Coffee heat rising

Angst

Ah, the Good Ole’ Days…

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Well, lookee here. This charming event occurred within walking distance of our beautiful old historic home in the Encanto district — the first house DXH and I owned together.

The Encanto/Palmcroft district really is a lovely area. I miss its pretty streets and friendly neighbors and beautiful park with its lakes, every day. I could walk to the grocery stores and the post office from my house. And did.

Actually…I could do that here, too. Older and wiser, though: I’m not that foolhardy. Today I jump in the car and lock the doors before opening the garage door to travel the few blocks down to the stores and such.

This is, after all, the Big City. A big, crime-ridden city.

Occasionally, I’ll drive downtown and cruise through that area, house-shopping: thinking maybe I’d like to move back. But…

But.. No.

It really is dangerous. Did we ever have some adventures in that house! And that was with 90 pounds of fur and fang as our room-mate….

My present area, while its ambience is a little more repetitively middle-class, is less than REAL safe for a lone woman to walk around in…but it sure ain’t like that place was.

Oh my goodness, so many adventures.

There was the night our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, awoke, got out of bed to stroll around the house, and spotted some guy sleeping on her back patio. Right outside her living-room door.

The night Greta the Ger-shep awoke in the middle of the night to find a prowler coming up the bedroom hallway. Somehow, she got between him and the door he’d come in. The panic was quite amusing.

The night my mother came down to stay overnight with me while DXH was out of town. We set up the sofa bed for her and get ready to say goodnight, when…she pulls a .38 out of her purse and sets it on the TV table next to her!

The morning DXH pranced out of the house, hopped into his car, and prepared to back out the driveway, step 1 in the journey to his office…. And found some very angry guy in the back seat. The fella was irked that anyone would have such bad manners as to wake him up at dawn!!!

That was life in the Encanto District.

It was so beautiful, so conveniently located, and the neighbors were so grand. But really: I’d never go back there again.

YDK: Lost and Gone Forever?

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YDK —  the beloved Young Dr. Kildare — seems to have flown the coop.

Yes, it is possible that he and his partners have closed the office for a holiday break. But if that were the case, surely they’d a) have a sign on the door to that effect and b) have some sort of off-putting announcement on their phone answering machine. But….neither of those applies. The doors are locked. No sign is in evidence. And they’re not answering the telephones.

Soooo…. I’m awfully afraid he’s gone, as in lost-and-gone-forever.

Not good, because he’s a sweetie-pie and his partners are tangibly competent. So I don’t hate loathe and despise going to the doctor when I have to see him, as is the case when I go to visit most quacks. Plus his office is right up the road from here…the Mayo Clinic, where my heavier-weight docs practice, is waaaaayyyy over on the east side, halfway to Payson. Seriously, almost an hour’s drive through cut-throat traffic.

Called a friend who is also a YDK fan. She thinks he may have moved his practice to Sun City. That’s entirely possible: a bunch of docs are following the Baby Boomers out there.

But…well, if so, bully for him. But I ain’t drivin’ an hour each way, forgodsake, to see a doc in Sun City for 15 or 20 minutes. Plus I have some exceptionally unhappy memories of the incompetence we encountered while my mother was dying of cancer in Sun City. Sorry…but I’m NOT driving an hour each way to do business with a dimwitted hack who doesn’t give a damn about aging women patients, thankyouverymuch.

One of those bastards told me and my father, as my mother begged for care for her (fukkin’ obvious! agonizing!) cancer, that (these ARE exact his words!) “all middle-aged women are hypochondriacs.”

No kidding.

Actually, the term he used was crocks. That’s quack-talk for crocks of sh!t.

So…now I need to try to find another “doctor in the wild,” as the Mayo’s staff calls the local medicos who are not on their faculty, or resign myself to driving until the cows come home for every little sniffle.

Or…I suppose…I could move to Scottsdale.

***

But….dammit, I don’t want to move to Scottsdale!

Not that there’s anything wrong with Scottsdale, other than that it’s Snottsville.   But my son lives here in town. I could almost walk to his house from mine – it’s an eight-minute drive down through urban traffic to his house. Residential parts of Scottsdale – those I might afford – are a good 45 minutes from central Phoenix. That’s when it’s not rush hour! And therein lies the issue: I don’t wanna be 45 minutes or an hour away from my son!

***

Sooooo….what to do, what to do?

I reckon come the first Monday after the Christmas chivaree, I’ll try to call over to YDK’s place again.

Failing that, I’ll…

a) Try to get in to a friend’s doctor in central Phoenix, and/or
b) Ask on the neighborhood Facebook page for recommendations from the locals.

We shall see how that goes. Mercifully, there’s no emergency.

…for the nonce…

Grrrrrrr….

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Dratted computer is out of whack. Can’t figure out how to fix it. Now will have to drag it to the computer store, stand-in-line stand-in-line stand-in-line stand-in-line stand-in-line…. After half an hour or 45 minutes, get up to the tech desk. Put them up to trying to fix whatever is going on….this will soak up half the morning. Or half the afternoon.

Like I have nothing else to do, right?

Well, while I’m there, I’ll look around for something different to give the Kid for Christmas. Really, just now I have nothing very special for him…need to find SOMETHING, even if it’s just a gigantic gift card.

The older I get, the less enthused about Christmas I get.

Christmas used to be my absolutely positively MOST favorite holiday. Now…not so much. These days, it’s just another hassle.

My son — a grown man, and then some — and I each can buy whatever we want, whenever we want it. And by and large, that’s what we do. So that doesn’t leave a lot of choices for Christmas gifts.

Dickering with the computer guys will complicate matters further. Just what I don’t wanna do! 😀

…and…

Now Ruby goes on FULL ALERT.

Sheee-ut!!! Now what?????

She’s gazing at the side gate.

  • This is not a Pool Dude Day.
  • No sign of Gerardo’s guys.
  • No reason for anyone else to come around.

Sooo… Get pistol? Call cops? Hmmmmmm…..

***

Grab a shilelagh. Trot outside. Now what???

Side gate is unlocked, but it’s not hanging open.

Hmmm… I do not close that gate without locking it. But Gerardo’s guys may have. Pool Dude surely may have.

Nobody’s hanging around. So…probably Pool Dude left it unlocked when he was here yesterday — may have just pulled the gate shut behind him without realizing that what THAT stunt does is just leave the damn gate hanging open.

Oh well. Far as I can tell: no harm done.

****

But…

Oh dear. One of the neighbors’ Yard Dudes has got a tow truck here, lashing up his big ole’ yard truck and getting ready to haul it off down the road.

Merry Christmas!
:-/
Not to say auuugh!

Just when you think your life is wonkers, you discover someone else’s outdoes you!

😮

zowie wowie zoweeeee

Yes. Then you discover theirs outdoes yours! 😀 And thank the Goddes we don’t have a squalling li’l brat to amuse us…

😀

The shrimp are half cooked on the grill, glorioski. The asperagi sizzle upon the grill pan, glorioski. The adorable little girl next girl squalls at whatever her sibling’s latest outrage may be, glorioski!

How do we love our neighbors? {a LOT!}

How do we love their squalling brats? {what COULD be better than a squalling brat who belongs to someone else???  😀 }

God bless them! And thank You, Your Godship, for blessing them with the beautiful kidlets.

Hmmmm… I wonderful if an adorable li’l girl would like a dish of delicious grilled asparagi?

LOL!

Waddaya bet not?

December 20
3:00 a.m.  Uhhhhh….maybe

Yes: it’s now Friday, three o’clock in the morning. Or possibly 10 p.m.

I’ve come unstuck in time.  No idea what time I went to bed last night; therefore no idea how long I’ve been asleep. The dog is conkered out on the sack; shows no interested in springing to life here in the wee hours.

My bedside clock busted. Looks like…either the battery died, or the connection to the battery is shot. The laptop claims it’s 10:08 p.m.  The desktop says 10:10 p.m.

So I assume it’s mid-evening on…what? Friday, December 20?

Jeez.
Stop the World! I wanna get off!

Scared Witless

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Nope. There really is no other explanation for my mother’s behavior and habits than that she truly was scared witless.

Yeah. I kinda knew it, largely because part of her motherly teaching was that I should be extremely cautious and yes, always, always, ALWAYS lock all the doors and windows before going to bed at night.

To a degree, if you’re female, that’s just common sense.

But…no. Her terror went way beyond that.

She was convinced, for example, that some guy was going to stroll into their carport one evening, climb up on top of the car, hop through the attic opening, crawl across the rafters, take out a saw, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house — there to have his way as he pleased. One evening, it became evident that this was real fear and not just some silliness she picked up out of a women’s magazine.

She showed up at my house to stay overnight on the TV room sofa. What did she bring with her?

A .38.

No kidding.

We get the bed made and, after watching TV half the evening, shut off the idiot box and head into the night. And out of her purse she pulls this GUN.

Y’know… You wouldn’t do that unless you were terrified. And you certainly wouldn’t do it in front of your daughter. In your daughter’s home.

That was the point at which I realized she wasn’t play-acting. She was genuinely frightened.

Had something happened to her in the past that made her that scared?

I kinda doubt it. If so, she would have said so. Oh, hell: she would’ve gone on at length about it.

No. She didn’t hide things like that.

Whether it was the ambient fear in our culture — which is real and does affect many women’s thinking — or whether something had happened to her, I do not know. But there’s no question that she was terrified. She wouldn’t have pulled a stunt like that if she weren’t scared half to death.

My parents’ house in Sun City did have a carport, not a garage with a door you could close. So that meant, of course, that your car and anything in that carport were exposed to the evening air…

AND…that carport’s ceiling had a hatch-type door, whose purpose was to let workmen in to fiddle with the wiring, the plumbing, the insulation, and the drywall in the attic.

She was convinced — apparently because she’d read about this happening to some other Sun Citizen — that somebody was going to climb on top of the car, open that door hatch,  hop into the attic, make their way to the living room, saw a hole in the ceiling, and drop down into the house.

The better to rape some nubile 65-year-old, right?

Yeah. That’s what I grew up with.

That kind of thing has to affect you, over the long term. I don’t feel terrified. No: if I did, I wouldn’t live here alone in a four-bedroom house a mile south of a crime-ridden suburb and two blocks east of some very alarming apartments.  But yes: I do remember it. I remember it as not just strange, but as fundamentally alarming.

As for my mother?

There really isn’t much explanation for the chronic terror that afflicted the last couple decades of her life.

* Don’t know if she was similarly scared when she was a young thing

* Don’t know if she’d ever been attacked, and so might have suffered the aftereffects.

* Yes, I do know there are a lot of sh!theads out there, but not so  much as to require you to cower in terror behind locked doors and windows, with a pistol in hand.

And as for the local creeps, crooks, and nut cases?

* Dudes! Make. My. Day!

…ROARRRR….

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Not only that, but ARF!  Yea, verily: ARF, we say!

11:38 p.m. and the cop copter is circling about to the north of us. And…when you are a dog, is there any chance in Hell that you’re likely to hunker down on the bed and stay in the sack while the cops are chasing robbers?

Hell, no!

Ohhh, no. Nothing would do but we had to trot outside and pee in the gravel.

😀

Fortunately, the policia and their prey are a ways to the north of us — the copter’s not directly overhead, at least. By the time Ruby charged outside, they were a neighborhood away, and receding. Now that we’re back in the house, all is quiet out there.

Ugh! L.A. East. Honest to Gawd, what a place this is!

Puffing Her Way to Hades…

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It’s hard to understand, for me, how my mother could have failed to grasp that she was killing herself with her incessant cigarette-puffing habit.

Matter of fact…I think she did know it, and that she quite deliberately killed herself. Yeah. With tobacco.

She’d had a difficult life, although my father doted on her. But…before he came along, her upbringing as an unwanted child was less than an ideal way to establish residence on this earth. Her grandmother’s dying of diabetes couldn’t have helped — this was the mother of her useless father, the one who, like the useless mother, made it sterling clear that he didn’t want a brat around to crimp his style. The first 12 years or so of her life were spent out in the middle of nowhere, on her paternal grandparents’ dirt farm in upstate New York — today it would be about the equivalent of growing up in the most remote boondocks of Nevada or New Mexico.

{jeez????!!! Did I post this thang without finishing it?????}

{Let’s start over here, where I intended to go next!}

Ay vai! So there she is, a young teenager in the poverty-stricken remoteness of Upstate New York.

Her poverty-stricken farmer grandparents — the paternal set — glommed her [WHAT IS THE WORD?] mostly because they lived in upstate New York and the (far more affluent, far better educated) maternal grandparents lived in California, thereby proving themselves, before a local judge, to be worthless wastrels. Hm?

So the poor little girl grew up in the backwoods of upstate New York until her paternal grandmother finally died of diabetes. This gave her grandfather an excuse to get rid of her: he shipped her off to the maternal grandparents in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There her fortunes changed. The California relatives were moderately affluent (not wealthy, by any means; but neither were they dirt-poor, in the mode of the New York relatives). She got a halfway decent high-school education and ended up with a job that would put a roof over her head and food on her table.

But…uhhhh…

What did stylish, even moderately “loose” women of those times do?

They smoked, that’s what they did.

Result: she developed a virtually inescapable addiction to nicotine. Even if she’d wanted to quit smoking (she certainly did not!), she probably could not have done so.

And the resulting result: She was murdered by the tobacco manufacturers. Eventually she died of tobacco-induced cancer.

A real fine way to go. Yeah.

Some time before she actually got sick from the habit, the word came down that smoking tobacco could kill you. By then, though, she’d learned that anything she didn’t want to hear was BS emanated by Big Brother.

And you be sure that “quit smoking” was NOT something she wanted to hear.

So she puffed her way into the grave.

DID she commit suicide?

I kinda doubt it. I think she just refused to differentiate between bullshit, propaganda, and accurate science. And because she couldn’t or wouldn’t make that distinction…well…she died.

On the other hand…. You could argue that willful ignorance of the facts is a form of suicide.

Yep.