Coffee heat rising

Glenn Gunnells

Melted!!!

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Argh! I overestimated the heat when I went for today’s exercise stroll. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temp is 111 just now. “Feels like 117.”

Is THAT all?

Yeah…well, I’d have guessed 119. 😀

It feels like freaking Saudi Arabia out there, where we lived on the edge of the Persian Gulf: hot, humid, and suffocating. And yes, that place was capable of reaching 120 degrees. Nooooo problem!

So, 117 degrees doesn’t seem THAT out of the ordinary. Eh?

This is one of many days that make me wish I were back in San Francisco. Where I belong.

Ohhh well. That ain’t ever gonna happen again. My son is here, and I’m not leaving as long as that’s the fact.

{sigh}

Most of the time, Arizona has a tolerable climate. It does get absurdly hot in the summertime, as we can see by today’s balmy afternoon. But the winters are lovely, as are most of the spring and fall days.

That notwithstanding, I do wish my parents had never discovered Sun City, the garden spot that drew them here. Boyoboy! Imagine a whole gigantic subdivision where NO KIDS ARE ALLOWED!

Goodie.

You were allowed to live there if your brats were over 18 or off in college. I was 16.  So…

They engineered a deal with the University of Arizona whereby I would start my freshman year there a year early. So it went: I dropped out of high school at the end of my junior year, and they dragged me to Arizona. Soon as we got here, they exiled me to Tucson.

That I was all set to go to UC Berkeley the following year meant nothing to my father. (Well…he himself was a high-school dropout, and the truth was he understood little or nothing about universities and university education…) They yanked me out of school, sent me off to Tucson, and with great delight moved themselves into a pleasant tract house under the flight path of the war planes from Luke Air Force Base.

The cute little Sun City house was my father’s lifetime gift to her. And she was SO delighted with it! Seriously: she even made herself relish the roar of those damn fighter jets: as the pilots practiced, she’d sit out on the back porch in the morning sipping her coffee and simper, “Ohhhh! it’s the sound of freedom!”

Yeah, Mom… The sound of World War III comin’ our way…

She loved it, though. So it was a beautiful thing he did for her, after decades of marriage living in difficult conditions.

Charging off to college a year early was a nice ego trip for me…though it wasn’t the greatest of all possible ideas. At 16, I really was too young to go off by myself. I did OK — the UofA was hardly the most challenging of all possible higher ed institutions.  But I would have been better off waiting a year or two. And FAR better off going to one of the University of California campuses.

Not that I did all that poorly: I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa. But my social life left something to be desired. Like, for example…a social life.

So…heh! I guess you could say my life was melted. Just as I was melted by today’s blasting heat on the sidewalks of the ‘Hood.

And that was one of the first reasons that the phrase “I hate Arizona” became my byword. 

How I Got to Arizona…

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And  now, after yesterday’s astonishing mercury level, it’s only 108° in shade of the back porch. That’s comin’ on to 5:00 p.m.

Brrr! Get out the sweaters!

Can  you imagine? Honestly! I could brain my parents for dragging me to this hellish place. They made me skip my senior year in high school, betook themselves to Sun City, and shipped me off to the University of Arizona in Tucson. This, so that my father could retire to Sun City.

Understand: I planned to attend the University of California at Berkeley…and was well on my way to qualifying for that when they yanked me out of high school.

Did they understand that there was a qualitative difference between the universities?

My mother certainly did. I doubt if my father did — or if he cared. He wasn’t interested in giving me a fancy education. He was interested in retiring. ASAP.

What a mean thing to do to me, after I’d worked my butt off through high school to get into Berkeley!

Did he understand that? Sorta. Kinda. But…I doubt it.

He was a blue-collar boy, through and through. In fact, I’m not sure he even graduated from high school. The minute he qualified to get into the military, he joined the Navy. From there (his health sagging), he went into the Coast Guard. After that, the rest of his work life was dedicated to the Merchant Marine. Well…except for the ten hellish years with Saudi Aramco.

He did pretty well in the Merchant Marine, by the way. Especially for a guy who had exactly zero higher education.

Give him credit: he paid for all four years of my time at the University of Arizona. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and, after marrying a lawyer, transitioned into a Ph.D. program at Arizona State University.

But…know that it had been understood that after high school I would go to Berkeley, move into with my great-aunt and great-grandmother in their  bungalow (which had room to accommodate me nicely), and get the bachelor’s degree from the University of California.

Which, we might say (by way of understatement), was a far cry from the U of A. And an even farther cry from ASU.  Did he know that? Well…I kinda doubt it.

He was a workin’-class boy; grew up in Texas chasing the rear ends of cows until he made his escape by running off to the Navy.

And he was not about to diddle away his retirement cache to send his girl child to some fancy college. After all, what was a girl supposed to grow up to do? Be a wife and mother, of course. And ya sure didn’t need a college degree for that!

Today the UofA has a much improved reputation, regarded as one of the top 25 U.S. universities by Times Higher Education. Well…it wasn’t like that then: back in the day it was renowned as a party school. And I got in a year early with a middling-high grade average after three years of taking five solids in high school.

The upshot was that I landed a degree from what was then a mediocre institution but what is now pretty well regarded. Who’s to know, eh?

So…here we are in 2026, still in Arizona.

Do I regret not going to UC Berkeley?  Damn right!

Do I regret taking three degrees from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University?  Not really.

Hey. It’s better than nothin’, eh? 😉

Those degrees did get me a high-test husband and a university faculty job, so I can’t complain too much.

But still…sometimes I do wonder what would have been the outcome if even one of those degrees had come from Berkeley.

Well. We’ll never know. 

A Rasty-Nasty Day!

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Whew!!!  It is BEYOND hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there!! In the deepest shade of the back porch: a hundred and eleven degrees! 

My father would have called this a Rasty Nasty Day, after Ras Tanura, the hideous American oil outpost where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Twelve long years in that unholy dive!!!  He had figured he’d make enough to retire, if they saved every penny, in eight or ten years. Yeah…

Well…he almost made enough to retire on.

He wasn’t a real educated fella. Inflation, for example, was kind of an alien concept for him…  So, when he made his calculations for how long he’d have to work out there before he could retire and take us home to the States, he missed his goal by some six years.

About the time this projection unwound, my mother came down with a horrific case of amoebic dysentery. The doctors out there told her she needed to go back to the States –ASAP — to be treated for that fine ailment. This gave her an excuse to grab me and flee back to California, where her relatives lived. It also accelerated his retirement plans: he stayed for another year and a half, until his current contract ended, and then came back to join us in the States.

So that was a blessing (big-time!) for me and my mother. Couldn’t have been great for him, but at least she and I got out of that Hell-hole.

At any rate, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the climate was hot, muggy, humid, and hotter than the Hubs. Just a HORRIBLE place, certainly for the gringo set. As a little kid, I didn’t know any better. But my mother, raised in Upstate New York, suffered terribly — from the climate as well as from the endemic disease.

And now, here on August 23 of Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, I indeed have been around long enough to know better. And believe me: if my son weren’t here, I would not be here in steamy Arizona. No how, no way!

But he persists, because his dad is here. His dad  persists, because Dad’s job planted him here…and because his present family is also planted here.

Well. Arizona ain’t as grim as Saudi Arabia was. But…it does have its trying moments.

And right now, we’re in the middle of them! 

What He Knew She Went Through…

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As my mother lay shucking off her last hours on her deathbed, I approached and tried to offer some comfort. Angrily — furiously! — my father physically chased me off. He wouldn’t even let me come into her bedroom.

He never was especially empathetic to me. I believe he always saw me as a weird little kid — which I was, to a degree. But not allowing me to be with my mother as she lay dying? Not even after she had said she wanted me there?

WTF? How cruel could a man get?

During all these years that have passed since then, I’ve resented him for chasing me away from her. I’ve thought (as I’d often thought in other circumstances) that he hated me because I was a weird little girl. And because of my eccentricity, he didn’t want me around her.

No kidding: decades have passed, and those decades did nothing to offer any insight to what he might have been feeling.

Recently, though, an insight has snuck into my feeble little mind.

He didn’t want me around her because he didn’t want my last memories of her to be utterly hideous. As they would have been, had I lingered by her bedside until she died.

She didn’t even know I was there, so out-of-it was she. So…what reason (other than to make me miserable) for me to linger by her bedside as she slid into death?

Now, in retrospect, I think he didn’t want me there because he didn’t want me to go through watching her die of a ghastly enteric cancer. The vomiting. The horror. The agony. Dear God!

He wasn’t a real articulate guy. It would have been exceptionally difficult for him to have said that to me outright. But now, after year and year and year have passed, it strikes me: what we were looking at was hideous. Truly hideous: a ghastly death by cancer. The best thing that could have happened to me, during that unholy ordeal, was to have been kept away from it.

And that is what he did.

He stood between me and the worst moments of my mother’s dying. And that, God bless him, was probably the kindest thing he ever did for me.

What a Place!

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Ugh! Arizona…WHAT a dump!!!

It’s 95 degrees in the deep shade of the back porch, under overcast skies. Wunderground predicts we’ll hit a crisp 100 degrees today, with 15% chance of precipitation. The skies are solidly gray, so…Funny’s Weather Service predicts one helluva lot better chance of rain than 15%.

I hate this place. (In case you hadn’t noticed…)

WhatEVER possessed my father to drag us to the middle of the baking Arizona desert after he retired?

Oh, yeah. I know: Cheap!

Compared to California, where we’d been living for the six years after we got back from Saudi Arabia, this place was a bargain on steroids.

* Housing: cheap
* Utilities: cheap
* Gasoline: cheap
* Doctors’ fees: cheap

On and on and on….

The fact that he cut off my opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. from Cal Berkeley? Meh! Who cares? She’s just a girl. Why does she need a Ph.D. to cook on a stove and wash dishes in the kitchen sink?

Yeah, I did eventually finish the doctorate…from Arizona State University.

And yeah: it most certainly DOES matter where you got your advanced degree!

Except for the ego gratification, I might as well not have bothered.

No, a guy who never finished high school could not be expected to understand why his kid would want a Ph.D. and what advantages it would present to her. Still…how pig-headed can you get?

So, yeah…I hate Arizona. Wish I’d never been dragged here. Wish I’d had the initiative and the ambition to get myself out of here while I was an undergraduate, or, forgodsake, at least for graduate school.

But…by the time I hit the Ph.D. program, I was married to a well established lawyer here in Phoenix. He wasn’t going anywhere (nor should he have!), and neither was I. So…Okay: Ph.D. from Arizona State. Whoop. De. Doo.

What a place!

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Yuch!!  Just back from this morning’s (soggy!) doggy walk. What a horrid morning! Gray, wet…yes, SO wet the air actually does feel soggy.

Feels like Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we used to live while my father worked for Aramco — the Arabian American Oil Company. HORRIBLE. One of the nastiest places to live that you can imagine.

Ruby is panting frantically as she lounges on the kitchen floor’s cool tile. I’m covered with sticky sweat…thirsty but too tired and sore to get up and lumber into the kitchen after a glass of water.

WhatEVER possessed my father to move us to this ungawdly place when he retired?

Oh, yah: I know. CHEAP.

Del Webb was practically giving away the houses in Sun City — certainly by comparison with California real estate. But Sun City’s BIG appeal to him, IMHO, was NO KIDS.

Truly: he abominated kids. He hated the sound of kids playing outside. And when he heard of a whole housing development where no kids were allowed, he thought he’d found Nirvana.

He made me drop out of high school a year early, so he could send me to the University of Arizona…thereby getting around Del Webb’s rule that no one under some extenuated age could live in Sun City. If your kid was away at college, you were allowed to move in…even if the brat was under 21.

So that fucked up my education. But why should he care? I was just a girl. What did I need a degree for, since all I was gonna do was take dictation and type? And raise kids, of course.

Y’know, if he’d waited just one more  year, I would have gotten into UC Berkeley, and there I could have landed a decent degree that would indeed have led to an interesting job or a first-rate graduate program. But nooooooo….we had to move to f*cking Sun City.

What a place!

At any rate, here we are, enjoying a classic Arizona late-summer day. Wet, soggy, dark with overcast…just gross. I hate Arizona (in case you hadn’t noticed…). And really…I will resent him for the rest of my life for f*cking up my educational plans (I was lined up for a Ph.D. from Berkeley or UCLA!) and dragging me out to the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

But…yeah. So what? I was just a girl….