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.
