Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Why?

by

I do believe that she knew what she was doing.

She knew smoking causes cancer. That revelation was in every print and broadcast medium in the English language.

She knew what dying of cancer was about. She had watched her mother die of it as she attended the woman on her deathbed.

She knew her sidestream smoke was making her little girl sick. And sick. And sicker.

She knew her effing cigarettes infested every air-conditioning system, from the car’s to their apartment’s to her new home’s. She knew the car stank and her home stank to high heaven because of her smoking habit.

If you knew your toxic habit was making your kid sick…if you knew it was stinking up your home and your car…if you knew it was killing you…WHY would you keep on with it?

Seriously: no matter how much your smelly habit pleased you, no matter how much it distracted you from the petty miseries of everyday life, no matter how much you loved the stink of burning tobacco…WHY would you stick with it when you knew it was poisoning your child? The child you wanted so much that you went through three failed pregnancies to get her?

That just mystifies me. She couldn’t NOT have known. And so the only conclusion you can draw is that at some level she was doing it on purpose. She wanted to die.

She smoked herself into the grave because she welcomed the grave. 

She welcomed it so much she didn’t care whether her daughter went there with her. Hey—maybe so much the better, eh? She wouldn’t be lonely there…

Seriously: I was sick all the time I was growing up, living in the stinky houses where she poisoned the air with her stench.

There really is no other explanation than that, at some level, she welcomed death — the death she knew those fukkin’ cancer sticks would bring her. Why she would put her beloved daughter and her fine husband at risk, too: that mystifies me. Suicide is one thing; murder is another.

She did succeed in killing herself. She died of a tobacco-induced cancer.

She seems to have failed at doing me in, too. So far, I haven’t developed a terminal cancer. That we know of…

***

I never could understand the stupidity of it. But I never did well at understanding stupidity in general.

Seriously: she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew her habit would kill her and, at best, make her child sick. So…why??????

What on earth possessed her?

Yeah, I know: addiction.

But she was amply endowed with psychological resources. She was smart — you can be sure she knew what she was doing to herself. She was capable of making up her mind to accomplish something and then doing that something. She doted on her child and surely didn’t want to make the kid sick on purpose.

She was aware that I was sick all the time with chronic respiratory ailments. The connection between the mom’s cancer sticks and the kid’s constant coughing was obvious.

We live in a society that criminalizes self-harm by addiction to various drugs. Why do we tolerate self-harm by nicotine addiction? Why do deliberately harming children by choking them with toxic smoke?

Oh yeah. Why did I need to ask?

$

 

 

Ninety degrees at seven-forty…

by

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.

What Happened to Her?

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Yknow… Sometimes in idle moments I wonder what happened to my mother to make her SO SCARED.

Something must have happened. You wouldn’t be that terrorized of ordinary daily living unless something had happened to you.

When DXH and I lived downtown, we had a beautiful old classic rich person’s house in the historic part of the city. It really WAS beautiful. And the people who had it before us added on to it, creating a little mansion with a huge living room, huge dining room, large breakfast room, vast kitchen, large laundry room, separate TV room, and four bedrooms.

The house was first-rate. The neighborhood left something to be desired, though. Like…basic safety. The place swarmed with scammers, rapists, and burglars.

DXH traveled off and on for his job and his civic volunteerism. When he would leave town, my mother would get all upset.

No kidding: she would be nigh unto frantic when he absented himself.

She lived, with my father, in Sun City, a mausoleum-like retirement tract that stood a 30- or 40-minute drive from our house, through unpleasant traffic.

But whenever DXH would leave town, she would volunteer to drive into the city and stay with me while he was gone. What on earth she thought she was going to do if the dread burglar/mad rapist actually did enter the house escapes me. But there she was.

What she thought she would do is shoot the ba*tard. She would always show up with a nice little revolver, which she would set on a TV table next to the fold-out bed where she slept. This would give me the willies — she did not have formal self-defense training, and I don’t even know if she had formal training in the use of a pistol. But my father did: he was a licensed firearms instructor. So…I expect she knew how to pull the trigger.

The question, o’course, was whether she knew when to pull the trigger.

And when not…

Most of all, though, what worried me was that she was so scared. 

Now, in those days, women were scared. I was, too, when left alone in a house that any passing sh!thead could easily enter. And occasionally did enter…  But…but…why was she SO damn scared she thought she needed a deadly weapon at her side, even when a large dog was sitting there guarding her?

Yes. “Scared” was why we owned a German shepherd…

I figured something must have happened to her. You surely couldn’t imagine yourself into a state of fear so elevated. She must have had something real to cause that terror.

If so, she never told me what it was. (Thank goodness: if she had, I would have been just as terrorized.)

One of the reasons my parents retired to Sun City was that people believed those stodgy realms were safer than safe. What could happen? Who would want to rape a wrinkled, gray old bat? Who would waste their time burgling the home of some wretch trying to live on Social Security?

Well. Stuff happened all the time. Overall, the public imagined that Sun Citizens were fairly affluent. They weren’t, but compared to someone living on welfare in South Phoenix, they appeared to be. So burglaries did happen. Stick-ups did happen. And the occasional bizarre rape did happen.

So the truth was, our house and neighborhood were at no more risk — or not much more — than their little retirement dream house out in the far western suburbs. But I didn’t know anyone else who felt called upon to keep a revolver at the side of their bed.

Here, where Ruby and I live now, is…safety-wise? About the same. Certainly no safer than anywhere else. Certainly not as safe as a place in a gated community or a high-rise with a security guard posted in the lobby.

But hereabouts I don’t feel at anything like the risk we sensed downtown. We have deadbolts on every outside-facing door and on every security screen door. Alarms on every window. And a dog that barks like a banshee. You couldn’t get in here without giving me plenty of warning to get out a different door or to lock myself and the dawg behind a solid-core interior door and call the cops.

{sigh}

But really: what a place we live in, eh? The Land of the Free and the Home of the Terrorized.

When I was a kid, my mother was wary…but we didn’t live inside a barricaded fortress. What do you suppose has changed? And how?

by

Remembering Paul P., my college boyfriend. How my parents hated him!!!  Mostly, I think, because of his ethnicity.

It would have made more sense to hate him because he introduced me to alcohol and sex when I was about 17 or 18. This was in my junior year, which would have been about 1964.

Paul was white, but he was Eastern European.

For reasons (if any) that escape me, my parents disapproved of Eastern Europeans. If you weren’t white and British or Western European – or a white American — you did not make the cut, in their world.

I was madly in love with Paul, who was handsome, fairly smart, and reasonably ambitious. His morals left something to be desired: fuc!ing an underage girl was questionable, as was his enthusiastic approval of his best buddy’s laying a barmaid because the buddy’s wife was so advanced in pregnancy that she couldn’t accommodate his dong.

If that latter episode hadn’t happened, I probably would have married Paul. It was just a little(!!) too revolting for my taste, though… Talk about your narrow escapes!!

But he seems to have turned out OK. He became a university administrator. And online there are pictures of him surrounded by his loving family (absent any barmaids). So I assume his life went reasonably well.

Hope he’s living happily ever after…

Lone Wolf Howls at Moon…

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Aaa-rooooooo!  Leave me alone, goddamit!!! SNAP BITE!

LOL! Wednesday: Not sure whether this is a Cleaning-Lady Day. But I don’t think it is. Sure as Hell hope not, anyway.

Talk about your ingrates, eh?! Here I am, loafing in a spotless house, and WHINING because the person who keeps the damn place spotless is likely to show up and interfere with my beloved solitude.

What a nut case, eh?

Ay-yup. I am such a hopeless loner that I even resent having someone around when that someone cleans my house and hauls out the trash and makes my life altogether tolerable.

😮

My son is coming over this morning to drag me to the dentist. 

A crown fell off a molar. In theory, the dentist should have to in$tall another crown. But…waaaaiiit-a-minit here! Look at that tooth and you see nothing wrong with it!!! No cavity. No filling. No busted faces.

The alarming implication is that the dentist installed a totally unnecessary crown, and gouged me several hundred bucks for the privilege. So we’ll be having a little discussion with him today.

And boyoboy, am I ever NOT looking forward to that exchange.

So between the cleaning chaos and the looming dental confrontation, this is not shaping up to be a great day.

Ugh!

Weird Little Experience…

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Now, HOW on earth did I know?????  

Wonder-Cleaning Lady just emailed to say she wouldn’t be able to come shovel out the Funny Farm this week. And that’s fine…she has — you know — a life, if you can imagine.

But the weird thing is…yesterday evening and then again this morning I thought, clear as day, “Luz is not gonna show up this week”!

There was no reason to imagine that. She had said nothing. And yet somehow I knew she was not gonna come over today.

Isn’t that strange?

***

Oh, well. She does such a superb job that even after two weeks, the place is relatively clean. I’ll sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms. Since I keep the kitchen pretty clean all the time, she shouldn’t have too much extra hassle when she does resurface.

Ruby-Doo will miss her, but I won’t miss the roar of the vacuum and the bustle of the dusting, sweeping, bathroom-scrubbing, bed-changing…and whatnot.

😀

woo-WOO-woooo