Coffee heat rising

Common sense

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.

Really: There is no answer, is there?

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He had already decided that he wanted to move out of Sun City and into Orangewood, the old-folkerie of his choice. But she was having none of it.  Because he adored her, he wasn’t about to insist that she move someplace where she didn’t want to live. Surely 10 years in Saudi Arabia must have been enough of that!

So they stayed in Sun City until, eventually, her cigarette puffing and the effects of the gawdawful meds for the gawdawful gastric diseases she picked up in Arabia killed her. And he was ready: within hours after she died, he had the place packed up, an apartment rented at the old-folkerie, their house on the market: and he was ready to move.

I couldn’t have lived there, at that old-folkerie. It was institutional misery on a grand scale…just horrid! I could barely stand the rules in grade school, to say nothing of having to accustom oneself to living in a prison for the elderly.

The key, I think, was that he didn’t mind institutional living. He’d spent most of his adult life on ships, going to sea, What would have made me crazy felt like normal living conditions to him. And without my mother at his side, there was no reason for him to have to take care of a house.

To him, living in Orangewood, a holding pen for the elderly, felt normal. It must not, at base, have felt much different from living on a ship: Crowded conditions. Bad food. Someone else’s schedule dictating your life. He seemed to like it…and in fact, my guess is he may have liked it more than owning and having to run his house.

My mother, sadly, died soon after he retired — in her mid-sixties. She smoked herself to death. Her relatives — rabid Christian Scientists — didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. She did both: a-plenty. Basically, she smoked herself right into the grave.

Seriously: she was never awake when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. You knew when she woke up in the night because you could smell the stink from her f*cking cigarette. You knew that she was awake in the morning because the first thing she did before she lifted her head from her pillow was light up a f*cking cigarette. You knew when she was about to turn out the bedside lamp at night because the last thing she did before she went to sleep was to puff her way through one last f*cking cigarette. And that, amazingly, is no exaggeration.

He smoked, too, but not every living, breathing moment of conscious existence. He probably went through eight or ten cigarettes a day, if that many.

She smoked constantly.

Literally: she was never conscious when she wasn’t smoking. And no, she did NOT care that her sidestream smoke made her little girl sick. No, she did NOT care that I asked her to please not smoke so damn much around me. No, she did NOT care that doctors told her the smoking would kill her.

Not surprisingly, the habit did kill her. In a way, the surprise is that it let her live so long: she died on my birthday in her 65th year.

Sixty-five is a lot of years to puff your way through every goddamned conscious moment, eh? So you’ve gotta figure she was a pretty tough character…all things considered.

He loved her so. Oh, my, how he loved her.

***

No, he never complained about her f*cking tobacco habit. He smoked, too, but nothing like as much as she did.

He cared for her, lovingly and richly, through every ugly minute of the last weeks and months of her life. Did it even register with her that her idiotic habit created weeks of torture for him? If it did, apparently she didn’t care; no more than she cared that her fu*king clouds of smoke made her little girl sick.

***

After she died, he moved out of their sweet Sun City house. I’d say he couldn’t stand to stay there after the torment she’d put him through…but that wasn’t true at all. Before she fell ill, he had already decided to move into the (horrid, IMHO!) retirement/nursing home in town, an institution called Orangewood. It consisted of tiny apartments, barely big enough for one or two people, in an environment where you were watched every G.D. moment, regaled by the neighbors’ idiot TV shows, and fed disgusting institutional food.

Couldn’t have been much different from living on shipboard, I guess.

He seemed OK there, and before long took up with a hag whom he (foolishly!) married. And there he lived unhappily ever after.

Yeah. My mother killed herself. And she sure as Hell didn’t do him any good.

***

I never did understand why, when she knew she was making herself hideously sick, why she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was making her daughter sick. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was piling awful, ugly work onto the man who loved her more than life. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she’d have a shot at living longer if she’d quit with the cancer sticks. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew her whole home stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew he would have to watch her die, one ugly inch at a time. But she just kept right on puffing away.

WHY???? What on earth, what in the name of God would make you persist with that?

That was the thing that puzzled me, and still does. She must have known how much she was making him suffer. She must have known how miserable she was making her daughter. WHY would you do that to the people who love you?

Yeah: it’s an addiction. But y’know: people can get over addiction. When you can see you’re harming the people around you who care about you, the sane thing to do is to quit harming them. How hard is that, really?

###

Giddy-up!

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Two days later and, incredibly, we’re STILL on the wagon!

Who would’ve predicted it, eh?

Now, I ain’t a-gunna say that I don’t miss a nice beer right about now — come 4:20 in the afternoon. But neither am I gunna say that I’ll keel over in a faint without it.

The crazy-making peripheral neuropathy continues, though I could (maybe) persuade myself that it’s a little milder just now. For that to be credible, that milder-ing would have to continue for several days or weeks, and get more obvious as the time passes. So…about all we can say about that is time will tell. 

Meanwhile, I’ve come to think that if I’m going to be able to stay in my home as I age and not end up in one of those horrible warehouses for old people, I’ve got to get 100% sober and stay that way. That is to say, I’ve gotta quit drinking, and I’ve gotta quit drinking NOW.

So far, that’s not been very difficult. But…heh!!  It’s only been a few hours…

It needs to become not a few hours. Not a few days. But a few weeks.

And then a few months. And months and months… And then…yep: years. 

Videlicet: I’ve gotta get off the sauce and STAY off the sauce. Now and evermore.

We shall see, soon enough, whether that’s even remotely possible…

AAARRRRGHHH! Not to say “goddammit!”

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Just went out in back to enjoy this morning’s swiggle of coffee and…

Yeah:

Discovered that SOMEONE STOLE THE PILLOWS OFF THE BACK  PORCH CHAIRS. 

God.

Damm.

It.

!!!!!!!

I made those pillows myself, to fit the chairs. With some difficulty, we might add. Had to drive clear across west Phoenix to get the cushions and the fabric.

And now all but one of them is gone.

Yeah. The considerate thief left me ONE pillow to sit on. 

Ohhhhkayyyyyyy….given my decrepitude, is it possible that in a Senior Moment I stashed them in the garage or a closet to keep them out of the rain?

a) What rain???
b) What closet???

And c) NOOOO. Nope. No stack of lawn-chair pillows in any of the closets, in the garage, in the storage shed…nooooo where. 

So pretty clearly, somebody stole them.

Isn’t that cute?

I’ll have to electrify the next set, eh? Booby-trapped lawn chairs! 😀

GGGAAAARRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

I dunno what is going on these days, but of late everything that comes my way makes me angry as hell. 

The other Latest Goddam Outrage is that to get a covid shot around here you have to traipse to your doctor and get a prescription! 

Yeah. Kill an hour of your time driving around and sitting in a waiting room and yakking with the quack to get a 30-second jab!

What?

The?

Fuck?

I have yet to jump through those hoops — or to drive an hour out to the Mayo to talk MayoDoc into shooting me up. And so every breath  taken, presumably, risks laying me low with a potentially fatal respiratory infection.

That’s an hour each way. Yeah: TWO HOURS of driving time to get an ordinary drugstore shot.

It looks like having to extract a prescription for an ordinary flu or covid shot is going to be S.O.P. Sooo….I may have no choice!

My son thinks the Mayo can do no wrong, so at his behest all of his doctors and all of my doctors are working out there at the clinic.  Yeah: halfway to Bisbee.

Thus we’re talking about blowing away a whole afternoon to get a 20-second shot that has always been available at a pharmacy a ten-minute walk from my house!

Either that or taking a chance that maybe I won’t get the disease and praying for the best.

WTF???????