Out the door with the dog as dawn cracked. We try to get an early start by way of avoiding the Dog Parade: everybody and his little brother, sister, cousin, aunt, and uncle is out by dawn at this time of year. Especially on a day like this: it’s hot, humid, incredibly muggy.
Around the circuit we go, dodging dogs as we trot along. Hotter. Muggier. Ickier. After an hour of trudging, we round the corner up the street from our house, and….
DAMN!!!!!
There’s Gerardo and his guys up in the palm trees, hacking out dead fronds and dropping them into the pool.
The pool that was just cleaned the day before yesterday, to the tune of a bracing bill.
Heh! Today the tune is ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR ROOOOOOOAAARRRR: blowers and gasoline-powered saws going full-tilt.
Now I’ll have to call Pool Dude and pay him AGAIN to clear that mess out of there. Gerardo’s guys will try to clean it out as best as they can, but they don’t have the equipment to really do the job.
Fine way to start the day, hm?
Already tired, hot, sweaty, frantic-made, and depressed.
Walked by my friend Marge’s house while we were out. Pretty clearly she’s no longer there: either she’s passed, or they’ve dragged her off to the dreaded old-folkerie.
It’s kind of a cute house, in a bourgeois way: classic Southern California tract house. The neighborhood is nice, occupying what once were horse pastures and cotton fields. This area was all rural when I used to drive through it on the way from my parents’ house in Sun City to my job in downtown Phoenix. Now: all Mittel-America.
Marge had paid off the house, figuring to leave it to her son when she died. But he pre-deceased her. So presumably it will go on the market in the near future.
It’s a ways from the Bosnian Empire. But…frankly, I wouldn’t want to live there, even though the street itself is extremely pleasant.
* It’s just a block from Main Drag North, once a country lane…now more like eight lanes. It’s a major commuter thoroughfare in from the west side now, just PACKED with traffic during the rush hours, and pretty frantic any other time of day. Too much noise, to much carbon monoxide, too many fruitcakes.
* The houses are pretty old, and so require constant maintenance and repairs. My house is expensive enough in that department…and in comparison to Marge’s place, it’s a mere youth.
* Speaking of expense, all those houses up there are on irrigated lots. While this keeps the water bill down — flood irrigation doesn’t use city tap water — it means you have to maintain a third of an acre (or more) of grass. You don’t even want to know what Gerardo is gonna charge for working on those damn palm and citrus trees this morning. And I have gravel landscaping…so he and his guys don’t have to mow every week or two.
With increasing frequency, I contemplate where I would like to move, if I could get away from here.
SDXB and NG are in Sun City — last I heard from him, he appeared to be about on his last paws. He’s not answering the phone and not returning calls…so I figure if he’s still living, he’s probably in a hospital or old-folkerie.
Personally, I’ve lived in Sun City, and I ain’t a-doin’ that again.
Truth to tell, there really isn’t anywhere I’d rather be than here. And…for what it costs to get yourself into one of those warehouses for old folks, I could hire someone to come in and take care of me.
With the Baby Boom Generation entering senilitude, there are more and more businesses and organizations that will come to you and keep you going until you’re on your last paws. Recently learned about an outfit that will come to your house and bring food to you. Plus we have an army of freelance cab drivers out there in the form of Lyft and Dial-a-Ride — on top of the traditional taxi services. Frankly, I think if you know what you’re doing, you probably can arrange to get all the services that you’d need delivered in yourhome.
Now, I expect, is the time to find out about those businesses and create a list of them, with contact info.
Welp, just this minute I’m sitting here waiting for a couple of lawyers to show up.
To be more specific; the discussion will concern the mortuary in Sun City where my parents were laid to rest…without my advice, without my specific knowledge.
Not to sound altogether too goddamn embittered, I have to allow that my parents had made arrangements for themselves years before my mother died. And she died years before my father’s unhappy demise. But…
Yeah. But….
Backstory: My mother dies, having smoked herself into eternity. She and my father are living in Sun City by then, and had been there for some time. Among the many wise-old-age things they did while they were dwelling there: they arranged to be cremated and then stored in the local mortuary.
Except…. I don’t know that they both did so that at the time. My mother was stashed in the place. But then my father went off and married the Dragon Lady, about whom (I s’ppose) the less said the better.
When my father died, he was reduced to ashes, dumped into an urn, and set on a shelf next to my mother, as per his wishes. Presumably.
But then…
David Smaug: Dragon
Oh, yes: but then…. when the Dragon Lady died, her relatives arranged to have her cremated and stashed in the same mortuary, on the same shelf with my father and my mother.
It would be hard to describe — certainly not in polite terms — how much I reviled the Dragon Lady. She surely ranked among the meanest human beings you could hope not to meet. She reveled in her cruelty.
My father, after she had thoroughly alienated me from him, came to detest her. He was afraid to divorce her, because — as he put it — “she’ll get all my money!”
This was the great terror of his life: someone getting all his money.
Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to accrue enough to retire on. Given that he didn’t even have a high-school diploma, this was quite a challenge and quite an accomplishment.
I wish I’d been savvy enough to have said to him, “Daddy! Your daughter is married to one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. That woman is NOT gonna get all your money.”
But I didn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do that. Plus interfering in his affairs was not my style. So…stupidly, I let this just float along, as it would.
The relatives had not bothered to tell me when dear Dragon Lady died, nor indeed did they condescend to tell me that they had arranged to have her interred next to him and my mother in the Sun City mausoleum. In fact, it was just recently that I found this out.
*****
Lawyers in, discussion had, lawyers out the door.
It’s going to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to pull this off. My will is going to have to be rewritten. Extracting my parents “cremains” from their prison in Sun City will cost a bundle. And buying space in the church’s graveyard will cost even more.
Maybe it’s not worth the headaches and the dollars. I dunno.
I must say…this makes me mad.
I am angry about it. What excuse did those people have to sneak around and deposit the Dragon Lady next to my father: the Dragon lady who made my father’s last years even more miserable than they needed to be?
Today’s discussion with the lawyers (speaking of “get all my money!”) will set me back $400. They estimate the entire maneuver will run about $4,000.
****
And…the more I think about this, the more I think it’s probably not worth doing. Who cares where their remains are stashed? They’re not alive to know about it. All their other relatives are dead: I’m the only immediate relative who survives either one of them.
And why do I care where their ashes are tucked away? Dead is dead is dead. A few ounces of whatever remains of them won’t bring them back, won’t make them any less dead. They’re not here to appreciate (or not appreciate) taking up residence in the green and quiet church close.
Huh.
Maybe I should just save my money, donate it to the church when the time comes, and let them arrange to celebrate whatever has passed for my life.
Yes. When you’ve lived in a neighborhood long enough to become a historic fixture, your brain is filled with layer on layer on layer of memories.
Just now the adorable young father of the incredibly adorable young kids in the house behind us, spouse of the spectacularly adorable young mother, is out in the backyard mowing grass. The kids are giggling and hollering and carrying on. The sun is setting and the evening is turning to dusk.
Oh, my,… HOW Sally, the former resident of that house, would be delighted to have that lovely young family in there. She and her room-mate: oh indeed, they would be thrilled.
The two women were grade-school teachers. Old Maids. Having never married, when they met each other on the job and figured they could tolerate each others’ company, they decided to go in together to buy a house in a lower-middle-income neighborhood of lovely (ahem: terrifying) Sunnyslope.
As it developed, SDXB moved in right straight across the street after I booted him out of my house, a block to the north and a block to the west.
So it was that we became friends with the Old Maids. And what fine neighbors they were.
Sally’s companion eventually passed away. Sally, seeing the end in sight herself, sold the place and moved into an old-folkerie. Time passed. SDXB, in terror of Tony the Romanian Landlord (he who threatened the judge in the lawsuit we won), moved to Sun City. I, having lived in Sun City once and decided that was quite enough, refused to go. Instead, I got out a number of…uhm, toys…armed myself to the teeth, scared the sh!t out of my lawyers, and cooed, Tony, make my day!
One of Tony’s sterling characteristics — he has several — is that he is no fool. Yea verily: he is very, very smart. That being the case, he proved it by refraining to commit any new criminal frolics.
The dust has now settled. Tony and his lovely Pretty Daughter are deeply engaged in building their rental empire, and I’m still here. And…no one has had to make my day. ;-D
Because — of course — Tony is no fool.
Tony’s sweet and intelligent and horribly beaten-down Other Daughter lives two doors up the street from the Funny Farm. She is an excellent human being, IMHO. If I dared…if she dared…we would make good friends.
Oh, well.
The upshot is, she and I are not enemies. 😀
***
I don’t know if Tony is a good man. But I believe he is more than that: he is a great man.
Yes. In his context, he is a great man. He has accomplished feats that you and I could only fantasize about….partly because we couldn’t conceive of them and then, even if we did, couldn’t figure out how to pull them off, and partly — mostly — because none of us would be willing to work that hard.
Seriously: the things he has accomplished have simply defied belief. And if you stood back and watched him, the sheer amount of hard work he poured into those feats would boggle your little Yankee mind. He is, truly, an incredible man.
****
Is that why I’m not afraid of him?
Possibly. I’d like to say I’m not afraid of him much. I’d like to say I respect his intelligence and his ambition enough to know he’s not doing to fuck himself up.
But then there’s my Daddy. Yeah. The Daddy who taught me not to to be afraid of a helluva lot.
Who knows?
The truth is, Tony is dangerous. The truth is, Tony is too smart to engage that quality. The truth is, Tony is not gonna put all that he’s worked so hard for at risk. The truth is, my Daddy was right: stand your ground. The truth is, because Tony is no fool, he’s not very dangerous.
Bless’im.
Ohhh those beautful playing children. How I wish Sally could be here to be the melody of their laughing!
LOL! Especially doesn’t happen. Mostly because when you’re old as the hills you forget how long ago it was that you watered the hills. 😀
Seriously. I cannot remember ANYTHING, and when I do remember something, I can’t remember where I put it.
I thought I’d bought coffee the last time I trekked down to AJ’s.
Nice thought. Wrong, tho — so it appears. I can NOT find a bag of coffee beans anywhere in the Funny Farm, not to save my life. Usually it goes in the freezer….but nope. Not there. Not in the big storage freezer in the back room. Not in the refrigerator. Not in the kitchen storage cabinet.
WTF?
So whenever I finish this cup of tea, I’ve gotta get off my duff and traipse down to AJ’s again, to stock up on coffee.
The thing is…I’m pretty damn sure I bought coffee the last time I was there. It was on the shopping list, which remains on its whiteboard attached to the garage door. If I’d utterly blown it off, I think I would’ve noticed. Only thing I can imagine is maybe I left it in the shopping cart when I went to unload the groceries into the car.
Actually, in some parts things don’t change. In specific: humanity doesn’t change.
So…I have a friend — more like a casual acquaintance, but a person whose company I value. We met some years ago through a business networking group. This outfit used to convene for a monthly business meeting out in Scottsdale. Eventually, for reasons I don’t recall, they stopped meeting at our regular restaurant at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln drive and began to meet further south, almost to Tempe.
The original venue was a helluva drive from my house; this new place was just too damn far. So I kinda stopped going there. Occasionally I would traipse across the city, but I wouldn’t go to every meeting. And eventually, I really did quit attending altogether. It was too bad, because I enjoyed socializing with these folks, and as time passed it had become the main way I was getting any regular contact with other people.
But…che sera sera, eh?
At one point recently, this gentleman announced that he was going to move from his longtime digs in the East Valley to a place in Sun City, on the west side.
I cringed.
Casa nostra…updated. They enclosed the screened porch and added that nice patio.
First off, I’ve lived in Sun City. The reason I’m in Arizona is that my father dragged my mother and me from Southern California to Sun City in about 1962. The man wanted more than life to retire, and an opportunity presented itself: in high school I was a hotshot student, and the University of Arizona offered to accept me for admission at the end of my junior year — in 1962.
Well. Everyone was all very thrilled. I was beside myself with joy to get out of a year’s worth of brain-banging boring high-school classes — and to be able to flounce around bragging about how smart I was. My mother was delighted to get her husband back full-time. And my father couldn’t have been happier at the the prospect of quitting work a year early.
So. We moved out there. I went down to the University of Arizona in Tucson while my parents took up residence in a two-bedroom place in Sun City (much modernized in these photos) beneath the flight path of the fighter jets practicing out of Luke Air Force Base.
My father didn’t understand money, and he didn’t understand that he hadn’t yet accumulated enough to safely retire. One recession and he was done in: within a year he had to go back to sea. My mother and I stayed in that awful place while he wrestled and fought to earn back his decimated retirement savings. It was a horrid time for him, and a difficult time for my mother and me.
As much for me as for anyone else: young people were not welcome in that place. And even if you weren’t made to feel like you smelled bad, it was a boring, tedious place to live, row on row of ticky-tacky tract houses designed for people who never intended to spend 12 months a year there.
The instant I graduated from college, I grabbed a low-paying receptionist’s job and moved into a tiny studio apartment in mid-town Phoenix. Far from ideal…but at least it wasn’t in Sun City.
***
So. When my friend said he was going to move out there, my first thought was ohhhh gawd!
The salient point you need to be aware of is that my friend is Black.
Yes. A single Black man, probably around 50 or 55, moving out to Whiteyville.
I should have explained to him, in so many words, what he was getting himself into. But I didn’t…it didn’t feel like remarks on one’s racial status were any of my business.
***
If a 17-year-old white kid was not welcome out there, a middle-aged black man was even less welcome.
He lasted about…what? Four months or so. Couple weeks ago, he sent out an email announcing that he’s moving back to the East Valley. He didn’t feel comfortable in lovely Sun City.
Yeah. I’ll bet he didn’t.
****
So, in the meantime…. Now I’m old and I’m teetering on the edge of the grave.
No, I’m not gonna die very soon — at least, probably not. But it is time, as they say, to “make arrangements.”
Both of my parents had themselves reduced to ashes, dumped into urns, and stashed in a mausoleum in Sun City. If I were a decent human being and an appropriately loving daughter, I would join them there.
But y’know what? I don’t want to.
No.
I do not want to spend eternity in a vase gathering dust in Sun City.
Parents or no parents.
To frost that cookie, a couple days ago I discovered my father’s horrid third wife’s family had put that dreadful woman’s ashes out in Sun City, next to his ashes.
Yeah. That mean, evil, nasty b*tch is taking up space on a shelf next to my mother and my father.
***
Without this latest development, I probably would just have let it go. Complain not, and arrange to have myself reduced to a few cups of ashes and set on a shelf next to those two.
But…no.
I’m sorry. But no. There is no way in Hell I’m going to allow myself to be interred next to that horrid creature. In fact, if I could see how to do it, I would get my parents’ urns moved somewhere else. Real fast.
The problem is…
Ohhh yes: does every issue not have a problem?
The problem is that my father deeply, passionately hated organized religion. This state of mind came about when his mother, a Chocktaw Indian woman, was scammed out of what today would be at least a million dollars — by nut cases who persuaded her that they could talk to the dead. Her father, a white buffalo hunter, had participated in the extirpation of the herds of buffalo roaming Oklahoma and Texas, in the process accruing quite a large pile of money.
After he died, she inherited this pile of cash. And the scam artists descended on her. Long story short: pretending to be able to talk to the dead, they scammed her out of every penny, leaving her and her sons without a nickel or a dime… My father, who was just a kid at this time, associated the theft with churches. In his mind, all religions are scams — especially the organized Christian varieties.
So…you see the problem? If I were to go out to Sun City and remove their ashes from the mausoleum out there, tote them down to my Episcopal church, fork over a handsome donation, and have them stashed there, it would be an incredibly disrespectful act.
Disrespectful of my father’s experience, of his decision to put himself and my mother in the Sun City mausoleum…of…whatever.
But speaking of disrespectful, that AWFUL woman he married after my mother died is out there on the same damn shelf.
That, in my opinion, is damn disrespectful of me. And of my mother.
One thing is for sure: My ashes are NOT gonna sit on a shelf anywhere near that harridan’s ashes.
****
So. Now — right now — I need to figure out what, if anything, to do about my own impending demise. And what, if anything, to do about my parents’ cremains.
My stepsister is dead, so if I were to remove my father from her honored mother’s side, she would have no clue. No offense to be offered there, assuming people cannot view what happens here on earth from their platforms on the Other Side. On the other hand, her daughter survives. I don’t know if that young woman ever traipses out to the far west side to commune with her mother’s ashes…but if she does, it would be pretty sad to remove my father’s ashes from her mother’s crypt. For that matter, I don’t even know if the woman’s ashes are out there with my father.
I didn’t get along with those people — they were extreme right-wingers, and they thought I was a seditious Commie. Plus the young woman in question has her own life and has not spoken to me since long before my father died.
So…should I feel any compunction about snabbing my father’s ashes — if I can do so at all — and spiriting them away to the church close?
This is what I would like to do: Go out to Sun City, demand that the mortuary hand over my mother’s and my father’s ashes, bring them back to Phoenix, and arrange to inter them at my church.
* I don’t know whether I can do that, since I’m not the one who arranged their interment and I’m not the one who paid for it.
* My mother would love it, but my father would shimmer in his funeral urn through the rest of Eternity: he hated churches; he hated organized religion.
* God only knows how much it would cost.
Do I want to spend my son’s inheritance — any part of it — on juggling urns filled with ashes? The ashes of people he barely remembers? Hell, my mother died before he was born. When I told her I was pregnant with him, her response was to shrug her shoulders and go “Meh!” So…do I even care whether their ashes occupy space near mine?
Possibly not…
I do know — well, I think I know — that I would like to have my pile of ashes stashed down at my church, not out in horrid Sun City. But…I have no idea how much that would cost or what would be involved in arranging it. Next week I’ll be speaking with the woman who runs the operation at the church, and so…soon I’ll know whether this is something I can afford.
My mother-in-law got her kids to sprinkle her ashes off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That sounds like a worthy alternative…but my son doesn’t have anyone to give him moral support in any such antic. So I hesitate to ask for that.
Whatever. The time has come to figure out what to do when the “time” does come.
***
At any rate, we’ve wandered from the entrance to this little rumination. The kick-off was that a lovely friend of mine is moving out of Sun City, whence he recently migrated, because he is a Black man and the natives out there have made him miserable because of the color of his skin.
So, going in search of Donna Freedman, proprietor of the eminent personal-finance blog Surviving and Thriving, I cruised out to where she’s visiting: her daughter’s home in a sprawling suburb north of lovely uptown Phoenix.
Wow! When we say this place is Southern-Californicating, we’re not kidding. The area looks just like Orange County did when I was passing through high school in those parts: square mile on square mile of modestly built but not unattractive tract houses, mostly indistinguishable from each other.
Now…I don’t especially wanna live someplace where I can be bossed around by a club of neighbors. On the other hand…given recent events across the street, there’s something to be said for it. One thing is for sure: a real, every-homeowner-signed-onto-it HOA would be able to limit the use of its houses by private individuals.
We do have an HOA — not one that has a de facto say in what you can and cannot do with your home. But the problem is: the Romanian Landlord has taken it over: his daughter is its president! 😀
At any rate, the tract in question is just vast. It must go on for square mile after square mile. It surrounds a golf course, and it appears to run up against Moon Valley (another upper-middle-class tract) and the north side of the North Mountains. It’s meticulously maintained — nary a weed to be seen in anyone’s yard. It’s an easy drive to the university (toooo late for this retiree! 😀 ). It’s pretty close to a big Sprouts and a decent Fry’s grocery store. It appears not to be directly under the flight path of any local airports. There is a school there, so it’s clearly not a Sun City-style old-folkerie.
Hmm. On the other hand, I could walk to the Sprouts and the Albertson’s here. Now admittedly, I wouldn’t — it’s not safe to walk up Conduit of Blight Blvd. But in theory, it would be possible.
On the other other hand…hmmm… The city’s smog backs up against the south side of Squaw Peak and the North Mountains. That would suggest that even on high-pollution days, the air in that HOA (on the mountains’ north side) would be breathable. Hmmmm…
Well. I may jump in the car, fill up the gas tank, and take a long, lazy tour of that place.
************
Or…maybe not.
LOL! The build on the houses out there makes my house look like Edinburgh Palace! Just a cruise through photos on the Internet changed my mind about that idea. REAL fast. 😀
The prices are possibly a little less than what I could get for the present palace. But the cost of moving would soak up that difference. Add the usual repairs and improvements one invariably has to make when moving into a house that’s been occupied by someone else…and egad!
It just wouldn’t be worth it to move. In terms of cost of the real estate, it would be about an even trade. But in terms of quality, it would be a large step down.
Soooo…. As for potential places to move, that leaves…what?
* Fountain Hills. Some places out there seem to be roughly comparable to my house. But I’ve seen a number that were clearly cardboard and plaster.
* Sun City. Even if I wanted to live in a ghetto for elderly white folks (I don’t), those houses also are cheaply built. If you don’t have a covered carport along the building’s west wall, any room on that side of the structure is gonna be an oven.
* Central Phoenix. A hot spot for the young and the upwardly mobile. Centrally located houses are outrageously overpriced. The pretty old “historic” buildings require a lot of repair, upgrade, and maintenance work…and it ain’t easy to find workmen who know how to deal with architecture that dates back to the late 1920s.
* North Central. Ritzy-Titzyville. You pay a premium — a large premium — for the address.
* East Central. Ditto.
* Scottsdale. Prices are out of the question and architecture ain’t much better than the junk on the west side.
* South Phoenix. Mostly slum. The areas that aren’t ghetto and slum are less desirable because of the surrounding downscale districts.
Truth to tell, I don’t see any of those places as necessarily better than where I am. The ‘Hood is one of the choice neighborhoods in the city of Phoenix. No doubt there are fancier or safer areas in Scottsdale or to the north. But face it: every area gets its burglars, its sh!theads, and its lunatics. It doesn’t much matter where you live, as long it’s not truly a slum.
