Francisco right after we came back from Saudi Arabia. So yea verily: I indeed do know I don’t want to be cooped up in a high-rise again.

Don’t want to live in either of the Terraces’ places, to tell the truth. But it looks like pretty quick, I’ll have no choice…

Honestly, any day I’d rather be dead than locked up in some institution. I just HATED living in the dorms back in college. And now it looks like…yeah…we’re headed that way again.

The prospect makes me cringe! Surely, there MUST be a better way to spend the last few years of your life.

But…well, my son is in no position to babysit me through that final period. Nor would I want him to do so.

It just feels like there must be some better way. Maybe hire someone like Luz, our Wonder-Cleaning Lady — to come in and stay at night?

Like she has nothing better to do, either….

Hmmmmm….  I wonder if it would be possible to keep one’s house and stay in it during the day, but rent space in one of those old-folkeries for the evenings and nights.

Then you could go over to the old-person’s prison for, say, dinner and then for the night. Have breakfast there, if breakfast is your thing. And then come back to your home to loaf for the daytime hours.

This at least would give you a little privacy, a little peace and quiet. You would have your own space for at least some part of your last days. But you could get a couple of (yucky…) meals and safety for the night-time hours for the other part of the day.

At one point, the problem would be getting back and forth between the prison and your home. My son has ordered that I may not drive anymore — and in fact has engineered that legally. I could walk to the old-folkerie nearest to my house. Besides, an Uber driver lives catty-corner across the street from me: probably I could hire him to come pick me up every afternoon or evening. But then he’d have to deliver me back and forth to jail…and that’s asking a lot. He probably wouldn’t be willing to commit to that on a regular basis.

One other huge problem with those baby-sit-you-thru-your-last-days institutions is that they literally do take everything you’ve got. So…little or nothing will be left for my son. And that also is NOT what I want.

No. I want him to get what remains of the money my father left to me, plus whatever is in my own savings accounts by the time I croak over. HIM…not some baby-sitting business.

But just now, it’s not real clear how to make that happen.

Round and Round They Go…

by

And where they bite, no one knows. ARF!

Actually, this morning’s junket around the park was uneventful. Quiet. Arfifarious. Ruby declined to try to eat any of our fellow dog-walkers’ companions. (Either that, or the dog-walkers have finally wised up a bit…) Weather was hot, humid, icky — reminiscent of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

Mornings like this remind me of oooohhhh how glad I am that I no longer live out there! What a gawdawful place!

Seriously: a swampy morning like this would be S.O.P. over there. Useta be: all summer long we’d wake to water dripping off the eaves as though it had rained half the night…under a clear blue sky. That’s how humid it was: the air SO WET that water would condense out of it and piddle off the eaves like rain.

LOL! Swamp or no, the park is always fun…or at least pleasant. This morning we encountered a handsome young father pushing his obscenely adorable baby along in a carriage. Awwwww! What could be cooler, eh? 

😀

Well. Maybe “cool” wasn’t exactly the term. But he and his urchin were indisputably charming.

Otherwise…what? Well…one “what” is that, as we hiked along a particularly affluent street in Lower Richistan, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance between the upscale section of the Hood and a historic Phoenix district called Palmcroft.

That tract is part of the larger, also highly historic area called Encanto: a place full of gorgeous old houses dating back as far as the 1920s.

Our area is much newer…but here in the 21st century, no one would dast to call it “new.” The houses are edging on to “historic” themselves, many of them very pretty, all of them handsomely maintained. The Young and the Affluent do adore “historic” houses, and they flock in here to buy them…bearing well-stuffed pocketbooks.

This pushes real estate prices up and up and up. I couldn’t even begin to buy a house down near the park — an area that I could easily have afforded a decade or so ago, when I moved in here.

Therein lies a main reason that I want to stay in this house till I croak over: if I can leave the place to my son, he’ll be able to afford to go anywhere he pleases. 

  • Fancy-Dan Scottsdale: no problem
  • Ritzy Paradise Valley: call in the movers!
  • Back to his dad’s home town, Grand Junction, Colorado: off to the scenic upscale(!) hills
  • San Francisco, where each of us privately believes we belong: California, here we come!

You name it, he can be there. Or…he may choose to just stay here and enjoy this handsome upscale tract.

And it is an exceptionally pleasant place to live. Centrally located. Handsomely built. Mature landscaping. Gorgeous park. Adorable kids. And nowadays: an increasingly awesome public transit system.

Seriously: you can live here now without a car. And, incredibly enough, I do! 

Such are one’s thoughts as one’s dog tugs its human around our park. I love it here…my dawg loves it here…we ain’t movin’…isn’t that the cutest li’l kid you ever saw!… I want my kid to get this place, lock stock & barrel…