Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Life: Which Direction to Take?

by

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. 

 

 

What Next, Lord?

by

It’s now an hour and a half later than when I wrote this morning’s post. I take it into my feeble little noggin to walk up to the nearby Albertson’s grocery store to pick up a few minor necessaries. Right….

Step out the front door and….

ROAR!!!!

Cop helicopter blasts overhead. Circles the neighborhood: round and round he goes, clearly searching for someone.

Someone you may be sure we do not want to get to know…

Back into the house. Lock the doors behind me. Double-check that all the other doors and windows are locked.

See why I find myself thinking, almost obsessively, about moving someplace else?

Ugh!

I really do begin to think that if I’m going to stay in a single-family home, I need to move down into my son’s neighborhood. Houses there are within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s overpriced market, plus a nearby aged shopping center hosts a large Fry’s supermarket.

Hafta say that I no longer feel safe in Phoenix.

O’course, I never did: you’d be a fool to think all was hunky and dorey in this place, wherever you live & whatever the time of day. But these days I do feel more uncomfortable than I used to.

I never used to feel unsafe inside my home, in broad daylight.

And that’s telling me it may be time to move.

But move where?

  • My son’s neighborhood? Frankly, it’s no safer there than here…in fact, it’s probably less safe.
  • Fountain Hills, whither my cousin betook herself? Very nice, very toney…but wayyyy too far from where my son lives.
  • Tempe, suburban home of Arizona State University? Meh! It’s about as bland as you can get. Does have, as one of its advantages, easy proximity to the many cultural activities at the university campus. But…how likely am I to take advantage of those things?
  • South Scottsdale, where my best friend and her husband lived for awhile after they returned to the Valley from an excursion in the Virgin Islands? No better than Tempe in the Meh! department.
  • Into an old-folkerie? The Beatitudes and Orangewood retirement “homes” await. Problem: I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. And I’m not anxious to wind up my life in one of those places.

I can’t say that I exactly feel unsafe, here in the Hood. It feels more like…nuisanceferizing.

Yeah: one damnfool nuisance after another.

The cop flyovers are nuisances. No, I don’t feel at risk. But I do feel that I have to get up, close and lock all the exterior doors, and check the windows to be sure they’re secured shut.

Do I want to do without the cop flyovers? Hell, no! Those cops are all we have between us and a legion of sh!theads.

But…how wise is it, really, to stay here much longer?

Hotter Than the Hubs…Still

by

Seven in the morning. The dog and I are back from the Morning Trudge. She’s taken up her position in the cool cave under the toilet. The human is desperately swilling iced tea.

Ugh! What an AWFUL morning! Hot and sticky and swampy…feels like hideous Saudi Arabia, there on the shore of the Persian Gulf where we lived for ten years. That was an awful place then. And this is an awful place just now.

We walked by our transplanted neighbor J’s house. It used to belong to SDXB, until he got spooked by Tony the Romanian Landlord and ran away to Sun City. In his panic, SDXB merrily sold the place for a pence to the City of Phoenix, who gave it away to a welfare case.

That lady is a sweetheart and a nice person to have as a neighbor. But she has neither the experience nor the cash to maintain an aging upper-middle-class house. Sooo…. the place has more or less gone to pot.

And of course, that affects property values for all of us.

Thank you, Big Brother! 

😀

Occasionally I think about moving down into M’hijito’s neighborhood. Centrally located, within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store, madly gentrifying, steps from a bus line….  But…

But GAWD, do I hate moving! Even if the cost were irrelevant (which ain’t the case anymore!), packing up four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a dining room, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a two-car garage is more than I care to contemplate. Just. Too. Much. Work!

But…hmmm….  It might be worth it.

Just depends on which way the wind blows.

If the city continues to give away houses here, property values will tank. In that case, I won’t be able to get enough for this house to move into a comparably middle-class neighborhood, and when M’Hijito inherits this place, its value will be nil. So…

Could be worth selling out now and jumping to a more stable district.

My neighborhood is “less stable,” shall we say, because we are the next one south of a dangerous slum. The low-income district to the north of us is notorious, and it took some nerve (and maybe some stupidity?) to buy into our area.

Because of that neighboring blight, I was able to afford much nicer housing than I could have hoped to buy anywhere else in the central city or the East Valley.

Our area has stayed stolidly middle-class since I moved in — a good 15 years ago. But it’s beginning to look like that may not be the case much longer. The accursed city ran a train line up Main Drag West, conveniently bringing every bum in town up to our neighborhood. The nearby grocery stores are getting old…the infrastructure is getting old…everything is getting old. So…

It may be time to start thinking about moving elsewhere. Or consigning myself now to the inevitable old folks’ prison.

At any rate: for the moment…yes. The place is still pleasantly tidy and blandly middle-class. But how long will that be the case?

Anyone’s guess…

Biggest Mistake of My Life…

by

Loafing under gray skies, I find myself gazing back on the major decisions of my life. Ever-entertaining….

It strikes me that the single worst decision I ever made was NOT to have majored, as an undergraduate, in a subject that would have landed me a decent job. Without benefit of a graduate degree.

As it is — stupidly having majored in English and pursued not one but two graduate degrees — I can’t get a “decent job” for love nor money.

Consider the likely possibilities:

An Ed.D. would have gotten me a principal’s position in some high school in a desirable location — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.

An MBA almost certainly would have led to a decently paying corporate job. Just about anywhere.

An MS in microbiology (my favorite subject) would have landed a job at a hospital or a university, pursuing interesting challenges.(nevvermind that women were not welcome in the sciences at the time…TOTALLY not welcome!)

Any of those jobs could have led me to a career far, far away from hot, muggy, intellectually backward Arizona.

But ohhhhhh  no!  I had to chase a Ph.D. in English…so that I wouldn’t have to go back and change my undergraduate major to a subject that would have made economic sense.

What? Me? Make sense? 

Surely you jest…

Walk Right In, Sit Right Down…

by

This morning, for reasons unknown, my feeble little  mind cast itself back over one of the gooniest experiences of my life. And it was an experience we went through because neither my young husband nor I had the nerve or the common sense to utter the word “NO.”

Back in the day, he and I lived in a gentrifying historic neighborhood that occupied a tract of beautiful old houses in central Phoenix. And our house was a beautiful old house: it dated back to the 1930s. We loved the place. To this day I miss it…though I sure am glad I don’t have to take care of it anymore.

So anyway….there we were, soaking up joy in the gorgeous old Encanto neighborhood, when one day this couple showed up at the front door.

They were, it developed, old friends of my husband, from college days. And, in classic hippy-dippy fashion, they had jumped in their car and taken off across the country, to craft the Adventure of a Lifetime. When they arrived in Phoenix, they looked us up, said “hello,” moved right in, and sat right down.

No kidding! They invited themselves in, and the next thing we knew they were unpacking their smelly gear in our family room, there to take possession of the sofa-bed.

They were carrying all sorts of food and crap in their car. This stuff, they hauled into the house and dumped in the family room. Half-spoiled, it stank to high heaven. That didn’t seem to bother them, though.

They hung around for a week or ten days, until I told my young husband to ask them to leave. Even then, it took some doing to shoehorn them out of the house! But eventually they moved their campsite to the downtown YMCA, and (mercifully) that was the last we saw of them.

The room stank for days after they left.

The one good thing that came of their little invasion was that my husband and I learned a good lesson: NEVER let people invite themselves into your home!!!

😀

Lordie! For awhile, I was afraid we would have to buy a new sofa-bed. Eventually we did buy a new mattress…but it wasn’t easy to find one, and it wasn’t something we were budgeted for.

I did learn a raft of lessons from that misadventure, though. Primary among them: I will NEVER allow people to stay in my home again, even if I know them fairly well. 

You just never know what kind of stupid stuff people will get up to. Or how they live their daily lives, what their hygiene is like, and how much nerve they have when it comes to taking advantage of you.

Man! Once stung, twice wary!

I Want My Mother Back!

by

Not only her, but also my great-grandmother and my elegantly intellectual great-aunt. (My grandmother was gone long before I came onto the scene.)

Oh, my! How my mother would have admired her bright and classy grandson today! She really would have thought he was The Business.

But alas, she smoked herself to death shortly before her grandson came on the scene.

When the word came down, in the 1950s, that smoking causes cancer, she decided the pronouncement was Big Brother trying to control our behavior. So she chose to ignore the science.

And, not surprisingly, she developed the disease shortly after my father retired and betook himself and her to Sun City, Arizona.

Not long after her cancer was discovered, my pregnancy was also discovered! No kidding: my first (and only) child.

She was so sick by the time she lay dying that she didn’t much care about anything or anyone around her. No doubt what she most wanted was an end to it all.

Shortly after M’jito was born, I took him out to my parents’ house in Sun City, there to introduce the grandparents to him.

When I carried him into their bedroom to show him off, she took one look at him, shrugged, and said,”Meh!”

She wasn’t even slightly interested in him.

So offended was I that I felt I never wanted to see her again. But…well…  That was neither feasible nor humane. My father needed my support, and on reflection I had to allow that she had no reason to get all excited about a child that she would never watch beyond infancy. Particularly given that she didn’t especially like children…

Eventually, then, I got over it. After all (as I came to realize)…

  • She would not live to see this child grow old enough to toddle around on two feet.
  • She didn’t especially care for children; she had me only because her grandmother insisted on it.
  • When she died, we figured, our little son would be well short of the age when he would remember her. And that proved to be true, in spades.
  • And I could not walk away from her as she lay dying.

Still. What would it have taken to have muttered, “That’s nice, dear. Congratulations…”

So. OK, I never got over it. And yeah: I want my mother back. The mother who was still reasonably healthy before she smoked herself into oblivion, the one who cared about everyone around her, the one who would have been delighted with her adorable little grandchild.

But no. ‘Twas not to be.