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Family

Love Escapes Blindness at the Garden Gate…

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My father openly called him a sh!thead. My mother didn’t use that kind of language, but she made it more than clear that she agreed with my father’s assessment of my Dearly Beloved Boyfriend, that junior year at the university.

Ooohhhboy, did they loathe the guy! 

And y’know, from the vantage point of decades, I can see they were right.

Real right. He was a dyed-in-the-wool jerk.

It took him to teach me that, not my parents. 

LOL! I dated him for…what? two and a half years, as an undergraduate. That’s how long it took for me to figure out that…well…yeah: he was a jerk. 

How’d I find out?

Well… One afternoon we were laying in the sack, after a lively frolic. Talkin’, as old loving couples will do. The subject of his best buddy’s wife came up.

Buddy and Wife were a couple who had been married for…what? maybe three years? Whatever: they weren’t kids. He had a full-time job. She was a loyal spouse and all…

By this time, Wife was advanced in pregnancy. Like…six or eight months along.

As we loafed in the sack, Dear Boyfriend was going on about how brilliant his buddy was for picking up a chippie, whom he was merrily diddling on the side. You understand: Buddy was a married man. One whose wife was about to produce his first child for him. 

Yeah.

I don’t remember whether I made some judgmental comment about this state of affairs. Probably not…probably more like asked some naive question. WhatEVER: in the course of conversation, Dear Boyfriend remarked that it was really a good thing that his pal had gone out and picked up a floozy, since the wife was so advanced in pregnancy, she couldn’t entertain him. “A man,” said he, “has gotta have it!”

Uhm. Yeah.

Evidently my parents had somethin’ in their assessment of his character: they believed him to be a scoundrel.

When he said that, I thought, “My parents are right! This guy is a TOTAL lout!”

Within a couple of days, I gave him the heave-ho. And I’ll tellya: his heart was broken! 

Oh, the drama! Oh, the tears! …And oh! f**k you, pal! Out he went. 

My friends were abhorred. (Of course, they didn’t know about the uber-pregnant wife.) My parents were delighted. Dear Boyfriend was shattered. I was disgusted.

Whew!! Close one!

I was lucky that I didn’t marry him…because I fully intended to.

Not until he explicitly TOLD me what my life was gonna be like if I married him did I realize what a raving jerk he was. This, despite my parents having told me so, time after time after time.

Talk about love going blind at the garden gate...or, in my case, going deaf. I simply refused to hear what they said. Not until he spoke for himself (the idiot!) did his unadulterated jerkitude register with me. To this day, I can’t believe I was lucky enough that the guy let his mouth babble on — while we were laying in our own coital bed!! — so as to reveal what a gutter rat he was. And to reveal that my parents were right about him….

LOL! I suppose the moral of the story is if you’re a jerk, learn to keep your mouth shut. Or maybe…I dunno…pay attention to what your parents say about the current Love of Your Life. 

😀

What NOT to Do in Old Age…

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Gorgeous, cool morning. Few people and fewer dogs out and about. Ruby and I have a great (and peaceful) doggywalk. As we stroll through a fog of boredom, I consider…horrors abundant:

* My father having to care for my mother in her last, agonizing days and weeks.

* She dies and he moves into an old-folkerie, a venue I regard with horror.

* But he likes it, because after a lifetime at sea, he’s accustomed to institutional living.

* What he isn’t accustomed to is Helen, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West.

* Marrying Helen botches up the rest of his life.

Seriously: the last years of his life were ruined, not just because of my mother’s illness and death but because he naively married the dragon-lady. Apparently he didn’t understand that there was no real substitute for my mother, the love of his life. Did he imagine that one woman would be much the same as the next?

What have I learned from my father’s late-life experiences?

* Stay out of institutions as you age, if at all possible. Doesn’t cost any more to hire someone to come into your home to clean and drive you to the grocer and whatnot than it does to live in one of those places.

* Do not imagine one spouse is a carbon copy of the next. Do not figure you can replace a late spouse with someone new.

He would have been OK if he hadn’t married Helen. He wouldn’t have been happy, but he would have been contented enough by himself in a pleasant apartment at Orangewood, the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died. And over time he would have adjusted to the loss of my mother.

* Find new things to do w/ your life. A new hobby? Travel? Raising poodles??? Something that’s different and reasonably fun, or at least interesting.

I want to say that marrying Helen wrecked his life. But no: My mother dying is what wrecked his life. And she died prematurely because of her smoking habit.

So: Don’t smoke! Don’t take a partner who smokes, either.

He did smoke, but he had quit well before the time my mother started to get sick from the cancer. Get rid of that habit NOW: don’t wait until it’s too late.

* But remarrying wasn’t a solution, either. I’d suggest you NOT remarry after you lose a spouse. Or, if you must, don’t do so until you’ve known the new partner at least a year. Give yourself an out, and keep that door unlocked for as long as possible.

* It made sense for him to move into Orangewood.
* It made sense for him to take up a friendship and then a romance with Helen.
* What didn’t make sense was to remarry. And if he’d waited, they might not have done so.
* Once they had entered their marriage, they were both legally trapped in an official agreement. Getting out of it would have cost each one a ton of money, and a whole lot of bad feelings.
* Staying independent — staying free from the git-go — would have given each of them and both of them the leeway to choose how they wanted to live. Once they’d married, they both felt stuck in the partnership: a partnership they each came to realize was a mistake.

Better to live in sin, my friends, than to live in misery. Seriously: they would have been so much better off if they’d never married, even if they had chosen to move in together.

Ethnic Hatred

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They did hate him. Yes, indeed. WHY, I never fully understood, except that he was THEM and we were US.

My parents were born & bred to think of themselves as Yankees: specifically, as Whitey-White natural-born Americans.

This, despite the fact that my father was at least a quarter Choctaw Indian. More like half, far as I could tell. But he believed himself to be all Honkey.

Anyone who was different from them, my parents hated. With élan, we might add.

Welp, my boyfriend Paul was no American Indian. He was Eastern European, as a matter of fact. Far as I could tell, his people were mostly Bohemian.

Whatever, they apparently didn’t come up to my parents’ standard of whitey-whiteness…though to my eye, Paul was as white as or whiter than me.

Paul was the first love of my life. And oh, my: I was in love with the man.

We met in my sophomore year at the University of Arizona. Got a-goin’ and kept on goin’ until I was in the middle of senior year, when my parents finally succeeded in breaking us up.

There was a point at which, though, I realized that if I married Paul, I would never see my parents again. That’s how much they hated him. And I was very close to my parents: especially to my mother.

And “never see my mother again” was not, to tell the truth, what I wanted for my future. So, at the point where I realized that probably would be the outcome of any serious affair or marriage with Paul, I gave him the heave-ho.

He was shattered. I was deeply unhappy, too. But alas, I was not willing and ready to break up my family for a man.

So, that was that.

Every now and again, I think of Paul — as I was doing this afternoon while traipsing around the neighborhood on foot.

Would my birth family really have been permanently shattered if I’d married Paul?

Well. One never knows. But I suspect the answer is “yes.” That is how much they hated the guy. If I went with him, it would be at the cost of leaving them behind.

And that seemed…ungrateful, hm?

Would Paul and I still be married if I’d thrown over the family traces and gone off with him?” 

Very probably not. And here’s why:

One afternoon we were loafing in bed when he started to tell me what his best buddy was up to.

Buddy was a married man. Had been for at least a year or more. At the time, his wife was advanced — very advanced — in pregnancy. As Paul and I lay in bed chatting, he remarked, with sincere approval, that his buddy had picked up a chippy in a bar and was f*cking her merrily. Having a great time! Paul approved of this heartily; because, after all, the buddy’s wife “couldn’t give him any.”

Got that?

She’s so bloated in pregnancy that she can’t accommodate his dong, so it’s OK for him to pick up a barmaid and jump into the sack with her.

Right…Then…And…There: That was the end of my interest in Paul.

If he thought it was OK for his buddy to f**k a chippy while the wife was too bloated to entertain him, then Paul would figure it was OK for him to do the same. WOW!! What a guy, eh?

So, it was out the door with me, that very night.

I’m sure he wondered what got into me. Altogether too much of him, we might say…  {chortle!} WhatEVER: I threw him out of my life that week. The proposed marriage never happened. The grand life together never happened. The great careers together never happened.

Thank goodness, eh?

A-n-n-d… {rumble rumble} here we go again!!

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Dusk. Dog and human fed and dutifully loafing. And the evening serenade rumbles in through the windows:

GRRRGGRGGRRRRRUUUMMMMMBLLLLEEEE GRBAM!

Wooo HOO! Lightning and thunder bouncing in through the gray skies.

Just enough rain to wet the pool’s decking and the houses’ roofs. But otherwise: mostly stürm und drang…rather little water. That notwithstanding: we who are a human and a dawg are mighty glad we’re not out prancing around in it.

Innaresting…I can’t tell just how ferocious this freshet thinks it is. NOISY is what it is, actually. Lots of crabby-sounding, grumbling thunder, but not a lot of visible lightning, and just a fairly conservative rainfall.

Hmmmm….. Let’s close them thar drapes. Oddly, I just don’t like the look of whatever is going on out there.

Meanwhile, in the Department of Idle Curiosity, let us look up my father’s people: the Chocktaw tribe of America’s South.

Interesting bunch, they were. My mother said he came out of the deep South. Apparently that was the case…with flair. 😀

He would never admit to being anything, genetically, but whitey-white. But all you had to do was look at him to know something was out of kilter with that claim. He had dark brown hair: so dark that when he slathered Brylcreem into it, it appeared to be black. Combine that with the most striking blue eyes, and…my goodness. He was quite a looker. He was tall, slender but well-built, overall a pretty handsome sorta fella. Came out of Texas and the Deep South.

LOL! My mother was genu-wine whitey-white: French and English. And where he was striking, she was unprepossessing. Nice-looking enough, but not so as to grab your gaze.

And what does that make me? Bland. Very bland. 

Three sheets(????) to the Wind…

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<<chortle!>>  By way of soothing my son’s concerns about my boozing habits, I’ve been on the wagon for the past few days. Blech! NOT my idea of pleasurable living. But WTF: refraining from my favorite potables (and from any potables) is easy enough…and probably not a bad idea.

Presumably the spirits of my Christian Scientist forebears are dancing in joy around the ghostly campfire. Christian Scientists — at least in their generation — were tee-totalers. Their idea of strong drink was 7-Up.

At any rate, for the past few days I’ve been passing up the usual glass or two of wine or can or Guinness. {sob!} My life is sinking into a slough of boredom!  😀

😀 😀 😀 😀

Seriously: it is strange how much you get into the habit of scarfing down your daily swiggle. And how much you miss it when you decide to refrain.

That, I suppose, should tell you something, right?

What it’s tellin’ me is that it’s past time to KNOCK OFF the swiggling!

Oddly, just now I don’t seem to miss it all that much. For me, the real issue (to the extent that there is an issue) is that the cocktail hour (half-hour, actually…) provides a time to unwind before charging around to fix dinner. And it allows me to relax after a day of whatever shenanigans I’ve been getting up to.

What’s needed is something else to do (or to drink) to occupy the little period leading up to dinnertime. Water doesn’t make it… 😀  Iced tea tastes good, but as I’ve aged I seem to have become more sensitive to caffeine. Tea doesn’t quite wire me up, but it can keep me awake into the night. And a glass of water?  Why bother???

Contemplating one’s favorite potables leads me to contemplate the long-ago boyfriend who introduced me to those fine gourmet drinks. Paul, his name was.

Oh, my: how my parents HATED poor ole’ Paul. I don’t think it’s because he introduced me to swiggling a cocktail before dinner: they had done the same thing for many a year. In fact, I’d never known a time when they didn’t relax over a cocktail before they started cooking.

No. It was his ethnicity. He was Eastern European. That, for reasons I never understood, was anathema where they were concerned.

Why? Yes, they were unreformable bigots…but that bigotry (so I thought) had to do with skin color, not with nationality. Paul was as white as we were! So…what the heck was the problem?

That was never explained clearly to me.

What was made clear, though, was that if I married Paul I would never see my parents again. 

No kidding.

So after a few months of this effing drama, I realized I had to make a choice. Paul had not brought me into this world. He had not raised me. He had not taken me all over Europe and North America and the Middle East with him. He had not brought me up in Saudi Arabia. He had not installed me in San Francisco and then in Southern California. He had not sent me off to college, tuition and board fully covered.

The choice was obvious, alas: OUT with the boyfriend, IN with the parents.

He’s now living happily ever after. So am I. And frankly, I suspect the outcome was just as well. 

Good Morning, America! And…

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…DUCK FOR COVER!

LOL! 8:00 in the morning, and you can hear those damn fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base all the way over here in North Central Phoenix! 

What

A

Racket!

Yes, the Sound of Death is no lullabye. That’s for sure.

People who live in Sun City bitch nonstop about the noise from Luke, right up the road from the Old Folks’ Ghetto. That actually creates SDXB’s job out there: as a semi-retired PR guy for the Air Force, he volunteers to staff the phones in the base’s public relations office. Every morning, rafts of Sun Citizens call in to bellyache about the roar from the jet plane exercises.

Hilariously, my mother used to LOVE that racket. She’d sit on her back porch, there in Sun City, and take her morning coffee to the lullaby of F-16s taking off and landing. “It’s the sound of freedom,” she would coo.

There’s a wild-eyed right-winger for you!  😀

By a weird coincidence, my house was built by the same outfit that built out Sun City. And, although it’s designed for more than two people, it bears a weird resemblance to my parents’ Sun City house:

* gray slump-block walls
* aluminum-framed sliding doors and windows
* asphalt shingle roofing
* sloping roofs over attics

Well, at least we have actual garages. Webb apparently felt a place to put a car was unnecessary for an old f*rt…presumably the new residents would be too old to drive, right?

Well. No. Out there, the houses have cheesily built lean-to carports. STEAL THIS CAR! that sign says…. 😀

Actually, what the local thieves used to do was climb on top of the car, reach up to the carport ceiling, and slide open the door to the attic. From there, they’d hop into the attic, walk across the beams to the living-room or kitchen area, saw a hole in that ceiling, and drop down into the house. From there, they’d steal you blind.

Lovely.

Here, my dowdy li’l Sun City-style house does have an actual garage with an actual garage door. 

LOL! If I’d known this subdivision was built by the same outfit that built Sun City, I wouldn’t have bought a house here. Not on a bet.

But that prejudice notwithstanding…it’s not a bad little shack. Not at all. Construction is sturdy. Design is sensible. Lots are large enough to put plenty of space between you and the neighbor. Alleyways are included, and they’re lined with 8-foot-high block walls.

Sun City has no alleys, and no backyard walls. Take your morning coffee in your backyard, and you can watch your neighbor do the same as the jets scream overhead.

They scream overhead here, too…occasionally. But at least they’re far enough away to put some distance between the natives and the racket-makers.

Ugh!! This is gonna be another beautiful day in Arizona: 28 percent humidity under clear (hot!!) skies.

In the Department of Jobs You’re Glad You Don’t Have, Mr. and Mrs Wonderaccount (right across the street) have hired a team of painters to spiff up their shack. I need those guys over here, too. But…well…luring them to my house would require me to get up off my duff. And I ain’t about to do that!