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Common sense

The Ole Guy…The Ole Neighborhood

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Took a hike up to the corner shopping center, there to pick up some not-very-necessaries and socialize with the locals. On the way home, I walked through the  northwest corner of the ‘Hood, an area that SDXB and I used to frequent when he lived here in Phoenix (before he made his escape to Sun City). At the time, I dwelt closer to noisy, crime-ridden Nineteenth Avenue. SDXB and I used to walk all around in that quarter, just about every day.

One house we passed almost every day belonged to a fella we called “The Ole Guy.” What a nice man he was. He and his wife had lived here forever, and by the time SDXB and I came on the scene, they were gettin’ on in years. She was usually indoors, but he liked to putter around in his yard and with his car, and so he would often be out in front. SDXB and I would hang out with him for awhile as we made our rounds of the’Hood.

Well, of course as you know (if you read FaM much), SDXB decamped to Sun City, chased off by the noisy new light-rail and the blossoming crime rate.

My house is far enough from the damn trains that I can’t hear their racket. And as for the murderers, rapists,, and burglars? Make. My. Day, Gentlemen! 

Plus I had lived in Sun City, hated it, and never ever wanna go back there again. Any day I’d rather have crime than stodgey. 😀

So I stayed.

So did the Ole Guy — for awhile. But soon enough, he had to deposit his wife in a nursing home, pretty much trashing his life and his joy. He disappeared from the scene — believe he moved into the same old-folkerie — and the house was sold to some anonymous suburban types. Dunno that I’ve ever even seen the present owners.

If owners they are: they could be renters, for all I know. 😀

But oh my! I do miss the Ole Guy. What a nice man he was: to my mind an emblem of the neighborhood and all that’s good about it.

And I do miss SDXB, who seems to be living happily ever after in Sun City.

Not “happily” enough to lure me back out there. For one thing, SDXB has a lovely new girlfriend, and I surely wouldn’t want to intrude on that relationship. And for another….ohhhhh boy, did I ever hate living in Sun City. And I ain’t a-goin’ back out there, no many how many old friends of mine have decamped to the place.

So…dayum! I feel like I’m the Last Vestige of the Old Neighborhood.

Which is silly, of course. There are no vestiges: just people who move in and people who move out.

But I suppose the ironic and kinda funny thing about it is that nowadays I’m the equivalent of The Ole Guy. Yeah: the ancient resident who’s lived here since the pyramids were built: that one.

Why stay?

* Too much work to pack up and decamp. (Can you spell laziness?)
* Kids. Migawd, I do love the sound of kids playing! Why would you want to live in a mausoleum where no kidlets are allowed?
* Centrality. We are smack in the middle of everything. The main reason I was trotting around on foot is that M’hijito imagines an old bat shouldn’t be bucketing around the homicidal streets of Phoenix (NEVER have a kid who’s an insurance adjuster!), and so he has protectively purloined the Dog Chariot and  locked it up in his garage. B…F…D…, say I: my house’s location is so superbly central that I don’t need a car to get to several grocery stores (one or two of them damn fancy), a doctor, a dentist, a vet a..this, a that, and another thing. A train line and two bus lines go by right up the street. And an Uber driver lives two houses down from me.
* Upper-middle-class upper-middle-itude. The place is upscale but not upscale. Handsome, cleanly cared for, moderately priced. It is, in short: just my speed, when it comes to real estate.

So…really, this is almost as good as San Francisco used to be for me and my parents, where we never moved our car out of the garage more than once or twice a month.

I figure I can live here until I drop dead, or until I simply cannot walk a block or so. Whichever comes first.

LOL!

But it does have to be said: when you’ve lived in a place for a long time, you do miss your old neighbors and you do miss the good-ole-days. Someday, no doubt, someone will miss me and my funny-looking corgis. But until then…

Well. I intend to reign supreme!

😀

 

Does It EVER stop? Or even slow down?

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Goodie Gumdrops! Now we’ve got a  new flu epidemic revving up. And the authorities expect it to be particularly bad in Colorado. That’s just across the state line…  😉

Seriously: if we have a flu epidemic in Colorado, we’ll have it here in lovely (adjacent!) Arizona. Tourists will bring it across the state line, and it undoubtedly will spread across the Reservation, too.

Not like I wasn’t already sick as a dawg, eh?

Seriously: I’m inclined to doubt that I’ll survive a really roaring case of the flu just now. Always have been preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections — when I was a kid, one evening a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t survive until morning.

Huh. He seems to have been wrong about that. Unless I’m a ghost, eh?

Truth to tell, though, respiratory infections do make me sicker than they do most people. What you think is a cold or a mild case of flu will lay me low for three weeks. And that I would like to avoid just now, what with this current mildly terrifying ailment.

Ugh. I can remember those awful brats in grade school teasing and tormenting me because my mother would keep me home whenever I caught a respiratory infection. GOD, but those kids in Ras Tanura were monsters!!! I learned to hate them even when they weren’t actively tormenting me — most of the time I’d just stay away from the other kids.

This was good, in a weird way, because it gave me plenty of time to study. Hence, lo! those many years later: Phi Beta Kappa. But…I think I would rather have had a few friends than a decorative fake key. 😀

***

So, soooo sick. The peripheral neuropathy, while apparently not especially dangerous, is absolutely crazy-making! To the extent that, as ailments go, it might actually be “dangerous,” it’s because much more of this would indeed make you suicidal.

No, don’t panic, please! I’m not about to throw myself off the North Rim. Yet. But I sure can see how, if this goes on and on and on, a person would be mightily tempted to bring an end to it. It hurts. 

And so I hurt constantly. If there were any way to stop it, I’d be inclined to try that way…even if it meant an end to life. An end to life, after all, means an end to pain.

And please: spare me the advice to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Both those nostrums — especially aspirin — cause peripheral neuropathy in me.

No kidding. Take an aspirin, and within half an hour or so, it’s bzzzzzzzz…

Yes, I will use aspirin. But only if I’m in a lot of pain. With the peripheral neuropathy lurking at all times, I figure one of those OTC pills will aggravate the hell out of it. And one thing I do not need to do is to make this buzzing and tingling and burning worse! 

Stop the World!
I Wanna Get Off!

She killed herself. Why, why, WHY the Hell????

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I fail to understand how she could have done anything so stupid. 

It was as though she deliberately incubated the cancer growing in her gut so as to inflict as much suffering as possible not only on herself but on those around her.

She knew.

She knew because she had been through the same horror with her own mother.

She had watched her wild-assed mother fuck her way into a terminal reproductive cancer. And, half a lifetime later, she drank her way and smoked her way into the same damned thing, calculated so as to cause as much suffering as possible for her husband and for her only child. And for herself, while she was at it.

Because she clearly knew what she was doing. I would suggest that what she did was not stupid. It was calculated. She knew she was gonna kill herself. She knew it would cause as much pain and suffering as possible to those around her. And that was her strategy.

So…well…I have to say that what she did was not stupid. It was malign, maybe. Because it was deliberate. Purposeful: she knew.

My poor father! He attended her through just about every moment of her hideous terminal illness, caring for her, feeding her, washing her, medicating her, dragging her to (useless!) doctors…God help him.

No question in my mind: she knew what she was doing.

We had known since the late 1950s that smoking causes cancer. She died while I was pregnant with my son: in the middle 1970s. A good 20 years after the cause and effect were identified. The more she heard of the science, the more she puffed away. I do think she truly believed those reports were Big Brother trying to control her life.

Why, why, why are people so stupid???? 

Oh well. Can’t fix stupid, can you? And you sure can’t undo its results.

The horror of it, though, is pretty straightforward: one’s sense is that what she did was not stupid. It was deliberate. 

She knew what she was doing would kill her, and she engineered the process to create as much suffering and as much stress as could possibly be inflicted on herself and on those around her.

Just. Plain. Evil. 

Understatement of the Century

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Well, it isn’t at all funny (about money or about anything else), but truth to tell, the first thought that entered my mind after this morning’s dawn flood of undisciplined thoughts was “My father’s marrying That Witch after my mother died must have been an unholy disappointment for him.”

Second thought: “Disappointment? What are you smoking?? It was a horror show. A horror show of the wildest, most terrifying character.”

The poor man. 

He didn’t understand: He could not replace my mother after she smoked herself to death.

A woman is not just a woman
A wife is not just a wife.
The love of your life is not a replicable quantity.

But forgodsake, a harridan surely is a harridan.

Marrying that horrid creature after my mother died and he moved himself to the old-folkerie did one thing for him: it brought him several years of utter misery.

Lonely as he might have been without his wife — his real wife, shall we say — he would have been a hundred times better off without the harridan from Hell who pounced him the minute he walked into the senior citizens’ community where he moved after my mother passed.

Some things are worse than the worst thing you can imagine….

My Father’s Little Orphan Annie

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In effect, my mother was my father’s Little Orphan Annie: an abandoned child with no resources and no future.

A large part of my mother’s life, certainly during her upbringing, was fukkin’ gawdawful. My father came along and rescued her from fukkin’ gawdawful.

His answer to fukkin’ gawdawful was marriage and an escape overseas, to a drudging life in Saudi Arabia’s American oil port, Ras Tanura.

After ten years in that hellish place, they decamped to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my father, an oil tanker captain and navigator, shipped out of the East Bay and my mother and I occupied a series of (quite nice!) apartments in the City and then in Long Beach, in Southern California. Eventually he retired and they decamped again, this time to Arizona.

They sent me to college here. My father worked until he could finally see his way clear to retiring, and the two of them figured to spend the rest of their lives in Sun City, an exceptionally bland retirement community on the west side of Phoenix.

That lasted a couple of years, until a major recession struck and my father had to go back to sea.

Horrible! I can’t even imagine how depressing that must have been — for both of them, but certainly for him. Poor man!

Another few years passed and he contrived to quit the hated job, once and for all. By then I was about through college; moving on to a job in a law firm, and very happy to no longer be living in dreary Sun City.

I went on to marry one of the lawyers (that’s what young women were supposed to do, right? Land someone to support them for the rest of their lives…)

Meanwhile, my mother sat crocheting in front of the TV set and smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And eventually succeeded in bringing on a cancer that, predictably enough, killed her.

***

Honest to gawd!  Both of them — my father and my mother — were right-wing crazies, the sort who thought anything they disagreed with that appeared in the news was just bat-brained propaganda from Big Brother.

Yes, that really WAS what they thought.

Unfortunately, Big Brother had the story right this time. And so, not surprisingly, this time my mother puffed herself into the grave.

Okay: so he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere, on the west side of the Valley. She’s done; he’s bereft.

Now he sells the Sun City house and buys into an old-folkerie, a place called Orangewood. Having lived in institutional settings all his adult life, he thought it was just grand. My mother had refused to go there, and so he’d had to wait until she died to get rid of the shack and install himself in the landlocked version of a ship.

Ugh! I’d have died if I’d had to live there. He liked it, though. I guess to him it must have felt like home. Because, after all, he had lived on ships — institutions — since he was 17 years old.

And I do wonder: did he like it? Was it life on the Bounding Main reincarnated? Or was it what he had envisioned as the ideal retirement?

The latter is my guess — never having been able to read his mind.

He was a handsome man, by any measure. And so the minute he moved into the old-folkerie and walked into the dining hall, a feeding frenzy ensued.

Since he was, as far as I can tell, a staidly loyal married man, it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he was the Catch of a Lifetime…or so it would seem to all the agèd ladies at the old folks’ home.

Within weeks he was snared.

So — again, as far as I can tell — he must have felt he’d hit the jackpot. Not only a dwelling in a hotel-like affair designed to cater to the elderly where someone else would buy the groceries, cook the meals, clean  the apartment, and take out the trash, but now a New Woman! 

He seems not to have thought through that bounty very thoroughly: within a few weeks he had proposed to said New Woman.

Mistake. As you can imagine:

* He was accustomed to living with my mother, who after some 30 years together knew him well and knew how to make him happy.

* He did not recognize the Wicked Witch of the West for what she was. Yes: a wicked witch.

Oh, my. You wanna talk horror show? Lemme tellya horror show! 

At one point I urged him to divorce the bit¢h. But he was having none o’ that: “She’ll get all my MONEY,” wailed he.

I was neither wise enough nor brave enough to say, in reply, “Daddy: some things are more important than money.” Wouldn’t have mattered: he would have ignored that bit of advice.

So he spent the rest of his life in misery, until he had a stroke that carried him away.

What a way to wrap up your life, eh?

So…What would you have done if…?

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LOL! Ever look back on earlier years and contemplate what life would have been like if you had done y instead of x? 

😀

Undoubtedly an exercise in futility…because o’course you did NOT do y. Probably  for the best, come to think of it. But it’s entertaining….

What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

What if I‘d insisted on going to UC Berkeley, instead of letting myself be lured into enrolling at the University of Arizona in exchange for the privilege of skipping my senior year in high school?

What if my father hadn’t taken a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

hmmmmm…..What if, indeed?

a) What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

Probably I wouldn’t be living there now. I loathe Sun City: the bigotry, the whitey-whiteness, the racket from the airbase, the dreadful excuses for grocery stores, the…on and effin’ on…

b) What if my father hadn’t take a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

I almost certainly would have gone to UC Berkeley, the university I craved to attend from the moment I learned there was such a thing as a university.

In that case, if I’d gone on to the Ph.D., I would have ended up, very likely, with a decent academic job. Probably would have married another academic. And just now might still be living in California.

Or waypoints.

c) What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

Well….  Assuming I finished the Ph.D. at Berkeley (not here in unlovely Arizona), I would have had a much more negotiable degree. By now I probably would have retired from a reasonably high-paying academic job. And very likely would not be living in Arizona.

d) What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

Who knows, o’course. I probably would still be married to the corporate lawyer, though. Chances are I’d still have had an academic job — probably tenure-track, or at least a higher-paying trudge through a Maricopa County community college.

LOL! How silly!

Seriously: “what if” has gotta be one of the most futile lines of thought ever invented by the human mind. Because nobody can second-guess — or even first-guess — what would have happened if circumstances had been just slightly different than they turned out to be.

Life…just is.