Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Traipsing to Pretoria….

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Hot, wet morning!

Out the door as dawn cracked, wherewith to take an exercise walk before it gets unbearably hot.

“Gets”???? Seriously?

Ohhhh well. 

It was down to the Albertson’s shopping center, wherein (I imagined) to visit the shopping-lot doctor’s office and tell the staff to QUIT CALLING ME ON THE PHONE, DAMMIT!!!!!!!

Three guesses:

* They weren’t open
* They weren’t open
* Or, they weren’t open

Right. Nine a.m. of a mid-week day, and no one was there.

Brilliant white cumulus clouds climb through a radiant blue sky. They seem to be growing, thickening. Presumably we’ll get some rain this afternoon.

Passed the PILES of cheap apartments along Main Drag West. Years ago, incredibly, my mother wanted me to rent a place in those dumps. They were no worse, really, than they are now. And no better. Not a place where you’d want to live. Especially not if you were a 20-something college kid.

Well. Post-college kid. I’d finished the B.A. and was lurking, trying to decide what to do next.

One thing I did NOT want to do was continue my career as a phone-answering receptionist, working for something less than almost nothin’. 😀

In any event, I cannot even BEGIN to imagine why those dumps, even when they were 30 years newer, would have been a desirable place for a young woman to live. Chez Pitz!

What on earth was my mother thinking???? 

Now and again, I imagine I really ought to sell the Dog Palace and move either out into the suburbs or deeper into town. Rationality soon catches up, though: it’s expensive as hell to sell your house, buy another one, and move. Plus I love my house and I ain’t a-gunna move away from here.

So. There!

Handsome young black man, loafing in the covered bus stop. Ohhhh you gorgeous critter! Smile. He smiles back. He’s plainly stoned.

Damn.

Proceed northward, ever northward, along Main Drag West. This, to avoid being followed into the ‘Hood.

Mercifully, I’m now tooooo old to appeal to any man: young, old, black, white, purple, stoned or straight…. Thank goodness! 

After enough distance is passed, dodge into the ‘Hood. Come upon a fine young father, busily installing a basketball hoop for his preschool-age kid. Adorable! Despite its surroundings, our neighborhood still DOES have a lot to recommend it.

DO I want to stay here, now and evermore?

Well….I’m so ambiguous as to whether the answer is probably “yeah….” I incline to operate on the “When in Doubt, Don’t” principle. If you’re not dead sure that XXX is what you want to do, then don’t do XXX.

duh! Why does that not seem obvious?

And yet….when ambiguity lurks, it surely isn’t obvious.

If you don’t know how well the real estate will hold its value…

If you don’t know whether those slum apartments will continue to go downhill, or whether the Yup set will discover them and turn them into high-rent urban campgrounds…

If you don’t know whether your health is gonna hold out as you roam deeper into decrepitude…

If you don’t know if your son would like to inherit your shack, after you finally do croak over…

Well, Helle’s belles: then YOU DON’T KNOW. 

Personally, I’m averse to making any kind of decision or move when I don’t know. Knowing what I’m doing: that’s what I do. But sometimes, that’s just not possible.

{sigh}

Gray Day Redux

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Another spectacularly, tropically rainy gray day. Weirdly beautiful. Ruby and I would be out traipsing through the ‘Hood if I could move my hip without eliciting a shriek of pain.

Alas, I can’t. So…instead, we loaf upon the bed, gazing out the big bedroom windows onto the cloudy skies and the burbling pool.

Dayum! If I didn’t hurt so much, I’d be out there paddling around in the drink.

Truth to tell, though, I’m afraid that if I got into the pool, I might not be able to climb out by myself. Would need to have a phone out there, to dial 911 if I couldn’t haul myself upright. And…

How do I not WANT to call 911 to drag me out of the drink? Let me count the ways….

My GAWD does this thing ever HURT!!! And there seems to be no position in which it hurts less.

***

The Haunts of the day take the form of memories of Saudi Arabia, where I grew up on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

My gawd! What a hellish place!

Even as a little kid, I think, I realized how horrible it was.

Well…that’s not quite the whole story. For me, as a kid resident of (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the horribleness was embellished by the fact that I was a weird little kid, whose eccentricity brought down on her all pure nastiness that grade-school children are capable of coughing up.

GOD, but those brats were monsters. And boyoboy, did they pour the hate on the weird little girl who imagined she wanted to grow up to be an astronomer. You just can’t even picture what nasty little horrors those junior Ras Tanura expats were. Evil, evil brats.

Now, in old age, one wonders where the moron teachers were. How come the idiot who ran the 2nd grade didn’t put a muffler on her little darlins’ mouths? How come the bitch who ran the 4th grade couldn’t bring herself to behave like a decent human being? How come my parents had to take me out of the school in the 5th grade so I could/would address the academic work and get through a whole day without collapsing into a nervous pile?

How did I hate that school? Let me count the ways.

And yes: the problem was the school and its monster brats and its idiot teachers. As soon as we got back to the States, I dived into the sixth grade in a San Francisco public school.   And weirdly, I did just fine there.

More than just fine, as a matter of fact. I thrived. In the California public schools, I hit the National Honor Society. And my performance excelled to such a degree that I started at the university at the end of the 11th grade — skipping my senior year in high school.

Must’ve been because I was a crazy nut case, right?

Oh well. Think about something else, f’r godsake!  

Clouds.

Rain.

Overgrown hedge.

Strange orange flowers.

Funny little dawg.

Sooooooo glad to be as far on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia as it is possible to get!

😀  😮  😀

What happened next…

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Yep: that appears to be what we have next on the agenda. My son is on his way over here to pick me up and drag me to the physical therapist’s gym, there to be pestered and exercised no end.

UGH!  How could I do without it??????

Well. Actually…I have no business bellyaching about this routine.

The spavined arm hurts like the dickens just now — and has done so all afternoon. Some supervised exercising should loosen up that shoulder and, with any luck at all, ease the hip pain, too…ohhhhhhg helle’s belles!!!!  Here he is!

*************************************
WOW!!!!!
*************************************

Did that PT guy make a difference?  Or DID he make a DIFFERENCE????

Oh, my goodness. It feels like I have a whole new body!

Well…not quite that far out in Left Field, but close. Very close! Seriously: the pain is SO much better, it’s hard to believe!

My splendid son has been schlepping me over to the therapists’ gym: a MAJOR hassle for him, as he has (of all things!) a job. Now that we’re home and back in the house, the hip pain is almost gone, and the shoulder pain: on the high side of tolerable!

WOW! This is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to walk around without hurting!

By golly. Now I’ll have to stop bellyaching about these procedures. (Never can have any fun, can I? 😮  ) Seriously: if this kind of improvement continues over the next few weeks, before ya know it I’ll be walking around normally…and getting up from a chair without groaning in agony.

Really: I seriously DO hope this improvement continues. If it does, it’ll be some kinda miracle!

Well. If this is what you get from an evening in Hell…BRING IT ON!

Stay Away from My Doorbell…Stay Away from…

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LOL! How’s about “Stay away from My House“?

This town is alive with door-to-door nuisances. I’ve pretty well learned never to answer the door. As policies go, that one leaves something to be desired: it causes you to miss calls from folks you do want to see. But…they number only about one in five of the hordes who show up at the house.

My neighbor to the west won’t answer the door at all. Doesn’t seem to matter whether she thinks she knows who’s out there or not. Ring her doorbell, and you get…nothin’.  If you want to see her, you have to call her on the phone and arrange to get together.

Ahhhh, the good ole days…when people were people and neighbors were friends. If you can imagine, my great-aunt’s house in Berkeley had — hang onto your hat — GLASS PANES in the front door. She could see whoever was out there, and decide on the spot whether to talk with them or not. Today, I wouldn’t have glass in an exterior door, not on a bet.

“Pleeze! Burgle this house!”

But…forgodsake, can you freakin’ imagine??? We live in a country today where you don’t dare answer the front doorbell.  Certainly not unless you know who’s out there. Not just who they are, but what they want.

Dayum, I miss Berkeley. What a pretty, peaceful, and civilized little burg.

Not that way anymore, of that you can be sure.

Seriously: I don’t think I’d feel safe living in my relatives’ pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house today. Too many druggies. Too many burglars. Too many wannabe rapists. Too many plain ole-fashioned pests.

Today, there really are only two nearby places I can think of where I would feel relatively safe:

One is dreary, boring, Sun City, baking away like a plate of cookies under the roaring path of Luke Air Force Base’s endless battalions of fighter jets. Horrible, whitey-white, hostile place.

The other is Fountain Hills: quiet, cheaply built, and baking away under the desert sun. Well. “Quiet” except during the breakfast hour and the dinner/cocktail hour, when HORDES of passenger and fighter jets pour into Sky Harbor airport, just to the south.

No, thankee.

Do I feel safe here at the Funny Farm?

Surely you jest…. 😀

Just now, though, the back door is hanging open, beckoning to every panhandler, druggy, and wannabe burglar who wanders up the alley. They have to make a special effort to see over the back wall, though: it’s topped with a good three feet of thorny, tangled vines. And if you wander into the backyard from any direction, you set off the Doggy Alarm, whose barkfest gives me plenty of time to shut and lock the door or to grab a pistol. Or both.

What.
A.
Place.

But…far as I can see, just about all of America is What. A Place these days.

So it goes…and goes…

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…and goes.  

As I mentioned in my latest scribble here, the bastards at the Mayo Clinic have, for no good reason other than my age, nullified my driver’s license.

This, in my opinion, amounts to your basic discrimination. And if I had a little more energy and a little more sense of outrage, I’d hire my lawyer to sue the ba*tards and undo that mess.

But y’know what?

I don’t give a damn. 

The truth is, here in this part of town one scarcely needs to drive.

First off, my house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, not three, but FOUR major grocery stores. And a doctor’s office. And a beauty salon. And a dentist’s office. And a hardware store. And a computer store. And a light-rail train.

So: irked though I am, I’m not about to expend the energy to demand JUSTICE, by gawd.

Second off, the place is crawling with Uber cabs.

Yeah: the Uber fad has taken over the ‘Hood, and we’re inundated with folks who hope they can quit their jobs and spend the rest of their pre-retirement lives driving old folks around North Phoenix.

Fine by me, folks! 😀

Thinking about the Uber inundation led me to recall…ohhh gawd!…the horror of my father and his wife’s sojourn in the old-folkerie called Orangewood. It’s an apartment complex for the aged and the redundant, and overall…well…depends on your taste. He liked it. I thought it was Chez Pitz.

Bearing in mind that my father had gone to sea all his adult life and so was accustomed to — and comfortable with — institutions, Orangewood gave the two of them a fine array of benefits.

* A nice little apartment that gazed out upon the rolling greenery of a pleasant, golf-course-like lawn

* Central location: walking distance to bus stops (if you didn’t mind waiting an hour for a ride…)

* Constant supervision

* Accomplished staff to help you deal with bills, doctors, taxes, and whatnot

* An army of workers to see that you haven’t fallen or set fire to the kitchen

* And on and on…

To my taste, it was pretty awful. I can handle those things myself, and do not need to be treated like a child locked in a playpen to get them done. But…if you don’t want to be bothered or you no longer can handle that ditz, it was great.

And…well…I suppose even I will have to admit (sooner or later) that a point in life comes where you ARE essentially a child locked in a playpen.

* You’ve fallen behind the prevailing technology to the point where you find it difficult to operate the present array of household gadgets.

* You really (in reality, not in some moron’s estimation) shouldn’t be driving.

* You’ve become decrepit enough that walking even to the nearby stores is becoming a challenge…especially in bad weather.

* You forget everything and then some…

Yeah: at some point you DO need a younger mind and body to usher you along toward the final exit.

I don’t believe I’ve reached that point yet — and sincerely hope I drop dead before I do reach it. And so what I most want is to be left to get on with my life’s chores without Big Brother’s interference.

At any rate, back to the point formerly at hand: what does this have to do with whether senior citizens should be imprisoned in old-folkeries? Not much, except that it brought to mind this episode:

My father and his wife, the redoubtable Helen, had taken it upon themselves one morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. But by this time, they were no longer driving. So they took a cab to the doctor’s office.

Whenever they were finished yakking with the doc’, they called a cab to come pick them up and drive them back home. Parked themselves in the doctor’s waiting room and…waited.

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

Some time later that afternoon, I caught wind of this. Drove over to the quack’s office and found them sitting in his lobby.

Waiting

….and waiting

….and waiting….

They had been there something like FOUR HOURS and no cab had shown up. And no, it wasn’t because they hadn’t called. The doc’s staff had called the cab company several times.

Hey. It’s just old bats, eh? Who gives a damn about them?

And that is the attitude toward the elderly in our culture. We live in Old Folks’ Hell, my friends.

That’s why I don’t want to live in a prison for old folks. And why, in general when dealing with service people and other strangers, I try to obscure my age and my situation. The more they know about you, the worse for you!

Welp…if I were a snappy Old Folk just now, I’d jump in the pool & get some exercise. But…I ain’t snappy and my hip hurts and the dog and I walked for an hour this morning and soooooo….this old bat is on her way to hit the sack. Again.

♥

 

Friday Morning…

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Not yet 8:30…the Dawg and the Humann have rolled out of the sack, trudged around the neighborhood, perused the pool and the yard, chowed down on whatever was in the fridge, slurped up coffee, read the news (and then some) and now…

Now?  Wish nothing more than to go back to bed.

😀

I should give lessons on how to waste time. Wonder how much people would pay for a course in professional time-killing?

My plan for today was to visit a venerable old-folkerie called Orangewood, a single-story spread about three blocks up the road from the house where DXH and I lived while M’hijito was in high school.

Question: Do I wanna live in that place?
Question: Would there be any benefit to moving over there?
Question: Could I duplicate its services and benefits right here in my house?

Answers:

* Hell, NO! I hate loathe and despise institutional living and do not wish to spend the last months or (God forfend!) years of my life in a dormitory for old folks.

* Yes. Plenty of benefit. You have someone else to clean up after you. You have a cafeteria serving up piles of chow…a “benefit” only if that’s the kind of gunk you like to eat. You have a doctor on the premises, one who materializes, as he did for my father, the minute you have a stroke. You have lots of company. You have a taxi service that will schlep you to appointments off-campus — for “free.”

* Y’know…I’ll bet I can. Turns out my cleaning lady used to go into people’s homes and provide day-to-day services for the agèd and the infirm. If she was doing that, others surely are, too. I suspect I can hire someone to provide most or all of the services that Orangewood provides. Only…in peace and quiet. Without serenades from the half-deaf neighbor’s TV set. Without annoying rules. Without disgusting institutional food.

If she was doing that for a living, that means other folks are doing it. So…one of my assignments just now is to call around and find out how to find such folks, how much they cost, and whether they really can do a decent job of it.

So there you have it: the present Project. Find out if it’s possible to replicate the services of an old-folkerie in your own home. And if so: start getting into position to do exactly that.

The longer I can stay out of any such place, the fewer weeks and months I’ll spend in old-age misery. At least, so I figure. Stands to reason, anyway.