Coffee heat rising

aging

And…whaaa? UNdone for????

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WTF?????  After this morning’s whiney whinge, now — come 3:34 in the afternoon — suddenly I’m a whole new person!!! 

Why?????  What on earth would cause a gigantic slug of misery to suddenly evaporate? To be replaced by a calm, almost complacent mood tending (even!) toward the cheerful?????

Seriously: I cannot imagine.

This morning I was truly miserable. Now: back to normal; indeed, even fairly cheerful.  Why?????

Well….I can’t imagine. Unless it was a nice sunny day and a long walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd and through the neighboring shopping centers.

Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood, through three neighboring shopping centers and all around a part of the tract where SDXB and I used to walk almost every day, back when he lived here.

He has moved to Sun City, and so is long gone. Me: I wouldn’t go back there if ya paid me.

But he likes that kind of fustian fuddy-duddery, so he’s very happy there. He and New Girlfriend seem to be doing well enough, though it sounds like he’s pretty damn sick. With my mother (oh, lemme tellya horror show!!), we found the medical care in Sun City was even more substandard than you get in the typical American living space. Just. Gawd. Awful.

Would she have died if she’d had decent care?

Well, yes.

But she sure as Hell wouldn’t have suffered the way she did. And that little Life Passage is one of several reasons you couldn’t get me back in Sun City: not on a bet.

At any rate: free of that place, Ruby and I put some serious mileage under our paws and had a lovely time hiking around the ‘Hood and through the neighboring shopping centers.

What exactly I’m gonna do to get through the upcoming end-of-life years, I dunno. Have to confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.

Seriously: over the next few months and year or so, I do need to make some plans. Maybe confer with M’Hijito about what he wants me to do … yeah, I know: check my idiot self into the Beatitudes, a venerable old-folkerie.

Thanks. I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim…  So we do need to confer and think carefully about how to deal with the upcoming (potentially hideous) years. But just now…I get to enjoy life for a few weeks or months!

 

Done For!

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Continuing spectacularly sick. Ohhh well…by now I’ve gotten used to the what appears to be the fact that I’m never going to get well. The best that can be hoped, I reckon, is that life comes to an end in some reasonable period of time.

Though, it must be allowed, we’re well past any “reasonable period.”

This morning — it appears to be a Tuesday — I plan to call a venerable old-folkerie here in the Valley. Well…the place is what I regard as a prison for the elderly. They take everything you have: your life savings, the value of your home, any other cash you happen to have laying around. In return, they babysit you and feed you awful institutional food until you pass into Eternity.

Which, we must hope, will happen soon.

Soon as my mother died, my father signed himself into a similar place, one then called “Orangewood.” His experience was just hideous, but not because of the institution and its operators: he married a woman he met there, apparently imagining she could somehow take my mother’s place.

Well. No one could do that. He was deeply, truly in love with my mother, and she with him. This new broad…ohhhh my gawd! Long story short, that “marriage” promptly turned into a Horror Show from Hell.

For me, it had one advantage: taught me that if you get locked up in one of those places, you mind your own business and don’t get chummy with anyone. And especially don’t marry anyone!

I had hoped to save my assets to pass along to my son. Unless I drop dead in the very near future, that ain’t gonna happen. Clearly, this unholy ailment is going to drag on and drag on and drag on, as I get weaker and weaker, more and more unable to care for myself. Soo….might as well resign myself to the fact that he will get little or nothing from me, because the disease is going to eat up everything I have: the value of the house, the savings I’ve set aside for myself, the small but real inheritance from my father. Gone. All of it.

If I were little stronger, I’d bring an end to the horror show myself, right now. But I simply don’t have the nerve end my own life. Just plain not brave enough. Sooo…that which I have is effectively no longer mine. Shortly, it will belong to a prison for old folks.

What a world we live in! 

What a Life She Had!

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Migawd! I think about my mother and all the things that happened to her over her 65 years on this earth...and I wonder…how EVER did she survive that long? 

My father, clearly was the best thing that ever happened to her. He rescued her from what I would describe as Hell. And he gave her some 30 years of happy married life.

And that, my friends, is an accomplishment.

She was born shortly after the turn of the 20th century, the child of an upstate New York farmer’s boy and a California chippy.

The chippy abandoned her to the paternal grandparents. What happened to the father, I have no clue…I assume he died or ran off.

After a series of court battles, her California grandparents succeeded in gaining her custody. So, a kid in grade school, she was sent to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Spending half her childhood in the boondocks of rural upstate New York meant she enjoyed few of the accoutrements of 20th-century American civilization. She told me she’d never seen a school bus before she got to Berkeley. Back home, the kids were taken to school on the back of a hay-wagon. And she described how flabbergasted she was when the California relatives brought her to their house, opened the front door, flipped a switch on the wall next to it, and magically the lights across the room came on!

Before long, she adjusted (more or less) to urban California life. What amazing experiences she must have had! She managed to get all the way through high school, but she surely didn’t go to college. Even my uncle — the one who designed the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco — never got a university degree.

As a young woman, she met my father at a party. He barged up and told her, “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever met!”

😀  Now there’s a line, eh?

Apparently, though, it was more than a line. They quickly became a pair, and before long they married. Yes: into a marriage that lasted over 30 years, until she smoked herself to death.

He worshiped her. And what a life he led her into! Ten years in Saudi Arabia. Journeys all over the planet, by plane, car, train, and ship. Homes in San Francisco, in the East Bay, in Saudi Arabia, in Southern California, in Arizona…here, there, and everywhere.

It was a life much shortened by the homicidal tobacco products that enrich their makers so. She died at about the time my son was born — over 30 years ago now! (Thirty years????  How did that happen?)

So my son never saw his grandmother. She saw him once, a few weeks before she died. When I showed him to her, a brand-new baby, her response was a shrug and “meh!”

She knew, I realize now, that she would never see him grow up…or even reach the toddler stage. Did she care?  I dunno… No doubt by then she was just too sick to care about much of anything or anyone. And truth to tell, I don’t think either of my parents were wild about kids.

But in between that boondock birth day on an upstate farm and her death in a comfortable bed in Sun City, she had an amazing life. One adventure after another, one country after another, one conveyance after another…all around the world.

I miss her. Wish we could bring her back.

Round and Round We Go….

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Whatever it is, it…

…doesn’t work
…has to be done over again
…needs a technician to deal with it
…needs my son to wrangle the technician
…is gonna cost an arm and a leg and another arm!

Air-Conditioning Dude just climbed down from damn near an hour on the roof. M’hijito was struggling to get away from his job so he could come down here and wrangle…but…apparently that was not feasible. No sign of the kid, no word from his precincts…oh damn. And now AC Dude needs to move along.

AC Dude is waiting in his truck for the kid to show up. He did say he had some paperwork he needs to do…but after that?????

We also had Plumber Dude in the wings: no sign of him.

Y’know…it looks like my dotage has caught up with me. Seriously: I just no longer can ride herd on workmen and doctors and lawyers and veterinarians and thisses and thattas.

Earlier today, I was thinking…hmmm…. Maybe it’s time for me to sell this house and move into an apartment.

Not fond of apartment living, frankly — been there, done that, and done it and done it and done it and…don’t wanna do it again. But it does have its advantages:

* The landlord deals with repairs and workmen
* Someone else has to be home to intercept those worthies
* Most of the infrastructure repairs are covered by the rent
* You don’t have to hang around all day to meet and greet said workmen

******

At any rate, my Excellent Son arrived soon to wrangle the beloved AC Dude. 😀  Seriously, both men rank among The Best, far’s I’m concerned.

Dear Son knew exactly what to describe to our guy. Bless’im! You don’t even wanna KNOW what I might have said to the fella.

Thanks to the clear instructions, though, AC Dude quickly grasped the problem and in less than an hour, had the thing fixed.

What a job, though! All told, from arrival to exit, it did take him darn a good hour of rassling around.

Y’know, this is one good reason — maybe THE best reason — for me not to sell this house and move into an apartment or some sort of old-folkerie. M’hijito should get this house. It’s just the ticket for him: roomy and handsomely renovated and smack in the middle of a passing tony neighborhood and within walking distance of the lightrail (which will drop you off right in front of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store…) and within walking distance of three major supermarkets. Really….we need to see that he gets the place when I shuffle on down the road.

***

And along those lines, recently I learned that the old folks’ prison called The Beatitudes  — just a few miles straight down Main Drag West from my house, and within easy walking distance of M’Hijito’s place — will send people to your home to babysit you!

That is to say: I may be able to get one-on-one oversight, food prep, some drivings-around, and whatnot without having to sign over my freedom to one of those awful jails for the elderly!

Whether they charge a lot more to come to your home and ride herd on you than they do to put you up in old-folks’ prison is yet to be discovered. My father had to fork over everything he got from the sale of his handsome little house in Sun City to get into the gawdawful old-folks’ jail where he consigned himself. So I imagine this supposed service will be similarly pricey.

But if the cost is the same…any day I’d druther be able to stay in my own home than have to move into a noisy, stinky, annoying zoo for the elderly. So: that issue moves to the front burner. It would be hugely reassuring to know I could hire out my end-of-life care, rather than having to move into a “facility.”

Ugh. What a society we live in!

Surely the End Is in Sight

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So, so sick. One can only hope this comes to an end fairly soon.

Not that I’m in any hurry to shuffle off this infamous mortal coil…but…dayum this old-age stuff hurts!

Need to find a way to get down to the nursing home/old-age factory, there to talk with the operators and figure out how to arrange to get myself in there when the time comes (which, I fear, is nigh…) and how to pay for it.

Horrors.

First horror: I truly detest institutional living. Hated every goddam minute of living in the college dorms. And now it looks like I’m going to have to end my life in exactly that kind of setting.

Yeah: hating every goddam minute of every goddam day.

Next horror: those places take everything you have in exchange for baby-sitting you into the Next World. And I do NOT want to have to fork over all the money my father left me and all of my own savings plus the value of this house for the privilege of being baby-sat into the Next World. I want that inheritance to go to my son, not to some baby-sitting factory.

As I mentioned a few posts back, Wonder Cleaning-Lady apparently spent some time coming into infirm people’s homes and baby-sitting them. Next time I see her, I’ll have to ask her about that, and where she worked.

It would be ideal if I could hire someone to come in and baby-sit me, at least during the day and at least until I’m a lot closer to the finish line. But it’s unclear to me whether that’s possible and, if so, how much it would cost.

Everything you have: that’s how much it’ll cost. Dontcha just  know?

And no, my son is in no position to chauffeur me into the Next World. He has a JOB. Can you imagine???

And it’s a pretty demanding job: his nose is on the proverbial grindstone all day, every day…and then some. So…somehow I’ve got to find some way get cared for without wrecking his life. And preferably without making me any more miserable than absolutely necessary.

So…I have no idea how to handle this. Asked down at the church, figuring social service work is a large part of a cleric’s job. They didn’t have a clue.

What would help a lot would be if I would just keel over dead, with a minimum of hassle and pain. Flop down on the living-room floor and be done with it.

BUT…we have this little problem of the dog. If I fell off the cliff into the Next World, she would be left here alone, with no one to feed her and care for her. And since nobody gives a damn whether I live or die, she might not survive until someone noticed.

I guess I could find a new home for her now. But gosh, I don’t wanna do it. Just now she’s my only companion and, frankly, about my only friend. If I give her to someone else, I really will be all alone.

All alone in an institutional setting. Doesn’t that sound jolly?

Hiking to Pretoria…

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Well…to Dogtoria, actually. Ruby and I just got back from a seemingly endless trek around the’Hood, not only all over the interior regions but up and down the east and south main drags. Traipsing traipsing traipsing.

Neither of the two lawyers I’d consider engaging were in their offices…not surprising, considering that this is a Sunday. 😀 Tomorrow I must take off into the urban wilderness and see if either of these guys will talk with me. Not about anything drastic…just quotidian stuff like copyright and ownership deeds and such-like.

At this point, I want to review  my will, to be sure that M’hijito  will get everything I’d like him to have after I croak over. That would be…everything I have. And that’s a fair amount, actually: investments, real estate, on and on and on. I want this stuff to transfer smoothly to him, without any hassle.

And with my beloved long-time lawyer consigned to the Other World (how dare he croak over!), we need to get a new attorney in place and set to go for M’hijito with a minimum of headaches and tax problems.

Tomorrow I’ll call Dear Ex-Husband (in his heyday one of the top corporate lawyers in the region) and see if he can aim me at someone who will get everything firmly and smoothly in place.

Meanwhile… Yes: the ‘Hood…  

The piles of apartments to the west of our environs are…mmmm….possibly not going in the direction one would like. They’re getting old. Rents must have come down, one surmises: the apparent quality of the residents (as seen from afar) is nothing like what it used to be.

So that puts the ‘Hood right on the border of a slummifying district.

And that makes this ‘Hoodie right nervous.

Seriously: I don’t like the look of it, and I kinda think I should sell the shack and move into a more credibly stable neighborhood, one likely to hold its value until after the Kid inherits his share of it. But before doing that, I need to make sure M’jihito’s interests are already protected.

Oh well.  We shall see. Eventually.