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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Conflagration!

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Wow! Can you believe those wildfires in California?

Wildfire in Kaibab National Forest, Arizona. Photo:  Mike McMillan, U.S. Forest Service.

When I was in high school, we lived not far from some of these venues — although in solidly urban, in-town areas. Not in combustible suburbs, that is. Though we were a goodly distance from fire-prone areas, I sure can remember, as a kid, worrying whether the current conflagration could come our way.

Unlikely: we were in the middle of Long Beach, a highly citified stretch of concrete and asphalt. Even in the good ole’ days, though, a barrage of media hoo-ha would make it sound like disaster was lurking at the next stoplight down the street.

La Maya and La Bethulia have a place by the seashore, somewhat south of San Francisco. Far as I can tell from reports on the Internet, the fires haven’t reached their parts…yet.

But even way over here in the depths of the Sonoran Desert, we’ve got a stiff wind blowing.

That suggests it’s at least as windy — probably more so — on the coast. And of course wildfires travel on the wind. Sure am glad I’m not there!

WHY restaurant food???

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As those who have followed Funny about Money for awhile know, dear Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend (SDXB) is a gifted and renowned cheapskate. The guy doesn’t diddle away money — any money — on much of anything. If the result ain’t worth the price, he ain’t spendin’ his cash.

Early on in our relationship, I learned that this principle applied to eating out. Dear Ex-Husband (DXH) and I ate out all the time, partly because over the years I had  become exceptionally bored with cooking and partly because it was somehow ever-so-much less annoying when the Kidlet refused to eat someone else’s cooking, as opposed to some damfool thing I’d spent half the afternoon preparing.

After I escaped our Home Sweet Home, I landed in an apartment complex where SDXB, his mother, and one of his daughters lived. And that was when I learned, to my astonishment, that he would not go out to eat restaurant food unless there was some dramatic special occasion for it.

Said he:

I cook better than about 95% of restaurants do.

  • Restaurant food is horrifically overpriced.
  • A nice home dining-room beats the ambience of a noisy, crowded restaurant, any day.
  • Why drive across the city when you can fix a better meal in your own kitchen?

Hmmmm… Well, thought I…yeah. But: anything to avoid work, eh?

Welp, over time I came to see the light. In fact, tossing a steak, a few French fries, and a veggie on the barbecue is one helluva lot less hassle than driving across the city to be serenaded by screaming brats, dreary Muzak, and a barrage of chatter while trying to communicate with some poor overworked waitress.

These were all in force the other day, when a couple friends of mine and I went out for lunch in a popular suburban restaurant here. And….

That was when SDXB’s lessons in fine cuisine came back to light and were mightily reinforced.

😀

WHAT a circus.

First thing you’ve gotta say about eating in restaurants: be grateful, be mightily grateful, that you are not an employee of any restaurant, especially not a worker of the “waitstaff” variety.

Migawd! Those women were working like the proverbial horses. Ambient noise was freakin’ unholy. The customers’ squalling, restless brats were terrible. The crowd, amplified by people waiting to be seated, downright defied belief.

Next thing you’ve gotta say: REALLY, truly…most of the time you’d do about 110% better to fix your meal at home. Or at least to buy take-out from a grocery store or maybe(!) a competent restaurant.

Next thing you can say: the food left a lot to be desired. Like…say…food. The mediocrity of what they served up: Good Gawd!

I could have prepared a meal out of a box that would have had more flavor and more interest than the puréed cardboard we received.

So…yeah. It’s true, what SDXB says: Better to eat at your own table, any day, than to trudge to a restaurant for a meal.

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.

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!

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.

My Mother Killed Herself

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I’d guess she cut at least 10 to 15 years off her life with the incessant smoking, and the bootleg booze couldn’t have helped. (Alcohol was illegal in Arabia, a Moslem country…so we Americans in camp made our own. My parents had a still in our storage closet and and a lash-up on our kitchen stove.) Between the accursed tobacco habit and the backyard swilling, she shortened her life by decades.

My father?  Well, as I recall, he didn’t smoke as much as she did. She was hardly ever conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth — I knew when she was awake in the wee hours, because from the instant she awoke I could smell her stink in my bedroom. He didn’t do that. Yes: he smoked. But not every living, breathing goddamn conscious moment.

DAMN the people who manufacture those murderous products!

She never saw her grandson. Apparently she didn’t care: by the time I got pregnant, she was dying of her cancer habit. When I told her I was going to have a baby — three or four months before she died — she shrugged and said “meh!”

Did she know she wouldn’t live long enough to see her grandson? Or did she just not care? I dunno. And…well…maybe I just don’t care anymore, either.

Sometimes I wonder, though . If she knew she was gonna die at 65 — when other women in the family lived to 85 or 95 — would she have knocked it off? It didn’t cut ten years off her life. It cut twenty years off her life: at least! Maybe even thirty.

But no. I think she knew exactly what she was doing.

Why in Hell would she do such a hideous thing to everyone who loved her?

Goddamn it! If you’re gonna kill yourself, get a gun and blow your brains out. Take a flying leap off the Golden Gate Bridge. But forgodsake, don’t use your suicide as an excuse to inflict torture on everyone around you.