Coffee heat rising

Family

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!

How Did They Live That Long?

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Old age is creepin’ up, y’know. Where the heck did THAT come from, eh????

Welp…as I get older, I do find myself wondering…

* How DID I get this old?
* How much older will I get? and
* Do I care?
* What can I do to stay in my home until I croak over: to avoid being locked up in an old-age prison?

My father thought old-age homes were The Business. He tried to persuade my mother to move out of their pretty little house in Sun City to enter an institution called Orangewood, here in north Central Phoenix.

She would have none of it. And she succeeded in resisting until she croaked over from the cancer brought on by her incessant tobacco-puffing: right at about the age of 65. The minute he got her urnful of ashes installed in the local mortuary, he was out the door! 

Sold their sweet Sun City house and moved himself into that Orangewood prison and felt mighty proud that he’d done so.

His best friend there shot himself in the head. You’d think that might have told him something, wouldn’t you? Maybe it did, but he had the sense not to articulate the lesson out loud.

He married the Wicked Witch of the West there…apparently in an effort to revive his reasonably content life built, over 32 years, with my mother.

That didn’t work.

The evil bitch made him utterly miserable. But he was afraid to divorce her, because, he moaned, she’ll get all my money.

The idea that some things may be more important than money was beyond him. Besides, he apparently was afraid to make a move in that direction, partly because the new wife was extremely popular at the Institution and divorcing her would have made him a pile of sh!t in the other inmates’ estimation. He didn’t feel he could afford to move someplace else…and he probably was right.

So he stayed horribly married to her.

At any rate, my mother died fairly young, partly because of her incessant cigarette-huffing; partly because of malnutrition while she was growing up; and  no doubt because of the amoebic dysentery she caught while we were in  Saudi Arabia and the unholy treatment for it that she was subjected to.

This left him alone in Sun City…and for a guy who had spent his entire adult life in institutional settings, “alone” did NOT make it. So he moved out of the house and into the old-folkery within weeks of her death.

What a nightmare!

Well, I”m not up for rehearsing all that here. Just bear in mind: when your spouse dies, don’t be in any hurry to find a replacement!

My mother died within days of turning 65. He was 84 when he died — not bad for a male who had a bitch of a hard life. But…that left him with some 20 years without the the love of his life.

Rather promptly after moving into the Old Folkery, he married the Dragon Lady. Big mistake. She was one of the great Bitches of the 20th Century, and she made him utterly miserable.

But he refused to divorce her, because “she’ll get all my money!”

Arrrrghhhh! Daddy, some things are more important than money. 

But as a practical matter, that old saw did not apply, where he was concerned. He’d worked like an animal all his life to accrue that money, and as a practical matter, there really wasn’t anything more important to him than his money.

Nor did he seem to understand that, with my husband a partner in one of the Southwest’s most powerful law firms, the Dragon Lady was not about to get all his precious money. He never did get that message, so between what he perceived as social pressure and his fear of losing his savings, he stayed in what can best be described as a nightmarish marriage.

I wish I’d had the nerve to tell him that the witch was not gonna get all his beloved money, because his daughter — moi — was married to a lawyer who would crush the old bat like a cockroach. But I didn’t.

So he stayed married, miserably. Died, miserably. Left me with about half the money he had come away with at my mother’s death. That precious money.

/eyeroll/

None o’ my bidness, eh?

Well, anyhow… Sometimes I do wonder how, given the gawdawful stress my father faced at the end of his life, how on earth he survived into his 80s. Poor man! How he must have suffered…

I, thanks to him and thanks to good luck, am not suffering. And hope not to, between now and the looming end of my life. Keep the hassles away from my son, and leave all the cash and property to him as his inheritance. Just let me live out the last few years, weeks, and days of my life in peace.

If there is any such thing….

Hotter ‘n the Hubs…again

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Not even 7:30 a.m. by the time the Ruby and I stumble back to the house. We left at dawn.

The SMOG! My gawd, the SMOG!

At first I thought it was fog. Seriously: it looks like a San Francisco morning out there. Doesn’t feel like it. It’s 95 in the shade of the back porch. The sky: yellow with crap floating in the air.

Horrid, horrid place.

If my son weren’t here, I’d be soooo gone!

Where would I go?

Berkeley, where my relatives lived for decades. Gawdlmighty, I do miss Berkeley.

The foothills of Tucson. Clean air, relative quiet, fairly upscale.

San Diego, in its more upper-middle-class incarnations.

Paris…parts of it.

San Francisco, where I belong…

oh, Hell: ANYWHERE! Anywhere but here!

Wunderground, that eminent weather-reporting site, predicts 112 degrees with a 6% chance of rain. Hm…observant of them.

Local weather reporters claim yesterday was Phoenix’s hottest July 30 on record.

Uhhh…sure. Yeah. Must be mighty boring to be a weather reporter. 😀

Walking home, Ruby and I passed a house on the little pass-through street bordering our slab of the ‘Hood. And by golly, out in front watering his yard was one of the handsomest Black men I’ve ever met. Quite possibly one of the handsomest of all possible men.

Not only that, but he was friendly. And he had a big ole’ black lab named Olive.

Hilariously, Olive was my maternal grandmother’s name.

Must be Fate, eh?

Olive. She died horribly: uterine cancer as a result of her lively sex life. My poor mother had to take care of the woman on her deathbed (Olive’s, that is…not my mother’s… 😀  )

Seriously: imagine inflicting the care of a wild-assed chippie on a teenaged girl, as said chippie lay dying. What a horror show!!

And what the HELL possesses people?

There’s some question about that episode, though. Years later, I found evidence that Olive had not died when my mother was 16 years old, but in fact was living in the Santa Barbara area at the time my own son was born. Never tried to track it down, though: pisseth me off too much.

Still. Sometimes I do wonder if my mother knew her mother was still living. Or if the crackpot family told her she’d died, either by way of freeing Olive from responsibility for her illegitmate daughter or by way of freeing my mother of having to interact with her…uhh…”racey” mother.

What a bunch!