Coffee heat rising

Common sense

A…a…n…d furthermore….

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Here’s what was going on yesterday evening, while Ruby the Corgi and I were doggy-walking and dodging bullets.

{sigh}

Y’know, this stuff is gettin’ old. I’m beginning to think SDXB was right; time to move to Sun City, where you can enjoy the Silence of the Mausoleum, day in and night out.

Having lived in Sun City when my parents moved there, dragging me with them and dumping me at the University of Arizona, I really, really do not want to live there again. So, when SDXB announced he was headed west, I refused to go with him. But sweartagod, I’m beginning to think that may have been a mistake.

At the time SDXB moved out there, it was fairly calm here in North Phoenix, for a big-city neighborhood. But…that’s not so true anymore. It feels like every time you turn around, along comes some new shenanigan. You can’t take the dog for a walk around the block without carrying a pistol with you.

But…my problem with Sun City is that I don’t wanna live in a mausoleum. And that’s what the place feels like. The silence of the tomb reigns. Plus you have that generation’s 1950s-style hatred of minority: the place is Whiteyville with a vengeance.

One of my friends moved out there from the East Valley, delighted at the prospect of living in a place designed for retirees. Problem is, it’s a place designed for white retirees…and he ain’t one of those. The locals ganged up on the poor guy and hounded him until he moved out!

Guess I should have warned him. But as a practical matter, it’s been over 60 years since my parents moved to Sun City. And frankly, I assumed the locals would have come into the 21st century by now. Wrong!

That notwithstanding, I find it a dreary and depressing venue. Weirdly enough, I like the sound of children playing. And even of an occasional teenager blasting the car radio as they cruise up the street. That, plus it’s a 40-minute drive into central Phoenix, where my son lives. I’d never see the guy again!

Well. You don’t have to move to a ghetto for old folks to escape the constant whiz of flying bullets. Other areas of the city are reasonably quiet and safe.

Problem is, they’re a lot more expensive than this part of town. Plus they’re further from M’hijito’s house.

I kinda doubt that I could get enough for this house to buy another house in points east. Might be able to get into a fairly tony North Central high-rise apartment…but then what am I gonna do with Ruby?

Plus…truth to tell, I love this house. It’s a couple of bedrooms too large, but otherwise it’s perfect for me.

  • It’s in a moderately safe neighborhood.
  • It’s close to my preferred shopping venues.
  • It’s easy to keep clean.
  • It has a nice pool…one that, for an exorbitant price, responds with Pool Joy to the ministrations of a hired pool dude.
  • It has gorgeous mature trees. And desert landscaping.
  • It has adequately nice neighbors.

Why on earth would I want to move?

Old Age: Live Free or Die???

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Is it possible to live independently in your dotage, right up until you die?

* Maybe, depending on how you define “independent.”
* Maybe, depending on how much cash you can fork over to an “independent living” outfit.
* Maybe, depending on how long “right up until you die” is.

Just heard from Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend, who (as you may recall) is living in Sun City, a depressing age-limited, race-limited (de facto) suburb on the west side of the Phoenix metropolitan area.

SDXB is pushing 85. He’s been in excellent health all his life and continues to take care of himself, in his own home all by himself.

New Girlfriend, we’re told, has sold her home out there and moved into an old-folkerie — these days, euphemistically called a “life-care community.” He sees the advantages, and as we speak is considering selling his nice little home in Sun City and imprisoning himself in one of those places, too.

And there are advantages. After my mother died, my father moved himself into one of those places, then called “Orangewood.” That probably was one of the best favors he could have done for himself…and for me.

For me? I didn’t have to take care of him!

  • He did not at any time live in my home.
  • He did as he pleased (more or less); I did as I pleased.
  • Our lifestyles remained independent, to the extent that we did not interfere with each other.
  • When he had his stroke (I was present at the time), medical people were right there, on the grounds, to care for him, and a medical clinic was right there to provide effective, experienced emergency care until an ambulance could carry him off to a hospital.

And that last one? It was HUGE. It meant there was no delay in obtaining experienced, knowledgeable medical care for him: right then and there.

So…is it time for me to start thinking along the Old-Folkerie lines?

Hm.

Well, quite frankly, nothing could strike me more as ANATHEMA.

No. I do not want to live in an institution. As a college student, I loathed living in the dorm. The elbow-to-elbow lifestyle just doesn’t make it for me.

So the question is…Is there a way to extend the time that I can keep living in my home until I’m totally bedridden or until I die?

In today’s America, it’s not at all clear that any such thing is possible. Unless they’re very wealthy, most young and middle-aged Americans have to work, and work full-time. That’s not an option.

This effectively limits care for the elderly either to institutional living or to hiring a full-time care-taker.

Neither of those is a very affordable option.

Nor, really, is it taking care of them yourself a desirable option. How well do you get along with your parents…seriously? How well do they get along with you? Even if you could afford to quit your job and stay h0me to care for an infirm elder (which you probably can’t…), how long do you think you could hang onto your marbles in that circumstance? Or as an old buzzard: how long do figure you can tolerate having your adult kids tell you what to do and when to do it?

Uh huh…you see what I mean, right?…

So I’ve been thinking how can I manage to take care of myself — without inflicting that care on my son — until I’m ready to make the Big Leap into the Other World?

Hmmmmm….

Let us try to explore this matter, in upcoming chapters of Funny about Money.

WHY do people do this?

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What if your bright and educated daughter showed up one day with a Certified Total Jerk and announced, “We’re in love! We’re getting married and moving to a dump in the middle of nowhere because — y’know! — he’s a mining engineer!”

What on earth WOULD you do?

That’s the story of my (former) mother-in-law. She married one of the Great Turkeys of the Western World — proving that love does go blind at the garden gate, or somewhere along the path.

He couldn’t hold a decent job — not for love nor money — because  he was such a jerk that he insulted just about everyone he met. At some point, someone in our tribe remarked that he never stayed on a job more than about six months. If he didn’t piss off the bosses enough to make them fire him, he’d quit on his own before things reached that point.

The particularly Looney-Toons aspect of this saga is that M-i-L was a very bright woman who, in a time when few women even thought about going to college, much less actually did it, had a four-year degree from a major university.

It always posed a kind of mystery to me…because she wasn’t an unattractive woman, and there was no reason she couldn’t have hooked up with a decent human being. Instead, she flang herself down the pit of a marriage to one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met.

They were divorced by the time their son and I married. Dear Dad had remarried by then. Crazy Mom never remarried, and indeed, after some years, came out openly as a lesbian.

At one point along the line, Dear (ex-)Father-in-law was visiting at our house. I asked him — truly mystified, I must say! — why on earth he married the woman.

“Because,” said he, “our parents disapproved.”

Well. That was the kind of fliply stupid thing he typically said.

No doubt the story was more complex than that. But it does beg another question: Why didn’t you wait for a year or so and see how things worked out?

If you were intent on scandalizing your small-town parents, you could have taken off on a prenuptial fake honeymoon: shacked up together for three months or so, just to drive the relatives crazy. This would have allowed you to see how that relationship would work out, and….

…yeah: And maybe have spared you 20 years of married misery.

Jeeemineee! I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d had a daughter who showed up with a jerk like that in tow. Nor what if I’d had a son who jumped into the marriage bed with a wacko like the character Chuck selected.

Nothing, I suppose. They were both of age. Their parents rightfully had no say about who they chose in the mate department.

Huh…. It puzzles me to this day: not only that they got married at all, but that they stayed together for some 20 years. It must have been 20 years in Hell!

Stop the World…

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i wanna get off!!!!!

This damn place — lovely uptown Phoenix — gets crazier and crazier with each passing day. Accumulated passing days have given us insane cross-streets and neighborhood roads: lunatic drivers, roads that go nowhere, a construction zone at every turn…what a horrible place!

Wait, wait… Whew! A miracle just happened: WordPress let me in to Funny about Money, a maneuver it’s been rejecting all morning.

I could not remember the secret codes…or much of anything else. Apparently the computer’s memory has not yet been consumed by senility: at length, it remembered SOMETHING and let me into FaM’s site.

So this morning I determined to buy a silly dood-dad that I’ve been coveting for some time. So it was off to the gigantic {supermarket} up on Dunlap Road.

They didn’t have it.

Ohhhkayyyyy….

Around the corner to the hardware store:

Noooo…not a chance in Hell.,

Ohhhhhkayyyyy,,,,

Across Main Drag Central, over to the westside shopping area, into another hardware store.

Nope.,

Into another supermarket.

Har har hardy-har har!

Over to the Safeway.

Not a chance in Hell.

Up to the Albertson’s. It may not be Hell, but it doesn’t have a chance of carrying the doo-dad, either.

Driving around & around. Ugh!

Truth to tell, I love to drive. But I am SO-O-O-O SICK of driving in L.A. East!!!!! Gawdlmighty, I hate the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Just a nasty, frustrating, crazy-making place to drive a car.

Driving around gets crazier with each day. People behave like they’re high on meth, wherever they go. Who knows? Maybe in my senilitude, I do the same thing. All I know is…GET OUTTA MY WAY, YA CRAZY FOOLS!

Seriously: that’s how it feels to drive here.

The more Phoenix resembles the L.A. area, the more I hate it.

Seriously: if my son didn’t live here, I would be sooooooooo long gone!

Where would I go?

Hm….

Here in Arizona?

* Sedona
* the Oro Valley area outside of Tucson
* Fountain Hills, an overpriced suburb of Scottsdale
* Prescott (probably not: too cold in the winter)

Uhmmmm…that’s about it.

In California:

* San Francisco
* Certain parts of San Diego
* Carmel/Monterey, if I had all the money in the world

In Nevada?

*Phbbhphttt!

In New Mexico?

* Santa Fe: again, if I had all the money in the world

****

Welp! Since “All the money in the world” doesn’t apply here. it looks like I’m stuck. And the more I live in Central Arizona, the less I like it.

****

Advice to the unwary: think one helluva lot more carefully than I did about where you’d like to spend your dotage!

The Salton Sea Boondoggle

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About the time we came back from Saudi Arabia for (thank gawd!) our last long leave, my father celebrated by purchasing the Car of His Dreams: a Chrysler sedan. He bought it in New York. He and my mother drove it across the country to San Francisco, where he took up a first-mate’s job on an oil tanker and we lived for a couple of years in a tony apartment complex called Parkmerced. Then he got another, better-paying job, shipping out of Long Beach, California.  So my mother and I packed up all our worldly goods, sent everything south, and moved into a (crummy!) apartment in Southern California.

Of course, we took the new Chrysler with us.

My father was so proud of that car. It was a Rolls Royce for the working classes. At least, so it was in his mind.

Meanwhile, my father being quite the cheapskate, my mother took it into her head to create her own little career: selling real estate. She had become friendly with a real estate saleswoman who was quite the scam artist. This woman persuaded my mother to get a real estate license and throw in with her, selling houses at the Salton Sea.

Salton Sea, then imagined to be a developer’s bonanza, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.  And my mother got swept right up in it. Fortunately, she didn’t buy any property down there, so my father didn’t lose his hard-earned shirt through her real-estate exploit. But….

Among other things, one aspect of my mother’s project involved driving from L.A. through Palm Springs and down to the half-baked development at Salton Sea. And that involved driving through a broad, sandy desert, where the wind blew fiercely.

Fiercely enough to sandblast the finish off that swell new car, right down to the metal.

My father must have just been horrified when he came home from the ship and saw the paint scoured off his beautiful new car.

And for what?

For naught. Salton Sea, as it developed, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.

***

She had no clue. Neither, unfortunately, did he. But one senses that if he’d had a shore job, if he hadn’t been off at sea for week after week and month after month, he would have sussed out the rip-off before she got caught up in it..

I was just a kid in high school. I therefore had an excuse (of sorts) to have no clue. Instinct suggested that all was not perfect there, but there was no way in Hell (where we were dwelling…) that I could have figured out that it was a huge, ridiculous scam. Even if I could have, my parents paid no attention to me. I MIGHT have alerted my father…but probably not. As far as he was concerned, I was just a weird little kid — and worse, a weird female kid.

So they got sucked into the Salton Sea boondoggle. How much they lost — above and beyond the damage to a brand-new Chrysler — I do not know. They didn’t share their financial matters with a weird little kid.

Mercifully, she didn’t buy any property down there. I’m pretty sure that was only because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He clung to every penny more fiercely than Scrooge McDuck hung onto his dollars.

Luckily for me..

The Insane Fidgeting of Tempus…

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Tempus fidgets, as my mother used to say. (Yah: very funny. Chortle!)

Yesterday evening I was thinking about my college boyfriend — let’s just call him P. — whom my parents hated, loathed, and detested.

Why they so reviled the man was something I could never figure out. To this day, it’s just a guess…but revile is the word. The detested him at a professional level.

My guess is that it was because he was from an Eastern European background, and they were bigots at a professional level.

You understand: he was NOT European. He was born and raised in Chicago, as were most of his nearest relatives. But in my parents’ minds…well…once a Bosnian, always a Bosnian???

My parents demanded that I break up a two-year relationship with P., one that had become serious enough that he and I assumed we would marry after we finished at the University of Arizona. When my mother made it clear that I would have to choose between them and him,…well…there really wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t about to abandon my parents, who had hauled me all over the world, provided a sterling upbringing, and sent me, on their dime, through four years of college.

A few other details frosted that cake, though. I think the one that cinched my decision came when his best buddy took up with a barfly, frolicking merrily in the sack with her…while his wife was too pregnant to accommodate him.

Seriously: the guy’s wife is eight or nine months along, and there he is, screwing this chippy. And P thought that was cool, just hunky and dory…after all, his wife couldn’t or wouldn’t let him have any. What’s a man s’pposed to do?

Right?

All my mother’s vociferous objections to P had little effect on my taste for him. I was madly in love, after all. Right?

But when, that night as we lingered in bed together, he remarked that “A guy has gotta have it,” excusing his friend’s faithless lust, I thought…ah hah! If you think that’s OK for your pal, you’ll figure it’s OK for you.”

Right?

Uh huh… Well, right or not, out he went. I flang him out: sent him off weeping into the night.

That that was the last I saw of him.

From what I can tell, he went back to the Midwest, got a master’s degree in those parts — in Education, the easiest of all possible programs — and then dove into a series of bureaucratic jobs. Turns out that for some time during my last stint as an Arizona State University bureaucrat, he was working in the ASU president’s office!

I had no idea. Didn’t find out about it until I was long gone from the Great Desert University, as was he. If ever I encountered him on the campus, I didn’t recognize him.

Which, I suppose, is just as well.