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Glenn Gunnells

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda…

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Ever look back on some damfool thing you should have done or, more to the point, shouldn’t have done and think…”coulda, shoulda, woulda,” all the while kicking your idiot self in the metaphorical tuchus?

The past couple of days have been haunted by that less-than-charming state of mind:

When my father and his late-life lady friend came to me and ostentatiously asked for my permission for them to marry, What the F**K was the matter with me that I didn’t jump up and down hollering NO, DON’T DO THAT!??

What was the matter with me that I didn’t say, as calmly and rationally as possible, “NO, DON’T DO THAT!

Why the HELL didn’t I say Wait! Just WAIT six months and see how things shake out then?”

Why didn’t I say to my father, DADDY, RUN AWAY!

Welp. Some of us are just plain plug-stupid. And evidently I’m among that number.

Dunno why that episode has come back to haunt me of late. But yeah: over the past week or two I find myself reliving the (annoying!) episode when my father and the Dragon Lady came to me like a pair of 16-year-olds and begged my permission to marry.

WTF was I supposed to say? They were both adults. They both had been married before (twice, in my father’s case). They both knew what they were getting into. And they both knew that since in their 60s they were unlikely to spawn any offspring, it fukkin’ DIDN’T MATTER whether they married or lived in sin.

Well. Of course, about all I could do was give them my daughterly blessings.

Dayum! I must have been smoking something especially toxic that day.

The upshot of this little circus performance was misery. Years of misery for my father.

He was afraid to divorce the Witch. “SHE’LL GET ALL MY MONEY,” wailed he. Nevvermind that his daughter’s husband was a senior partner in one of the most powerful lawfirms in the Southwest. Ohhh eeek! SHE’LL GET ALL MY MONEY!

Holy shit. Some things matter more than all your money.

Why didn’t I tell him so?

I dunno.

Just stupid, I guess.

What if…what if…why didn’t I?

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Ever ask yourself that question, LONG after the fact? Why didn’t I…make this small move or that obvious decision that would have cut off a disaster at the pass? An obvious disaster…

What WAS the matter with me that I failed to dispense the most obvious, simple-minded advice?

Sitting here thinking about my father’s painful marriage to the horrid Dragon Lady, whose real-world name was Helen… My god, but she was an evil thing!

When they came to me in the spring of their dotage — both widowed by the demise of their first spouses — and asked my permission to wed (yes! No kidding!!), why didn’t  I say “ARE YOU CRAZY?” or maybe HELL, NO! AND STAY AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT BS!”

Of course, at that point I didn’t know how evil Helen was. And she was evil: that is the best word for her cast of mind.

My father was devastated by the loss of my mother, the love of his life. The one who smoked herself to death, sucking on the murderous tobacco corporations’ cancer sticks.

And when Helen moved in for the kill after they met in the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died, he must have thought marrying her would salve his grief. A grief that was more profound than you or I can imagine.

Little did he know how much worse she could make it….

After it became obvious — after, alas, they were legally bound in marriage — that Helen was the meanest creature that ever walked or crawled over the surface of this earth, he understood how miserable he was. He took to taking a book outside, climbing into his parked car, and sitting there all day reading…having told the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be serviced.

She was so astonishingly stupid, she bought this story…over and over! How many times can you change the oil in a sedan, over the course of a month? of a week?

When the parking-lot car hideaway came to seem a little too transparent, he rented a studio in another nearby old-folkerie. Put a TV set and an easy chair in there. And repeated his story that he was taking the car to the Ford place. He’d sit there all day, come back to their apartment in time for dinner, and then have only an hour or two before he could escape from her again by going to bed for the night.

Eventually, one of the other inmates noticed that my father’s name was on a list of residents at the other old-folkerie…and, by way of torturing him and amusing themselves at Helen’s expense, brought it up one evening while they were playing bridge. My father was humiliated, Helen was rightfully infuriated, the marriage stank even worse than it already stank (which was plenty)…godlmighty!

Y’know… I might have headed that horror show off at the box office, if I’d had half a brain in my head. Because…when they came to me melodramatically one day to ask my permission to marry (!!!!! CAN you imagine?), I could have (should’ve, would’ve…) said NO! “No. Wait for a year to be sure you want to do this. Come this time next summer, if you still think you want to commit to living together for the rest of your lives, by all means do it. But don’t do it NOW.”

What WAS the matter with me?

Young, I guess. Self-centered. Stupid as a post.

My father was just miserable with that witch. Truly: I’ve never met a meaner human being.

I didn’t attend my father’s funeral, first because I wasn’t invited and second because by then that evil creature had chased me off with her unrelenting meanness.

Recently, I learned the Dragon Lady’s daughter’s family had her remains interred — or boxed up in an urn and set on a shelf — next to my father and mother’s ashes out in the mausoleum in Sun City. They’re all together there on a shelf.

Just horrifying.

If I’d had any idea they were up to any such outrage, I would have hollered HELL, NO! and sicced a lawyer on them.

One thing’s for damn sure: no one is setting my ashes on that shelf, goddammit.

I’ve arranged to be interred in the Close down at the church. Called out to the Sun City mausoleum to find out about moving my parents to the same venue, and learned that the bastards charge THOUSANDS of dollars to move a person’s remains out of their sanctified quarters.

Can you imagine?

That’s the Death Industry in America. They getcha coming and they getcha going. What incredible evil!

One Good Thing!

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Well, here’s a little miracle: FaM let me in on the big desktop computer, a vast and aging Macintosh.

Normally I use a laptop. The desktop is very beautiful and wonderful, but these days it’s profoundly uncomfortable for me to sit in a wooden chair for hours (or minutes….) in front of an office desk. So I use a MacBook — a laptop — which allows me to play with the computer while laying in bed or loafing in an easy chair. The ancient desktop is working here…which is nice for Funny about Money, but not so great for the 87 gerjillion other password-protected sites. The MacBook’s keyboard has died. Hit a key or type a password, and nothing happens.

Plus the desktop isn’t accepting a bunch of my passwords. I can’t get into my bank account, for example. And no, I can’t get through to those folks on the phone. So I’ll have to drive about seven miles (one-way) to the west side to get to the credit union, stand in line stand in line stand in line and stand in line to get to a teller, explain the current fiasco, try to get them to reset my password…WITHOUT A COMPUTER.

Yes. My laptop — upon which I am almost totally dependent because of the current ailment — just died, here at 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. The desktop is  not well — notice how it just decided it won’t type a single-end-quote? Lovely. It will enter an apostrophe: ‘  But not in a standard end-quote format.

Then I’ve got to come back here and drive another ten or twelve miles in the OTHER direction — through Phoenix’s cut-throat traffic — to arrive at the august Shemer Museum.

And what a fight awaits there!

I’d signed up, at a friend’s behest, for a pottery-making class. Sounds fun, eh?  Well…it would be…

But of late I’ve developed a new ailment: peripheral neuropathy.

This little horror causes your hands, your feet, your lower legs, your lips, your gums, and even your effin teeth to tingle like mad. Tingling like when a limb “goes to sleep” because you had it in some position that cut off circulation.

Welp… When we got to the pottery class, I discovered that it entails kneading and slapping at a ball of ceramic clay. And y’know what? THAT HURTS!!!

So I dropped the class and asked for my money back. They obliged…. Uh huh.

By depositing the refund in what they claimed was my PayPal account.

Uhhhmmmm….. WHAT Paypal account?

If I have a Paypal account, I’ve never used it. I have NO idea how to access any such thing, nor is there any way to reach a human at Paypal to find out WTF. Not that I can find, anyway.

How TF could they deposit money into a Paypal account that I don’t have?  As far as I know, Paypal doesn’t have my legal name: my parents gave me a bizarre name, guaranteed to make a little kid’s life miserable, and I don’t use it. Therefore there’s no way they could have sent me a refund through Paypal: Paypal would not know who I am if the Shemer sent money there under my legal name. And good luck trying to explain that to some functionary — probably a volunteer — at the Shemer’s front desk.

I’ve tried to call them, and I can’t reach a person there, either.  Trying to get them to call me is probably futile: because of the volume of nuisance phone calls I get, I’ve had to block most of the local area codes, plus many in other states. Phone solicitors have software that blocks their outgoing number and makes it look like they’re calling from a number in your area code. After you reach a certain age, you’re assumed to be a soft touch, so the ba*tards just blitz you with nuisance calls. Literally, until I blocked a series of area codes — many of them local — I’d get 10 or 12 nuisance calls a day! Yeah… I’m pretty sure the Schemer is in one of the blocked area codes, and therefore if they tried to reach me they couldn’t get through.

So now I have to get in my car, buy gas (wrestling with a pump handle HURTS), drive way to hell and gone to the east side — on the border with Scottsdale — barge in, demand to see a person, be told no one will see me (dontcha just know it?), leave my email, and beg the morons to get in touch with me that way. Then turn around and schlep all the way back into town to get to the Best Buy, bearing the laptop, and beg them to fix it.

The one minuscule bright point of light in this mess is that I do have a service contract with Best Buy. So…well…they MAY fix it for free. If they don’t, though, at least they will take it in and try to get it working.

MEANWHILE….

I’m clearly very ill. I need to move fast to be sure my end-of-life affairs are in order. But…but…but… My lawyer died. His partners scattered to the wind. I have no idea how to find someone to take his place. So I’m going to have to grovel to my ex-husband, begging him to find someone else to locate the missing will and/or write a new will. ASAP, so that my son will not face some unholy nightmare when I croak over.

I arranged for a burial niche for my ashes at the church, in their lovely, grassy courtyard that they call the Close. But I can’t see a sign that I paid for it. So now I’ve got to go back there, confess to my stupidity, and get the details or re-arrange that. Then go to a mortuary and arrange for my own cremation.

The prospect of trying to face down the Death Industry is just horrifying…and not something I feel safe in engaging just now. I tried to find out if I could retrieve my parents’ ashes from the shelf in the crypt at Sun City and move them to the Close. What a horror show!!!!!

My father had my mother shelved out there after she died hideously of cancer — not an ordeal I’d like to be reminded of and reminded of and reminded of and…

He arranged to have himself cremated and shelved next to her.

Then he moved himself into an old-folkerie.

There he met the Dragon Lady. She spotted him the instant he walked in the chow line’s door, and she went straight for the kill. Understand: my father was a very handsome man, though he apparently wasn’t aware of how attractive he was. He adored my mother and never looked in any other direction, far’s I know.

* *

Well, by the time he gets to Orangewood, his desired prison for old folks, he’s exhausted and he’s deeply depressed. When Dragon Lady flings herself at him, he is understandably flattered and cheered. Before long, she maneuvered him into a marriage that turned out to be truly depressing. It was just horrible.

He refused to divorce her, even though my then-husband could have gotten him unhitched free of lawyer’s bills, because (said he) “She’ll get all my money!!”

He tried to escape her, for short periods, by renting a room at another old-folkerie, where he would spend whole days in front of the TV. He would tell her he was taking the car to be worked on and was sitting in the Ford dealership’s waiting room all day while this work was allegedly happening. {Yes: she was so stupid she believed it!) But…  One of the inmates at the alternate old-folkerie  knew the Dragon Lady and tattled on him — in front of him, in a manner calculated to humiliate him.

So that was the end of that. Not of the horrid marriage, but of his only way to get a break from that horrid woman.

Well.

It turns out that after he died he had his ashes shelved next to my mother…and…and…lordie! Some time later I learned that, without asking me or saying anything at all, the Dragon Lady’s relatives arranged to have her ashes stashed next to my father’s and my mother’s. On the same goddamn shelf in Sun City.

Far as I can tell, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Sun City mortuary thieves CHARGE you to remove a person’s remains from their ash prison. So it would cost me THOUSANDS of dollars to spring my father and mother’s “cremains” from that place and bring them down to my church, where I want to be interred. Then it would cost some more to get the church to stash them there.

***

Well, the sun is up and I’d better get going: grab some chow, walk the dog, and hit the road. This is gonna be a day from Hell…I feel that in my bones. What a thrill — I can hardly wait to dive into it!

 

Lost Times, Lost Friends, Lost Family…

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Phoenix…ugh! The place gets more and more like L.A. as the days pass!

I was reminded of this, fairly vividly, when I drove through a tract just to the south of the ‘Hood, probably built out in the late 1950s or the 1960s. The houses there remind me so much of my mother’s best friend, Anna. The Long Beach, California, neighborhood where Anna lived could have been built by same developer — the houses practically clone Anna’s little place.

It was a nice little place. Her husband, Capt Ellison, was a sea captain just like my father, and he made a pretty good living, for a blue-collar guy.

And their house was nice enough: a sweet little place in a blah, faceless Southern California tract. Every shack looked the same as the next one, really. If you didn’t know Anna’s address and didn’t know where you were going, you’d never find her place.

The two men were coming on to the end of their careers, along about 1960 or ’62. They both planned to retire soon.

Capt. Ellison was on the last inbound leg of his last sea voyage. We were all looking forward to the great retirement and all the fun the friends would have and maybe talking Anna and Capt. Ellison into moving to Sun City, where my parents had already decided to retreat.

And damned if he didn’t drop dead on the ship’s deck.

No exaggeration: he had a heart attack and literally fell down dead. As the ship was heading in to harbor.

Well, the Ellisons’ house in Long Beach, a pleasant little place, was paid for. Their only child, a daughter who had some mental problems that seemed to entail a shortage of IQ points, was married and had two kids. And she had an appropriately mindless job on a factory assembly line, also in Long Beach. The son-in-law was a decent man who had reached the apogee of his career in a similar job.

That, of course, was the end of any inchoate schemes to inveigle Anna into moving to Arizona.

So there was something kind of heart-rending about driving through a neighborhood that looked so much like the one where Anna and Fred had lived. Absurdly, I wondered if my parents would have moved into town if Anna and Fred had bought a place over here, in that tract.

They might have. But probably not. My father, who was not fond of kids, thought Sun City was the greatest innovation since gin & tonic. The child-free appeal of Sun City, for him, was just huge. One rather doubts that Anna and Fred, who had grandchildren, would have thought the same way.

Also, Anna was massively overweight: so much that a good-quality bathroom scale could not measure how much she weighed. The ensuing health problems would have made it difficult for them to move. Plus their daughter, who was not overly endowed in the compos mentis department, was happily ensconced in that assembly-line job and a stable marriage. And Anna’s grand-daughter, who seemed to have developed a normal contingent of IQ points, was in high school and no doubt needed her grandmother to keep her more or less on track.

So…it’s reasonable to doubt that Anna and Fred could ever have been talked into coming over here, even after Fred retired.

Too bad. They’ve been missed over the years.

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..

Aging in Place…by Damn!

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Why in heaven’s name did I never think of this?  It’s so obvious!

Hire someone to come to the house and provide the services you’d get in an old-folkerie.

  • What would be the advantages?
  • What would be the disadvantages?
  • What would be the effect on M’hito?
  • What be the effect on me?

Y’know, my father checked himself into one of the first and most prominent “life-care communities” in Arizona. (Don’tcha just LOVE that marketing euphemism?) The place was called Orangewood…and it was within walking distance of my house in North Central Phoenix.

My mother had refused to go, so he was stuck in their house in Sun City until she croaked over — which she did promptly enough, thanks to her suicidal tobacco habit.

You need to know that he had gone to sea all his adult life, living on naval vessels and commercial tankers. So he was deeply accustomed to living in an institutional environment.

  • He didn’t mind close quarters.
  • He didn’t mind having to behave like he was in jail.
  • He didn’t mind bad food.
  • He didn’t mind other people telling him what to do and when to do it.

Personally, I loathe that lifestyle. Hated living in the dormitory.  And I would — truly — take a flying leap off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon if I were forced to move into one of those nursing-home knock-offs.

Turns out that some alternatives do exist, even though they’re not obvious.

Bear in mind: moving into one of those awful “life-care communities” will take ALL of your life savings.

So…uhmmmm…. If you decline any such move, will you not then still have your sticky little hands on said life savings?

And if that’s the case, couldn’t YOU decide how said L.S.’s will be spent, on whom, and when?

  • Why could you not sic your financial representative on the agencies and organizations you’d need to hire? Have him ride herd on them, see that they’re paid, that they do the job, and they don’t cheat you.
  • Helle’s belles, hire a second financial rep — or a lawyer — to ride herd on the first one.
  • It would be complicated as Hell and you’d need to have honest, reliable representatives…but…it could be done. Couldn’t it?

See the gist of what I’m saying here? You could hire your own people to provide the services you get from a “life-care community.”

You’d need more than one person. Taking care of an ailing oldster is no easy task…and it is, as a practical matter, a 24-hour job. You’d probably need at least three people, to cover three eight-hour shifts.

Hiring three people to hang around and watch over you 24 hours a day would, indeed, cost an arm and a leg and then some. But remember: when you move into one of those life-care outfits, they take everything you have.

To move to Orangewood, my father had to fork over his entire life savings, including the funds he got from the sale of his paid-off house. And though he wasn’t John D. Rockefeller, as an inveterate cheapskate he had piled up quite a mound of cash to see him and my mother through their dotage.

Okay. So: what are we looking at, if instead we hire private staff to babysit us in our own dotage?

  • What would be the advantages?

* They would be my employees, not beholden to some company acting as a holding pen to store my body while we wait for me to die.

* Therefore, I could hire and fire at will. If I were dissatisfied, I could find someone else to come in.

  • What would be the disadvantages?

* I or my son would have to ride herd on them.

* This would mean we not only would have to be sure they were paid fairly and on time, but also that income-tax documents were filed and that the employees understood their responsibilities for paying their taxes.

* Any dishonesty or shiftiness on their part could have painful consequences for us.

* Any loss of marbles on my part could also have painful consequences, for everyone involved.

* And of course, having someone in your face every day would be, for a loner like me, quite the little adjustment…

  • What would be the effect on M’jito?

* It would foist an untoward responsibility on him, one that could be quite a burden.

* If tax reports were incorrectly filed through no fault of his or mine, the government could harass us.

* It would free up large amounts of time for him, during which he would not have to ride herd on me.

  • What would be the effect on me?

* No doubt I would be less than perfectly pleased to have someone underfoot all the time — at least 8 hours a day, and maybe more than that.

* On the other hand, if it would keep me out of an old-folkerie, no doubt I could somehow make myself adjust…

In some ways, it’s a toss-up, isn’t it….