Coffee heat rising

Aging in place

Gettin’ Old…and Stayin’ Free!

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My roommate at the University of Arizona had an aunt in Tucson who allowed herself to be persuaded (by my rm’s mother) to tell the university that we two girls were going to live at her house. (In those days, undergraduate girls were required to live in the dorms, unless they stayed at home.) We promptly moved into our own apartment. And lo! We escaped the Hell that was the University of Arizona’s dormitory system.

Well, that’s about how I see our present-day old-folkeries: as institutions of Hell. I most surely don’t want to live in such a place. NEVER AGAIN! I cherish my aloneness. I love living in my house. And when Ruby barks (corgis surely CAN bark!), she doesn’t bother anyone.  When a neighbor chooses to turn their TV to “blast,” the damn thing is far enough away that the racket doesn’t penetrate my bedroom walls. Or any of my walls!

So…how to stay out of some awful place designed as a prison for the useless elderly?

Back in the Dark Ages, old buzzards often – maybe usually – moved in with an adult child’s family. My great-grandmother, for example, lived with her daughter, whose own son and daughter-in-law lived within walking distance.

That, you may be damn sure, ain’t gonna happen in our time and in our space! 😀

Fastest way possible to drive my poor son nuts!

But…but…waitaminit here!

WHAT IF you didn’t live with the offspring, but rather within walking distance? Or within a few minutes’ drive time?

That would give the adult kid easy, fast access to you – and you access to them.

And…in my case, what would it do for me?

Well, it would put my heroic son within a few minutes’ drive – or even walk. So, he could rescue me from myself, when needed. Conversely, I could easily reach his place, even on foot, making it possible (even easy) to pester the bedoodles outta him. 😉

Seriously: it would make it easy for me to take gifts of food and other treats to him. Easy to haunt him when I have some PITA that needs a grown man to handle. Easy for him to pick me up and schlep me to the dentist (or wherever).

And thereby it would facilitate my living at home as long as possible: preferably until I croak over.

Voilà! I get my privacy and peace & quiet. He gets his mutther where he can keep an eye on the ole’ bat.

Welp…all those bennies are, in fact, a shade on the optimistic side. My son has, of all things, a JOB (remember those?). He works out of his home for a large international insurance company. This, as you might imagine, does keep him busy.

Very busy,

So he can’t be trotting back and forth to my house or chauffeuring me around the city.

Fortunately, the corner of this city where I live happens to be well stocked with conveniences. Within a couple of blocks, we have an Albertson’s (supermarket par excellence), a more or less competent computer store, a Walgreen’s, a T-Mobile, a Bookman’s…. on and on and ON. About 90% of the time, you really don’t need a car to supply your needs here.

Gilding that lily, the swell new lightrail train comes right up into the ‘Hood., northbound from the downtown district. And the city is building extensions that will carry passengers east and west  and, eventually, further north into the middle-class suburbs along the freeway. In another few years, I’ll be able to get out to the university without ever touching an ignition key.

Mercifully, the time for me to need to commute to campus has passed…”mercifully” because no, I do NOT enjoy being groped by fellow passengers on those trains, or hooted and yelled at by jerk drivers as I stand at a bus stop. But if few minor irritants bother you, these trains ARE the Business.

Now…admittedly, there are some benefits to locking yourself into an old-folkerie.  In my father’s case, for example, one day he sat down for a huge mid-day meal in the dining hall and…promptly had a stroke!

Staff members there recognized what was happening and called for help on the spot. MUCH faster than I would have been able to call, even though I was sitting right there beside him. And they knew exactly what they were talking about when they spoke with the operator. Help arrived within minutes…and it was help who knew what to expect and how to address the disaster under way.

That wouldn’t happen if I had a stroke as I was sitting at my dining room table here at the Funny Farm. Of that you may be sure.

Someone would discover my corpse a few days later – maybe. Probably gnawed on by a hungry hound.

At any rate: just now one option is, in fact, for me to stay right where I am.

Another would be for me to move closer to where my son is.

His place is within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Gourmet Market, a few steps from the lightrail, minutes from two major regional hospitals. So…if I lived near him, I really wouldn’t need a car at all. I could use taxicabs if there were some reason not to walk, and in a real emergency, an ambulance would arrive within seconds.

Heh heh! JUST what my son needs, right? For his muther to move in three houses up the road! 😀

Ohhhhh well… It’s something to think about. If not to laugh about.

Holy Sh!t….DUCK FOR COVER!

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KeeeeRAAP! Some ba*tard just shot at our cop helicopter!

The action took place a couple blocks to the north of the Funny Farm…maybe three. But definitely on our side of Main Drag North.

Call the dog — she’s loafing in the kitchen, and she sees no good reason to get up and leave her scrap-scavenging post.

Call the dog.

Call the dog.

Call the dog again.

At last the obedient beast decides to get up and roam over to see what I want. Who knows? Maybe the Human has food.

Coax her up the hallway and hit the tiles. 

Stay down until whatEVER-the-Hell is going on quits.

Cop Copter is hovering over our old house, the noise-collector a few houses in from Conduit of Blight Blvd. That’s about a block-and-a-half from where the Funny Farm stands.  We hunker down on the bedroom floor…and….

ohhhhhh shee-ut, here he is again, roaring over at roof-top height. 

WTF?

Stay hunkered.

At last the Copter swoops around and takes off into the north-easterly distance.

Lift the corgi onto the bed. Check the doors — for the third time! — to be sure everything is locked.

Climb onto the sack with the dog.

Holeeee krap, what a place!

BONK! And this didn’t occur to me…WHY?

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Y’know…having lived in sprawling Southwestern cities all of my adult life, this factoid never occurred to me. But…y’know what? YOU DON’T NEED A CAR TO LIVE IN A CITY LIKE PHOENIX.

Early adolescence in San Francisco, taught me that…well…yeah. You don’t need a car to live conveniently in the City, as my mother and I used to call SF. San Francisco has (or had, at the time) premier public transit. You’d never wait more than ten or fifteen minutes for a bus or train to come by.

But Phoenix, a hub of blue-collar dorkishness, is NOT like San Francisco. Not even close. Phoenix is more like Los Angeles. Or Long Beach, where I had the un-privilege of spending my high-school years. Wherever you’re goin’ in Southern California, you can’t get there from here…not without a car.

To the extent that Phoenix and L.A. have trains, you don’t wanna ride on them…not unless you enjoy being pestered by panhandlers and oversexed bums. Yeah, there are busses, but by and large they don’t run on time, they’re filthy, and they also tend to harbor folks that you prefer not get too close to you. (“Too close” being “in the same county….”)

But…

Over the past week or ten days, I’ve made two disoveries that change ALL of that:

a) You don’t need a car; AND
b) You don’t have to ride on the off-putting public transit, either.

Why?

BECAUSE OF UBER. 

Turns out that during the past few months and years, Uber has become an enormous success here.

Yeah. You can get from  Point A to Point B in a private car, hired out by its owner to Uber, for less than a taxicab costs. The cars are clean, you feel reasonably safe in them, they show up in a timely way, and the cost is within reason.

Not only that, but a guy who drives for Uber lives three houses down the street from me!  And he’s not the only Uber driver in the general vicinity.

Dayum!

This changes everything. 

****

My son got mad at me and, in consequence, he stole my car. It’s parked at his house — presumably locked inside his garage.

I do not feel like bickering with him, so I decided, in a phrase, ohhh fu*k it! Let him have the damn thing.

And that’s when I discovered that Uber is everywhere. Even three houses down the road. No kidding. One of the neighbors is driving for Uber!

I can easily get from just about any Point A to just about any Point B (or C, or D, or whatEVER), and with a cell phone, I can call Uber from anywhere. 

And y’know what? Just now the only reason I want that car back is so I can sell it to some other sucker!

She’s b-a-a-c-k again…for the nonce

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The li’l computer is back online…just now. We’ll see how long that lasts. /eyeroll/

Several hours of galloping from pillar to post finally brought us to a store that could fix it: not surprisingly, an Apple store. This one, in a large shopping mall on the northwest side. So now this unit is operative.

When we got back to the Funny Farm, though, the big old desktop was acting up.

My son sat down to it and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it….  Several hours of working on the damn thing left us both short of temper. The upshot of that: a fine shouting match.

Once that got started, we both started getting madder and madder. He just roared out the door in a raging fit of high dudgeon. I, meanwhile, sink into a slough of stupidity…nothing I say helps, because I’m incapable of saying anything that helps.

The laptop still isn’t working right. I have no car, and so I can’t take it out tomorrow. There’s a computer store about six blocks away — my son abominates the place. Abomination or no, I guess I’ll have to take the thing there, even though my son has forbidden me to do so. (He hates the place, because it’s a hole-in-the-wall into which to stuff money.)

Without a car, I’m pretty helpless: if a destination isn’t within a couple of miles, I can’t get there.

What to do next?

 

Now What???

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In a moment of misguided chumminess, I lent my laptop to a business acquaintance. This is a guy I’ve known for years, outwardly very professional, a successful chiropractor by trade.

Bad move! Among other antics, he contrived to break the computer, rendering it nonfunctional. My son has taken it to a computer store, in hopes of getting it fixed…but that hope ain’t one I hold out.

Can’t afford to buy another one. That unit was tax-deductible, purchased when I used it mostly for the editorial business. Now that I’ve pretty much retired from that gig and from teaching, I get no break on its cost. And my son is more than ever convinced that I’m crazy, largely because of long-standing friendship with Mr. Computer Vandal.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago my car was trashed, when I rear-ended some woman on a dark, wet, rainy road.

Now I’m banned from driving (by the Kid) and so have to walk to the stores. I do still have a driver’s license…but no vehicle! He has glommed it and stashed it at his house…rather too far to reach without a car.

Luckily, the ‘Hood is richly endowed with neighborhood stores and chains: Sprouts, Albertson’s, Fry’s, Walgreen’s, Bookman’s, and a cute little liquor store in which to feel righteous by “buying local” when scoring a bottle of wine.

Dunno which way to jump just now. I could sneak around and rent a car. But frankly, that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. In the first place, I don’t want to go behind M’hijto’s back, no matter how unreasonable I think his driving ban is. Plus…about three houses down the street, a neighbor has gone into the Uber business. If I would get off my duff long enough to contact him, I could probably get him or one of his colleagues to drive me just about everywhere I need to go.

One damnfool thing after another, eh?

Yet to decide whether to pursue the scheme to convert the garage, now empty, into an art studio. Probably not: sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Still…hmmmmm…. I do like it as an idea.

 

Ohhhh Most Brilliant of Web Gurus!

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Well, our wonderful Grayson, the guy who keeps this site online and functioning, got me back in after I forgot (lost??) the password.

God bless him!!

Geez. I must be Alzheimering out. The more I fool with computer hoo-hah, the more opaque it gets to me.

Even when I print out this kind of ditz and tape it to the computer monitor’s frame, I still cannot get reliably in to this website, that website, or the other.

{sigh} I’m awfully afraid this is part of memory loss associated with aging. As the days go by, I recall less and less. Eighty-seven gerjillion passwords? F’geddaboudit. Due dates for bills?  Gimme a break. Who borrowed my laptop? I dunno.… Nothing is distracting me. I’m not sick. With no job, I’m never harried by work tasks, office politics, and general b.s. It looks alarmingly like the brain is simply wearing out.

Then we have mundane questions like…oh, say…what time is it?

  • The computer says it’s 8:47 a.m.
  • Clock on my desk: defunct. Can’t find it.
  • Bedside clock in the other room: 10 minutes to 2:00 (huh???)
  • Timer on the kitchen stove: 8:47
  • Clock in the dining room: 8:55
  • Best guess: HUH??????

 Figure out that it’s quarter after 9:00. Reset clocks, changing battery in one of ’em.

Cute li’l clock…wonder where I got it? Oh well. If only it didn’t have to be reloaded with batteries and dorked with to show what is apparently the current time.

Seriously: I can NOT keep track of all this ditz, much less make sense of six conflicting blobs of data.

Please, dear God: next time you bring me back to this planet, would you drop me on a desert island? One with no clocks? No computers? Maybe even no other humans???

But coffee, Sire. Plenty of coffee. Pleeze…..