Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

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 where 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?

###

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!