Well, actually….hold that thought, Your Lordship. “Home” was grody Ras Tanura, an American compound on the shore of the Persian Gulf.
You don’t wanna live there. And I sure don’t! Never again!!!!
This morning, though, the weather here as weirdly reminiscent of Ras Tanura’s: hot, sticky, stuffy…so wet as almost to be foggy. Horrible place there. And just now: horrible place here.
Ruby the Corgi is just back from dragging her human a mile or so around the park. Not exactly a horrible place…but this morning: hot and gummy.
If I were to ask the gods to take me “home,” I reckon I’d mean Berkeley, California. That’s where my mother’s relatives lived, on a hillside road that led up to a tunnel passing under the hills and into the upscale regions where my cousins lived.
Beautiful place, it was. Cool and green and populated with pretty little bungalows. A train came through that tunnel; my aunt,, who worked for Crocker-Anglo National Bank, would ride it into San Francisco five days a week, to get to her job. If I had my choice of places to live, that hill in Berkeley would be it.
Sure as Hell wouldn’t be here…you can bank on that.
My parents, for reasons I never understood, were enchanted by Sun City, here in Arizona. I hated it — partly because young people were markedly unwelcome, but more because it was dull, dreary, monotonous, and…well…boooooring.
My mother, though, loved it. Shortly before she died of tobacco-induced cancer, she told me how much she loved their little place in Sun City. And Sun City itself. And the heart-warming roar of the F-16s from nearby Luke Air Force Base.
No kidding. She used to coo on about how that racket was “the sound of freedom.”
Yeah. The sound of World War III.
Their best friends from Rasty Nasty (as my father called that shore-side Arabian-American Oil Company compound) followed my parents to Sun City. Truth to tell, I think they were following my mother, who was indeed their best friend. As she lay dying, the “friends:” informed my father that they were moving to Texas to be near their adult son…mostly because they couldn’t stand to watch my mother croak over.
So that left him out there all by himself. Once she was dead, there was no one amongst the neighbors with whom he had much in common. He was a merchant marine ship’s officer — in Arabia, he worked as a harbor pilot. Sun City, out in the middle of the Arizona desert, was about as far from the ships’ docks as you could get.
Maybe that was the appeal to him.
WhatEVER…as soon as she died, he moved himself into the old-folkerie that he had already identified before she fell ill. She had refused to move there (for good reason, IMHO)…but that left him to take care of her, very much by himself, after the cigarettes launched fully into their job of killing her.
Those last months in that pretty, beloved little house must have been seven kinds of Hell for him. The minute she died — no exaggeration — he started to make the move into Orangewood, that holding pen for the elderly.
He’d lived on ships from the time he was 16, so institutional living seemed comfortable and normal for him. I would have died if I’d had to live in that damned old-folks’ prison. He, on the other hand, actually liked it.
But to return to the Prayer of the Day….
Here in unlovely Sunnyslop, it’s hotter than the Hubs this morning, and humid. By the time the dog and I got back from walking around the park, I was drenched in sweat and humidity. Ruby ran in and flopped on the tiles. A jet fighter flew over the house. And I remembered how much my mother loved that Sun City house and even loved those damn jet planes.
So…yeah. Berkeley: that would feel like “home” to me…to the extent that we had a home.
But this house, on the border between crime-ridden Sunnyslop and white-collar North Central Phoenix, is home now. I’ll never see Berkeley again, that’s for sure. Chances are, I’ll never see much of anything beyond Maricopa County again.
That’s OK. I’ve seen the world. Don’t need to see it again.
