Yeah, you read that right, far as it goes: Just now it’s 7:40 in the morning, and the thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch.
Ugh!
Dawg and I just returned from a stroll around the park — about a mile or so. Ruby is SO ridiculously cute and adorable that every passer-by has to pause and coo over her. So that tends to slow things down a bit.
Gawd, it feels like effing Saudi Arabia out there.
Not quite as colorfully wet, though, as when we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Come a summer morning, literally the humidity would drip off the eaves like rain. Houses out there had swamp cooling, so the “air conditioning” was marginally helpful, at best.
Jayzuz! What a place to grow up!
And Jayzuz! What a pair to grow up with as parents!
Not that they were bad parents, exactly (except when they were pounding on me). What made me resent them was their idiotic smoking habit.
Both of them smoked and smoked and smoked! The house stank from rafters to floor. The carpets stank. The furniture stank. The drapes stank. The air-conditioning system stank. We stank. Ugh!!!!!
What possesses people to do that?
To be fair, at the time — the 1950s — people didn’t understand (or believe) that smoking causes cancer. Seriously: When the word came down and reports appeared in women’s magazines and on the news reports, my mother discounted the whole idea. She believed it was Big Brother trying to tell us all what to do.
And, to continue being fair, she was deeply addicted to nicotine. She would have had a bitch of a time stopping, even if she’d wanted to — which, you may be sure, she did not.
But…jeez… Wouldn’t you think the fact that everything stank of tobacco smoke — your clothes, your hair, your kid’s clothes and hair, the carpets, the furniture, the draperies, the bedding, everything — would register with a person?
If it ever did, she didn’t give a damn. If her cigarettes burned down the planet, she was not a-gonna stop smoking.
Wouldn’t you think she would have made the connection between the house’s saturation with stinking smoke and her little girl’s chronic, awful respiratory infections? I was sick ALL THE TIME that I was growing up. “Ohhhhh,” she used to simper, “you’re so susceptible!”
Yeah. Not so susceptible to viruses, dear muther, as to the poison you puff into the air all day and half the night.
I have no clue whether the addictive quality of nicotine was widely known at the time. Hard to imagine how anyone could miss it…to get the picture, all you’d have to do is watch someone try to kick the habit. She knew, all right. She knew she was addicting herself and she knew she was making me sick. She just didn’t care. Those fukkin cigarettes were more important. Far more important.
Ugh! That’s what I’m led to think about, when the morning breaks to a hot, muggy, stuffy Arabia-like day. Fukkin’ cigarettes. And a woman laying in her bed dying in agony as her husband worked like an animal to care for her.
Guess I should have more empathy for her dying throes. But…she knew what she was doing. She knew tobacco could and probably would kill her. She had cared for her mother as her mother lay dying of cancer, so she knew what that was about, too.
{sigh} It’s hard to work up a lot of empathy for a person who deliberately kills herself with a toxic product. Just really hard.