Aging in place

Ugh!!  Just back from the morning doggy-walk. What an AWFUL, swampy, icky morning! The sky is gray with high clouds. And those clouds have spawned a mass of hot, wet, soggy air: deposited on the ground where humans and dawgs like to stroll.

A walk out there feels like a stroll along the shore of the horrible, wet, sticky Persian Gulf…surely one of the most horrific venues ever occupied by humans.

We spent nine years in that ghastly place — in (un)lovely Saudi Arabia — until my mother’s health failed and my father was forced to quit his (handsomely paid!) job to bring us back to the States.

Most of the time, Arizona’s climate is reasonably livable. The hellish summers are attenuated by air-conditioning. Most of the time.

Yeah. Until you arrive at August or so. Then it gets wet and soggy and icky and HOT HOT HOT.

Most of the gringos leave the state in the summertime. If they’re working, they take vacation then and head into the mountains. If they’re retired, they jump in their cars and drive back to the Midwestern states whence most of them emanated, where they spend July and August.

Me, I have no such place to go. Plus growing up in hideous Saudi Arabia accustomed me to hot, soggy summers…so this place doesn’t seem all that bad to me.

Where would I go, if I’d ever had my choice?

San Francisco. Right now, today, right this minute.

My mother’s relatives lived in the Bay Area — in Berkeley, an enclave of the upper-middle-class — and when my father sent us back to the States (she was too ill to stay in Arabia, and had to be treated for her raging case of amoebic dysentery in a Stateside hospital), we landed in San Francisco. Temporarily.

So that got me away from the nasty brats in the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School, and got her more or less recovered (sorta).

Once she brought us home, she refused to go back to the Middle East. So my father was forced to quit his handsomely paying blue-collar job to join us in California and ship out of Long Beach. (He was a Merchant Marine pilot.)

Shortly, they discovered Sun City. Think of the joy: hopelessly whitey-white and no kids! 

One garden spot after another, eh?

Seriously: he didn’t much like kids (unless they were of the Boy Scout variety), and they wouldn’t dream of living anywhere near a place where a single brown face dwelt.

Anyway: Here I am, trapped in Arizona. They sent me to school in Tucson. Shortly after graduating from the University of Arizona, I married a lawyer who was moving up through a prominent regional firm. And that was it: yep, here I am. Stuck in the middle of the road…

Days like this lead me to truly hate this place. The heat, the soggy air, the fine developers’ monotony. Ugly air, ugly houses, on and tediously on.

I do miss the Bay Area, and surely would move back there if my son weren’t here and (heh!!) if I could afford it.

Failing that, parts of Southern Colorado strike me as livable. And any number of smaller towns along the West Coast.

My mother loved it here, though. That little house in Sun City was my father’s gift to her. And she did appreciate it.

She even contrived to force herself to like the gawdawful racket from the warplanes flying out of Luke Air Force Base. “Ohhhhh,” she would simper, “it’s the sound of freedom!”

Uhhhh…no, Mom. that’s the sound of World War III, headed our way.

Anyhow…that’s how I got here… Dragged against my wishes and deposited in the desert. Sent off to a third-rate school after I’d spent three years planning and preparing to go to UC Berkeley. And married firmly into MittelAmerica.

My son is here, and I ain’t leavin’ as long as he stays in Arizona. So…yeah. Here I am.

Horrible place.