Coffee heat rising

aging

…And Day Fades into Evening

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My son will soon be over here to drag me over to the (hateful!!) physical therapy studio. Ohhhh  gawd how could I do without that place and its mindless routines?

Said routines do nothing to help the spavined hip and back. What helps, apparently, is Time and the River Flowing. And walking, walking, walking, walking…

Trotted up to the northside shopping center this afternoon. A beautiful afternoon, we might add. Enjoyed schmoozing with the employees. Eyeballing the weirdos who live in the slum apartment complexes across the road. Strolling around the rest of the mall. Headed back to the Funny Farm…

On the way, passed by the Ole Guy’s house.

The Ole Guy was a retired gentleman who lived in a corner house just to the northwest of our part of the ‘Hood. And he was on in years: I’d guess he was in his late 70s or mid-80s.

SDXB and I would march around the neighborhood every morning, by way of exercise. And generally he would be out puttering in his yard when we passed by. WHAT a nice man!!

His main concern, as the weeks and months passed, was for his wife. He felt she was no longer able to stay in the house unassisted. Wanted to put her in a venerable Phoenix old-folkerie called the Beatitudes.

She was having none o’ that!!

The quarrel…uhm, discussion…went on for months.

We would see him every day; say hello as we passed; get the current neighborhood and family gossip.

But..yea verily. One day he was no longer there. The only way he could get her locked up was to lock himself up with her, o’course. And so when the time came, they both disappeared from our parts.

Much missed, we might add.

Dunno who lives there now: one never sees them outside

Ruby the Corgi and I are outside in front just now…as befits old folks, I guess?  Ruby is telling every passer-by how the proverbial cow ate the proverbial cabbage. I am…umh…loafing

And waiting for my son to show up and tote me off to the endlessly annoying physical therapy gym.

My gawd, how I hate that place. Its exercising hassle truly IS the biggest waste of time I can imagine, other than solving algebra problems for your ninth-grade math class….

So this will blow away the evening, a pretty evening when Ruby and I should be strolling from one end of the ‘Hood to the other.

One night I got pissed off with the frustration and the time wastage and sneaked out the door. Took off down the road on foot.

M’hijito had gone home, I think (or somewhere), to wait out the time with less boredom.

He was mightily annoyed when he showed up there to collect me and discovered I’d escaped.

😀

So now he won’t leave. He brings something to read and wastes his own goddamn evening sitting there while nothing useful is being done to me.

Make it stop, God!

Okay okay…sooner or later He will. But…wouldn’t it be nice if that “sooner or later” time could pass without endless annoyance?

😀

Hmmm…  A neighbor’s fire alarm seems to be on the fritz. It’s going quack!….quack!….quack!…. 

Ah…apparently it either ran out of juice or somebody came along and shut it off.

Hmmm…  Speaking of front yards in the neighborhood, we could so with a li’l maintenance here at the Funny Farm. Couple of plants need some serious pruning. And a spot where another shrub died could be cleared out and replanted with something new and classy.

Well…we can pounce poor old Gerardo with that. Get him to work on it before the weather is too hot for working.

Hm,….quack! quack! quack! 

Dammit! The defunct fire alarm was not. Defunct, that is. It’s back to quacking…and quacking…and quacking.

Uh oh. Here’s the Kid. Sooo…bye!

 

 

 

 

One Ringie-Dingie…Two Ringie…

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Not even 8:00 in the morning and I’ve already had three hustling phone calls and hung up on the plumber, who was calling to see if I was here and would let him in.

Because I didn’t answer the phone — or rather, slammed it down in his ear, one of my favorite tricks for damned solicitors — he went on down the road. So who knows when the plumbing will get unclogged.

My fault, of course, for not being more patient with the unending deluge of hustling. Telephone soliciting is a prison industry — who could be better as a phone hustler than somebody who’s already a crook, right? And apparently their warders turn them out of the sack as dawn cracks, so they might as well start calling…

****

Ohhh ADORABLE plumber!!!!  The guy just showed up at the door. Tested the terlets…and found them both working just fine.

The one in the master bathroom damn near overflowed this a.m., which was why I called him. Guess it must have had a water-soluble clog, because by the time he got here, the thing was working just fine.

Sooo…Handsome as he was, that was a less than perfect opener to a day that promises to be..trying.

The plan for today is to…well, start laying plans. Plans to lay me out, that is: or to lay out my pile of ashes.

Anyway…not a very promising start to the day.

Anyway, today I’ve gotta confirm that I indeed do have a niche reserved in the church close. That should be the case — I’ve paid for it.

Then decide if I want to try to kipe my parents’ remains from the Sun City House of Gloom. No, I am NOT gonna be buried under the flight path of Luke Air Force Base’s jet planes, nor am I going to be memorialized forever in a box on a countertop.

By 8 a.m., the phone was already jangling with nuisance telephone solicitors. They start calling early, because they figure old people get up with the sun. And yeah: they do have telephone lists organized by age.

{GRONK!}  I should get off my duff and take the dawg for a walk.

But…

It’s kinda chilly out this morning, even tho’ it’s after 8 o’clock. Don’t much feel like stumbling out by dawn’s not-very-early light.

One of the grand things about this neighborhood is its amazingly central location. This house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, but three excellent grocery stores, one of which is a Sprouts. What more could one ask, eh?

Well…we don’t have to ask: we have two excellent computer stores, a Walgreen’s, a bicycle store(!), a Walmart, a…on and on and on. So, luckily for me (under the current annoying circumstances), I don’t need a car to live here very comfortably.

Okay, back to the morning’s Subject at Hand: Do I want to purloin my parents’ ashes from the Sun City mortuary and place them in the churchyard?

As questions go, it’s not as easily answered as one might guess. My father just REVILED organized religion. His mother was ripped off by a bunch of religious crooks — they got most of a large inheritance she had received from her father. And so he came to think of religion as the House of Crooks. And he absolutely positively would not want to be memorialized through predictable history in a niche at All Saints Episcopal Church.

Of that, you may be sure.

However, I do not wish to be laid to non-rest beneath the never-ending roar of fighter jets racing in and out of an air base.

Now…yes, I do grasp the concept that my father will never know, not at any time throughout coming eternity, that I snatched his ashes out of Sun City. Or that very probably no matter how much my ashes vibrate to the tune of passing F-16s, I will never know it.

But still…something about that plan seems kinda disrespectful. He and my mother dearly loved Sun City. So where their ashes vibrate beneath the engine noise of America’s fighting force, that’s where the dear parents wanted to be.

On the other hand, is it respectful to me to decide that my remains must be stashed in a place where I hated living and where, because of my age at the time, I was decidedly and vociferously not welcome? I just loathed living in Sun City after my parents dragged me there. You couldn’t get me to buy a place there now, not on a bet!

Good grief! Let’s get real here: When you’re dead, you’re DEAD. No part of you lingers after, floating around the mausoleum under the war planes’ flight path, socializing with your even longer-dead parents’ spooks. WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Right?

So I guess if I’m gonna make “pre-need arrangements,” I might as well make them at All Saints.

That could be more appropriate for my son, too, in the long run: assuming he stays in Phoenix for the rest of his adult life. He went to school at All Saints (they have a very tony private academy). Most of his friends went there, too. So it’s not unreasonable to guess that he might want to be interred there, some day. And totally reasonable to assume that he would have no desire whatsover to spend eternity in a box in Sun City.

Memories…of Nightmares

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{chortle!}  Sittin’ here over breakfast remembering my beloved San Francisco Bay Area relatives of the prior generation. They lived on the side of a hill in Berkeley, just below a tunnel where the train to San Francisco entered the neighborhood.

Those were cool ladies: my aunt Gertrude and her mother (my great-grandmother) Clarissa, lovingly known as “Gree” by the family.

By the time I came along — after nine years in Saudi Arabia — Gree was well into her 90s. That seems to have done nothing to slow her down. She walked up that (steep!) hill almost every day, headed for a little grocery store where she bought lovely fresh produce.

Neither Gree nor Gertude drove a car. They had no need for it, truth to tell: the train would carry them into downtown Berkeley or across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. On foot, a short climb up a set of outdoor stairs would deliver them into Gertrude’s son’s neighborhood.

At some point along the (very long!) line, though, they decided that Gree should learn to drive. I was not along on this famous ride: mercifully, I wasn’t born yet.

So Gree and Gertrude had acquired a car, and now they decide to hop into it and take a drive.

Yeah.

Somehow, they get on the Bayshore Highway — Gawd only knows how. It wasn’t designated a “freeway” yet, but that notwithstanding, it was already magnificently a main drag. This was all very Californian of them…except…well…somehow Gree made some sort of a wrong turn and drove the wrong way up an offramp! 

No kidding. There they are, two old ladies in a clunk, headed onto the Bayshore Freeway going bass-ackwards up the offramp.

They make it onto the road, and now they’re driving against the traffic on what was then one of the most dramatic freeways in the land.

Got it? Wrong way on one of the fiercest freeways in North America!

Somehow, Gertrude managed to coach her mother across the lanes of 60 mph traffic and get her to drive off the road and safely onto the shoulder. HOW…really, I cannot even begin to imagine.

If I’d been her in that passenger’s seat, I would have utterly panicked and probably been unable to utter a word. You have to say about Gertrude: she was one helluva woman!!

Another Day Later and Deeper in… ??? …

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A day later and early evening. Still sicker than a dawg. Well: that’s not surprising, since the Dawg shows no sign of anything resembling an ailment…whereas I’m banging at Death’s Door. 😀

Well.  At least…at some doctor’s door.

Jeez. Did you know you could get peripheral neuropathy in your damned teeth???  No kidding: my two upper front teeth are buzzing like an electric current is running through them. And as usual these days, the hands are stinging and tingling and hurting enough to make typing freakin’ uncomfortable.

Whatever the hell is causing this, I do wish it would go away. From what I can uncover through  my endlessly brilliant excavations of the Internet, apparently the neuropathy that afflicts the paws can take aim at other parts of your body. The lips and gums are among those parts. I’m not gonna assume that’s behind today’s fun sensations — I are a English major, after all; I are not a doctor — but it does give me something fresh to pester Young Dr. Kildare with.

Or the new doctors down the road.

YDK has moved to freakin’ Sun City — a 40-minute drive from here, through crazy-making traffic. So I’m afraid our relationship has ended. That’s too bad…because I like him a lot and found he had a fine dose of common sense: a rare commodity in an M.D.

But…now we do have a doctor’s office just down the street — within walking distance, even!   Alas, so far I’m not impressed with those folks. Nothing bad about them, mind you…but nothing notably good, either. Personally, I crave a little more than mediocrity from my doctor.

M’hijito perennially wants to drag me out to the Mayo Clinic. Their docs would be fine if they just weren’t halfway to Payson…  Sorry, but an hour of driving through thick traffic to see a doctor for 10 or maybe (if you’re lucky) 15 minutes doesn’t make it for me.

Am I the only one who imagines that medical care in America used to be significantly better 15 or 20 years ago? Honestly: these days, it hardly seems worth burning the gas to get to a doctor’s office. They don’t pay attention to what you’re saying, and even if they do hear you, they seem to miss the point you’re trying to make.

Perhaps I exaggerate, though. Or more likely,  because I’m old doctors don’t pay any more attention to me than they do any other old person. Which ain’t much…

What a culture we live in, eh?

Colder Than a By-Gawd!

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LOL! Well, no: it’s probably not THAT cold.

It was one of my father’s favorite turns of phrase: hotter than a by-gawd! colder than a by-gawd! 

LOL! I never did figure out what, if anything, a “by-gawd” was. As a kid, I assumed he meant “bi-god.” By that, he apparently did not intend the Earls of Norfolk, a modern currency, or a premium British cheese. 😀

My hip and tailbone hurt like a by-gawd. How a bi-god got in there escapes me: he apparently snuck in while I was sleeping.

At any rate, the sun is up, but it’s still passing cold out there. This morning’s doggy-walk is gonna have to wait for an hour or two, at least until the frost is off the palm tree.

I’m IN!!!

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A miracle!  Lost the password for FaM.  And thought…well, that’s it for the blogging hobby.

But nay! called up a magical page, and presto! Here it is! Why or how, I have no idea…

Probably FaM is no longer for this world than I am…which at the moment appears not to be much longer. I’m very, very sick. No sign of help from any doc in any direction. They clearly don’t know what’s causing this ailment or how to treat it.

Nor, we might add, do they care. In America, old people are less than…”people.”

So…I guess it’s…just resign myself to the obvious fact that I’m not gonna last much longer. And…well, once I’ve stopped lasting, presumably FaM will stop lasting.

{sigh} I reckon the paucity of help or effective care is a function of my personality…which apparently is pretty obnoxious. People have hated me since I entered grade school — before that, really, as evidenced  by the time a neighbor’s preschool brat threw a fistful of sand smack into my eyes.

WOW! Did that HURT! 

Worked nicely, though, to teach me to distrust other people and to stay back from them as much as possible.

Well, WTF. I’m an old lady now — a really old lady, having pretty much outlived my life. A couple of women in my family lived into their 90s. But most died much, much younger than that.

My mother and her mother both croaked over from cancer. I don’t smoke, don’t drink anymore, and don’t f**k every soul who comes up the pike, so you’d think I’d last a little longer than some.

Well, no: “Don’t drink” is mis-speaking. I do love a glass of wine, though lately I haven’t been able to stumble to the store to get any. And I used to enjoy a bourbon and water before dinner. Can’t manage that these days, either. But still…one could figure that a lifetime of pre-prandial swiggling can’t have done the body much good….even if it’s stopped in old age.

At any rate…now that I’m old, I’m so, sooo sick that frankly, I can’t wait for the show to be over. No credible sign that it’s gonna end soon, though…unless I help it along. But that, alas, is not my style.