Coffee heat rising

Common sense

She knew…

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Yes. She knew. 

What she didn’t understand was that my father also knew. And he wasn’t going to put up with it.

***

My father rescued me from the most horrific cruelty my mother could possibly have committed. Ever.

What she tried to do was maneuver things so that I had to repeat what she had to do as a girl my age: minister to her mother as her mother was dying of a self-inflicted cancer.

Her mother was a fast little thing, back in the 1920s and 30s. Apparently, she would fu*k just about anyone and anything that  came along, and then some. My mother once told me about coming home from school one afternoon, using her key to unlock the front door, walking into the living room, and finding her mother and a boyfriend on the floor in front of the fireplace, in flagrante delicto. 

Not surprisingly, the woman fell prey to a number of venereal diseases. In the ’20s and ’30s, treatment for these was pretty fierce stuff. Couldn’t have been good for your long-term health.

Probably not for your short-term health, either. 😮

In due course, my dear grandmother fell prey to a reproductive cancer: one that killed her.

My mother, then a young teenaged girl, had to tend to her as she lay on her deathbed.

Result: she was determined that her own daughter would NOT do that. And the upshot of that was simply that my father chased me out of her room whenever I dared to approach her as she lay dying, years later, of the family disease: cancer.

In retrospect, I do understand what he was doing…and why.

But I also think he overdid it a bit. Probably he should have let me spend time by her bedside, even if I wasn’t toting bedpans and changing diapers.

Life. It distorts everything, eh?

Did She Know?

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Yeah, I believe she did. 

She knew exactly what she did, as she quietly and pleasurably and quite deliberately smoked herself into the grave.

She knew her stinking habit would kill her.

And she knew (quite correctly) that it would make her little girl sick.

The connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer became known in the 1950s.

Forgodsake, I was born in 1945.

So…yeah: when I was five years old, she knew she was making me sick.

And make me sick, she did: one gawdawful respiratory ailment after another after another. 

Yeah. I remember her simpering, one day, “Poor Dee! You’re so susceptible!” (Her nickname for me was Dee Dee. As a toddler, I couldn’t begin to pronounce the wacksh!t name she and my father inflicted on me, so baby-babble became the source of my day-to-day name.)

Gawdlmighty. If you believed your child was “susceptible” to every respiratory infection that came along and then some, WHY in the  name of God would you sit there and puff toxic fumes into her face?

Makes her sound stupid as a post, doesn’t it?

She wasn’t, though. She actually was a surprisingly smart woman — if hugely uneducated. What she was? Addicted, that’s what she was.

She was addicted to nicotine.

Even if she’d tried to stop smoking, she probably couldn’t.

Understand: She was never awake when she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth or her hands.

You knew when she woke up in the night because as you lay in your bedroom,  you could smell the f**king stink from her cancer stick: she wouldn’t lift her head from the pillow before lighting up.

She even took the damn things into the shower with her.

And — surprise! — they killed her. 

Pretty horribly, we might add. You don’t wanna die that way.

Evil, on an astronomical level: That describes the tobacco industry.  No one who is associated with it can be regarded as anything other than evil. It is an entire, huge industry based on murder.

That’s what tobacco products do: they murder you. In pain and agony and stinking horror.

Don’t let the ba*tards do that to you.

Icky Sticky Day!

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What a nasty Arizona summer day!

So humid that it’s overcast. And hotter than a three-dollar cookstove, as my father used to say: at 4:15 in the afternoon of a summer day on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Feels a whole lot like that, right now.

Just back from a brief perambulation of the ‘Hood. It was WAY too hot for that stunt! Whatever possessed me to go out strolling around in that swamp?

Gosh, how do I miss San Francisco?  Let me count the ways….

Wait! I can’t count that high!

Well, thank goodness for Amazon! They carry the type of crunchy brown sugar I like. Like it or not, you may be sure that I do NOT feel up for trudging through this heat and humidity to buy it at the grocery store.

Ordering it online, of course, means I have to wait for it. But that’s unlikely to kill me. The stuff is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Somehow I guess I can survive that long! 😀

Seriously: this is one of the ickiest days I’ve seen here. Back porch thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of an overcast day. Not all that hot, for Arizona — far from it! But sticky and gray and gummy. Just ugly weather.

Not fond of Arizona, really. If Ian the Great didn’t live here, you couldn’t drag me across the state line…  For sure, I’d be…where…?

* The San Francisco Bay area
….or
* Western Colorado
…..or
* Parts of Nevada
…..or
* Mars…

Anyplace but here, really.

Honestly! I thought my parents had lost their collective marbles when they moved to Sun City and dumped me into school at the University of Arizona.

Forgodsake, I was set to go to UC Berkeley! I assumed that was where I would go to undergraduate school and possibly grad school.

But oooohhhhh no. It was off to, forgodsake, Tucson for their little darlin’.

Okay, they weren’t educated or sophisticated people. To my father, a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. He surely would have understood the quality of a degree from Harvard or one of the elite women’s schools. But otherwise: there wasn’t much difference. Not in his mind.

Certainly not enough difference to pay a ton of money to get a degree from a decent public university.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up with not one, not two, but three degrees from Arizona universities. Because I myself, lacking close family with degrees from private schools — Cal Berkeley was our highest mark — I had no idea what the gradations between degrees from public schools might have been. If I’d known, of course, I’d have insisted on going to a California undergraduate school. Or to a private college. But…well…I hadn’t a clue. No more than my parents did.

Hmmmmm….?

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Idly reviewing recent posts here and…well…thinking holeee shee-ut! 

Pretty clearly, I’ve got somebody working for me who is not my friend. Some of the things that have happened lately ring of plain old-fashioned vandalism. 

Which one of my honored employees has been up to this stuff? Don’t know and, short of setting up an army of cameras and paying someone to review their films, I cannot imagine how to find out. Just now it looks like I have three choices:

* Sell the house and move into an old-folkerie
* Fire everyone who’s working for me now and start all over again
* Select one person that I imagine I can trust (which one???) and fire all the rest of them.

What a f*ckin’ nightmare!

And what kind of person deliberately torments a sick old woman?  

Forgodsake, it’s not like we have that much more time left for me to annoy you and make you miserable. Just because you don’t like me is no excuse to behave…well…downright immorally. If you hate me, fine! Quit you’re f**kin’ job and go to work someplace else!

WHY, Indeed….

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Yesterday Funny asked a rather pointless question: Why is life plagued by stupid people?

No answer to that one, I reckon…

But here’s another variation:

WHY did my mother, an overall intelligent and rational woman, commit suicide by smoking herself to death?

Yes, that is what she did.

She knew that tobacco smoking could — probably would — kill her.

She didn’t care.

She knew the unholy horrors that would be inflicted on her loved ones as they watched her die.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much she would suffer, having watched her own mother die of a self-inflicted cancer.

She didn’t care.

She knew how sick her second-hand smoke could make her daughter.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much her daughter loathed the stench of her stinking cigarettes, which permeated their home and poisoned its air.

She didn’t care.

So…WHY, in the name of God, did she NOT care about any of those life-crushing things?

Because she did know all of those matters, I do not believe for one second that she didn’t understand what she was doing. She smoked herself to death: on purpose. And if it made me sick in the process — well, Alhamdulillah.  Apparently, she truly didn’t care: not only that she was killing herself (which may have been the whole point of the exercise) but that she was sickening me in the process. Possibly even killing me.

Well, obviously she never reached that final goal. But I was sick all the time I was growing up, with one respiratory ailment after another after another. Basically, to indulge her own craving for nicotine, she deliberately made me sick. And she did so over 16 years, until I got old enough to get into the University of Arizona and leave her home.

Why on earth would you do that to your own child?

Life: Which Direction to Take?

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Not toward the liquor store, evidently.

😀

Imagining that I craved a glass of wine, along about 4:00 p.m. this afternoon I blasted out of the house and sailed toward the little booze store in the shopping center on the northern edge of the ‘Hood.

Got about two blocks along the way to the place and found myself thinking Why the f*** am I doing this????

Seriously: What on earth did I need a bottle of wine for? Or a fifth of whiskey? Or whatever I imagined I was gonna buy…

And, to my infinite surprise and delight, I found myself headed back to the house, empty-handed.

Yes. Turned around and came straight back to the Funny Farm: sans booze purchase.

For reasons I don’t clearly understand, my brain has decided it does not want its human to consume any more booze!

How weird is that, I ask you?

Truth to tell, I don’t think I drink to excess…at least, not by the standards of the crowd I run with.

My parents always had a cocktail or two before dinner: usually Canadian Club. Yes: every afternoon. After I came of age and was home from college, I would join them.

All my boyfriends guzzled merrily.

Dear Ex-Husband and I had a daily bourbon and water before dinner and wine with dinner. And that was for years. 

After he and I parted, the subsequent gentleman friends continued that tradition with me.

Understand: we weren’t getting sh!t-faced. We were just having a tipple or two.

After I found myself living in singletude, I continued that tradition: would break out the whiskey or the wine before dinner and pour a swiggle. Sometimes more than one swiggle….

Then one day it struck me that any more than one of those swiggles was making me…well…not high as a kite, but for sure, mildly inebriated. Maybe even more than mildly. And that was not good when one was loafing around the house all by one’s self.

So I decided to knock it off with the afternoon cocktails. Which I did.

But I continued to have a glass of wine (maybe a glass and a half) with dinner.

Time passed. Eventually it struck me that ANY swiggling was probably NOT a good thing. Dinnertime or no dinnertime.

So I quit. 

Yeah: cold turkey.

Have not had an alcoholic drink in some weeks.

And y’know… I don’t miss it!

That, I consider to be weird. 

Or maybe not. Maybe it was just time to knock off the swiggling and climb aboard the wagon.

Weird or not, it strikes me as a good thing. An exceptionally good thing, come to think of it. Because enjoyment or not, I do think consumption of alcohol — in any incarnation and in any amount — is not a good thing.

The Mormons and the Christian Scientists have got it right: booze in ANY amount just ain’t healthy! And the best thing you can do for yourself, if you’re a drinker to any degree, is to knock it off.

So…that’s what I’ve done. And the weird thing is…I don’t miss it!

Earlier efforts along these lines have indeed left me feeling deprived. But now? Not so much. For reasons I do not fully understand, I really, truly do not have any craving for a swiggle before dinner. Or a glass of wine with dinner.

So…yeah. This is a bit of a new direction for me.  We shall see how far I can travel in it.