Ruby and I are perambulating the north-eastern quadrant of the ‘Hood. This area is sandwiched between a broad, green park to the south and a desert wilderness area to the north. As we stroll along, we run into Wile E. Coyote, a resident of that wilderness park. He presumably has trotted down into the ‘Hood in search of a delicious stray cat.
Because, after all, EVERYone has a Constitutional right to let their cat run loose, right?
Oh, my goodness! The FLAP that dawg caused!
Every third passerby felt called upon to warn me, in hysterical tones, that there’s a coyote up there!
Eeek. Eeeek, say I. Eeek eeek eeeek.
Folks. Leave the damn dawg alone, and it will leave you alone. Keep your tame dog on a lead, and the coyote will leave your beloved pup alone.
Why on earth are people SOOOO stupid about such obvious things?
LOL! The coyotes around here want an encounter with you even less than you want an encounter with them. When they see or hear you coming, they turn tail and trot away.
Nevertheless, urban coyotes are among the reason we who have any common sense walk our dogs on a leash — along with the far more dangerous automobiles and unleashed dogs and stupid humans who think they must grab your dog, pet it, and feed it junk treats.
Am I the only one who’s flabbergasted and fatigued by the stupidity of our fellow humans?
Y’know… It’s kinda embarrassing to have a son (even a magnificently grown one) who’s a lot smarter than you are. Eeps!
The other day, my son purloined my car out of my garage. He refuses to bring it back. So here I am: carless in Gaza, having to do errands on foot and hire an Uber driver for more involved appointments. I thought the car-grabbing maneuver was just a moment of nastiness, or else the kid was trying to pull some sort of demented power play.
Uhmmm…. Not too swift on the uptake, am I??? :-
In fact, what he has been doing is demonstrating that he’s about 50 times smarter than his agèd muther!
Here’s what has happened since we took that car out of my garage:
* Not a dime has been diddled away on gasoline, car servicing, or anything else of a vehicular nature.
* The guy who lives catty-corner across the street revealed himself as an Uber driver.
> No kidding!!!! He uses his personal car as a taxicab…and he lives all of 30 seconds away.
> Took a ride with him: He appears to be a good, safe driver, and the inside of his chariot is spotlessly clean.
* I have not tried to kill a single one of my Fellow Homicidal Drivers.
* I did NOT, as had been planned, schlep the tank to the Ford dealer for updated maintenance work. $$$
* With the car locked up my son’s house, I’ve no concern about the passing burglars visiting my garage.
* The garage has been incredibly easy to keep clean (who knew???)
* Walking to the Albertson’s, Sprouts, or El Rancho provides a highly satisfactory amount of mild exercise.
Who knew, indeed? In a highly urban environment, the benefits of going car-free outweigh the benefits of owning a car.
That’s assuming you don’t use your car for regular commuting and you don’t have to drive to any destination every day.
Y’know what? I’m thinking we should get rid of that car altogether. Sell it and bank the money. Then I get M’jito or the Uber dude to drive me to the (relatively few) destinations I need to go to these days.
LOL! Just as I was about to stroll off to the Sprouts, along comes
ROARRRRRR ROAARRRR ROOOOAAAARRRR!!!
Dayum! It’s Gerardo and his boys.
Raising the question: How do those guys know when I’m in the middle of something that I can’t easily knock off, or just about to head out the door and need to get going?
They must have some kinda mental telepathy. ‘Cause it never fails.
No kidding. Absolutely NOTHING can be going on, but when I get up to haul on some clothes and trudge to…where?
* a grocery store
* the Walgreen’s
* the veterinarian
* the dentist’s office
* a doctor’s office
* or just to a trailhead on the side of North Mountain…
THERE THEY ARE!
Sheeeee-ut!
Now I’ve gotta sit around for 45 minutes, serenaded by leaf-blowers, weed-whackers, and assorted other noise-makers…waiting for them to get done so I can pay them for their (back-breaking!!) work.
Seriously: How these fellas survive a summer in this place just plain escapes me. It is hotter than the Hubs out there — I believe 112 was predicted for today — and they are working like mules. Even with top-of-the-line gasoline-powered tools, that job is best described as A Bitch. I can’t even imagine trying to do it at 11:30 a.m. on a 112-degree day with a 24% chance of rain.
And, since my Dear Son has kiped my car, to do the couple of local errands I was about to launch into, I’ll have to walk through even more ungodly heat, or else hire an Uber cab and pay for two rides (one to the stores; one back to the house). Neither of those are appealing options.
Apparently, a few of the grocery stores around here will deliver. But that poses its own problem: Most Americans do NOT know how to select produce. And since most of my diet consists of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats, about 2/3 of what I order is likely to be…uhm…somewhat wanting.
*****
Our boys FLY through the (gawdawful) yard clean-up. And they charge me $100 for a job that the boss usually does for $80.
Grrrrr.
But truth to tell: I ain’t complaining. It’s hotter than hell out there, and they do a damn good job…
but…
OH HELL AND DAMNATION!
They’ve gone off and left the side gate open!
RUBY!
RUBY!!!
WHERE ARE YOU????
Shoot out the door, trying to chase down the dog!
Incredibly, she hasn’t gone far. Matter of fact, she’s in the house. Thank the Gods and all their angels.
Once that little dog takes off down the street, she is GONE. And unassisted, she’s unlikely ever to make her way back here.
Did the woman who murdered my motherknow what she was doing?
Well…there is an element of ambiguity there. Luella was, after all, stupid as a post, a perfect match for her less-than-brilliant spouse.
But Jeez! How hard is it to understand “You must clean all produce thoroughly AND sanitize it, lest you come down with amoebic dysentery, which will put you in the hospital and may even kill you”?
Really, how hard IS that? Especially if you’re sat down in a classroom and made to WATCH the process, step by step, for sanitizing contaminated produce?
Back in the 1950s, American wives who were sent out to Saudi Arabia to accompany their spouses, on contract with Aramco, were required to take classes in how to prepare food safely and how to keep their families well. One point of those classes was to convince you to clean your food thoroughly before cooking it or putting it (raw, as in the case of salad greens) on the table.
There was nothing difficult about these lessons:
*Germs
*Germs make you sick
*Germs make your kids sick
*Germs can even kill you and your kids.
*So you must wash all your food thoroughly to get rid of the germs.
*This especially applies to things you eat raw, such as salad greens.
Does this seem hard to you?
Seemed pretty self-evident to the ten-year-old me. But I do remember my parents’ idiot friend, Luella, standing in the kitchen and preparing a cabbage salad…without ever so much as rinsing off the leaves. And I remember her handing me pieces of raw, unwashed cabbage greens to munch on, as she puttered about the kitchen.
This treat did nothing to me. Not unduly surprising, since I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a two-year-old and, during the time we spent there, was exposed to every Middle Eastern germ known to personkind.
But…that yummy salad made my mother very, VERY sick. Desperately sick.
The company sent her back to New York, where she was hospitalized for weeks and dosed with every treatment known and imagined to beat back the microbes.
She spent a good two or three weeks in the Ras Tanura hospital before the company doctors felt it was safe to fly her back to New York, where she spent the better part of another month in in treatment – drastic treatment.
That STUPID, evil woman apparently poisoned my mother on purpose.
What did she think it would do to her? Probably nothing. She was so stupid she didn’t understand difficult concepts like the germ theory. But she had been told about it. And told about it. And told about it again and again. If she’d had a synapse between her ears, she would have understood that unwashed produce grown in fields fertilized by human feces was likely to make you good and sick. How hard IS that to understand?
To this day, I remain convinced that Luella quite deliberately sickened my mother by quite deliberately neglecting to sanitize the dinner produce. What…A…Witch!
At any rate, my mother did survive, though she was never fully well again. Eventually she did die of a gastric cancer – to what extent it was related to the parasitic infection and the ferocious treatment, I do not know. But…I do remain convinced, to this day, that Luella killed my mother.*
I don’t get unconvinced easily, y’know…
*Actually, while Luella had a lot to do with it, the tobacco manufacturers went a long way toward killing my mother. She was addicted to nicotine, and so, thanks to that habit, she smoked herself into the grave.
Not even 7:30 a.m. by the time the Ruby and I stumble back to the house. We left at dawn.
The SMOG! My gawd, the SMOG!
At first I thought it was fog. Seriously: it looks like a San Francisco morning out there. Doesn’t feel like it. It’s 95 in the shade of the back porch. The sky: yellow with crap floating in the air.
Horrid, horrid place.
If my son weren’t here, I’d be soooo gone!
Where would I go?
Berkeley, where my relatives lived for decades. Gawdlmighty, I do miss Berkeley.
The foothills of Tucson. Clean air, relative quiet, fairly upscale.
San Diego, in its more upper-middle-class incarnations.
Paris…parts of it.
San Francisco, where I belong…
oh, Hell: ANYWHERE! Anywhere but here!
Wunderground, that eminent weather-reporting site, predicts 112 degrees with a 6% chance of rain. Hm…observant of them.
Local weather reporters claim yesterday was Phoenix’s hottest July 30 on record.
Uhhh…sure. Yeah. Must be mighty boring to be a weather reporter. 😀
Walking home, Ruby and I passed a house on the little pass-through street bordering our slab of the ‘Hood. And by golly, out in front watering his yard was one of the handsomest Black men I’ve ever met. Quite possibly one of the handsomest of all possible men.
Not only that, but he was friendly. And he had a big ole’ black lab named Olive.
Hilariously, Olive was my maternal grandmother’s name.
Must be Fate, eh?
Olive. She died horribly: uterine cancer as a result of her lively sex life. My poor mother had to take care of the woman on her deathbed (Olive’s, that is…not my mother’s… 😀 )
Seriously: imagine inflicting the care of a wild-assed chippie on a teenaged girl, as said chippie lay dying. What a horror show!!
And what the HELL possesses people?
There’s some question about that episode, though. Years later, I found evidence that Olive had not died when my mother was 16 years old, but in fact was living in the Santa Barbara area at the time my own son was born. Never tried to track it down, though: pisseth me off too much.
Still. Sometimes I do wonder if my mother knew her mother was still living. Or if the crackpot family told her she’d died, either by way of freeing Olive from responsibility for her illegitmate daughter or by way of freeing my mother of having to interact with her…uhh…”racey” mother.
Mwa hah ha! The LAST thing a reasonably rational person needs is a mud-bath in sentimentality…
Seriously: The Internet, being a repository of all things remembered, forgettable or not, presents a serious threat to your sanity. It invites you to wallow in memories best left forgotten,
We have my friend Bruce Macalvanah, about a year ahead of me at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. We were about in the fifth or sixth grade at the time.
Next: my father’s hatred of Macalvanah Senior. I do not know why my father loathed Macalvanah with such passion. They worked together on the docks, both of them harbor pilots. My father considered Macalvanah to be a dangerous idiot…what happened to create that opinion escapes me.
Then we had the awful, mean, vicious brats at the school, and the stupid teachers who couldn’t seem to bring the little darlin’s under control. With the exception of the first grade and the third grade, I was freakin’ miserable all the way through the six grades I spent out there, until we came back to the States and the kids and my new school had no idea I was the Weird Little Kid.
But let us not forget the kid who lived halfway down the block… Ennis Hatch. The only other little darlin’ out there who didn’t create a hobby of making me miserable.
Bruce was one of the three kids in Rasty Nasty who didn’t torment me. Why, I never understood. When we came back to the states, none of the li’l darlings in the San Francisco school’s sixth grade seemed to know that I was cut out to be a pariah. They were all pleasant to me. None of them made it their business to make me miserable. I had friends. We played together after school. No one seemed to think I was weird.
But in Arabia? Dear God, was I hated! Hated and hated and hated and hated. The little darlin’s out there did everything they could to trash my life…and they were good at it. Over some six years, only three kids out there were not just acidly mean to me. One was a little girl named June B. The second, another girl child about my age. And the other was Bruce MacAlvanah. He was a year older than me…but didn’t seem to recognize that meant he wasn’t supposed to have much to do with me.
For reasons I never did know, my father HATED MacAlvanah, Bruce’s father. The guy seemed like a nice enough fellow to me. But my father thought he was a dangerous idiot. Apparently something had happened down on the docks to inspire lifelong scorn in my father.
They were both harbor pilots, steering tugboats to wrangle tankers and freighters in and out of the docks — one false move, as you can imagine, could lead to a grim and fatal catastrophe.
But where our family was concerned, the one who allegedly was a menace was MacAlvanah’s wife, Luella. She apparently poisoned my mother, and I do believe she did it on purpose: deliberately served up contaminated salad greens that gave my mother a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.
My mother very nearly died from the infection. But oddly…none of the rest of the people at that dining table came down with it. I can tell you that my mother would never have served herself contaminated lettuce or cabbage: she sanitized every single bite that went into a bowl, a plate, or a pan.
As we kids lingered in the kitchen, Luella handed me pieces of the leaves she was cutting up for that salad. I scarfed it all down merrily…and I never got sick.
So…wha??? Either the produce wasn’t actually contaminated, or somehow Luella managed to dip specific pieces of produce into some bug-infested water and then drop them into my mother’s bowl. I dunno. What really happened there, I dunno. My mother was damn near psychotic about raw produce while we were out there: most assuredly, she would not eat anything that hadn’t been sanitized. So…I have no proof of what happened there: only the experience of watching my mother get sicker and sicker in a hospital bed, and almost die as she lay in the hospital.
None of the rest of us at that table got sick that night. So as episodes go, it was freakin’ weird.
***
If you were one of the little darlin’s in the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School during the early 1950s: Be assured that I have not forgotten your meanness — and I never will.
Ohhh well. There’s a lot one should forget but never will.
