Coffee heat rising

Glenn Gunnells

Reminiscences

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Achey this morning. Not sick: just tired from too much hiking around.

Crackpot neighbors are hollering at each other. Shut UP, folks!

Waiting for the toast to brown. Thinking….thinking back over my family’s life in Berkeley, California. Wishing I were still there. 

My relatives’ little house was right down the road from where the lightrail train came in from San Francisco and then shot through a tunnel to the other side of the hills.

My great-grandmother and her widowed daughter, my great-aunt, lived on Hopkins street, a long and mellow road that climbed up the side of a steep hill and ended where that tunnel carried the city train through from the far side of the Berkeley Hills.

Such a handsome place! I do miss it.

Their charming little house looked a lot like this one. CAN YOU BELIEVE that price!! Over a million bucks for an ancient, termite-ridden two-bedroom bungalow!

One thing you had to say for the neighborhood: it would keep you in shape. Where the relatives’ house stood, that road was mighty steep!

The relatives didn’t own a car, so just to go to the grocery store, they got a nice workout. And yea verily! Both of them lived well into their 90s, in excellent health. Without ever seeing a doctor.

Two blocks up that road stood what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. They didn’t: to them, it was just the corner market. WhatEVER: my great-grandmother (by then in her 90s) walked up there every day or two to pick up food and whatnot. Her daughter (my great-aunt), hiked up that hill five days a week to catch a train into San Francisco, where she worked for Crocker-Anglo National Bank.

On any given day, either one of them got about 20 times more exercise than we do. And it showed: they both lived into their late 90s, in excellent health. As Christian Scientists: they never went to doctors!

Heh. I guess the hill was their doctor, eh?

It was populated with pretty little houses. Walk the three blocks to the top of the hill and you came to what we today would call a gourmet grocery store. To them, it was just a corner store, a rather ordinary grocer.

Also on that corner were a dry cleaner and a set of concrete stairs leading up the hill into Sausalito, where my cousins lived. Next door to the cleaner’s was said gourmet grocery store: on the order of a Sprouts, only not so commercialized.

They were nice folks: the great-grandmother and the great-aunt.

Heh! Imagine having relatives who don’t think you’re a Communist because you’re active in the Democratic Party!

Yeah: the idiot woman my father married after my mother died dwelt somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler. So did her her rabid daughter, who — Arizona being, after all, Arizona (Home of the Right-Wing Crackpot) — attained to the rank of Superior Court Judge. Both of them wild-eyed right-wingers, who regarded me and my husband as COMM-YOU-NISTS.

Yep. Our family life went straight to Hell after my mother died. 😀

My step-sister Marilyn, who merged into our family after my father married her mother (in the wake of my mother’s death), must have thought we were the next best thing to Communists. No doubt she and her mom just l-o-o-ved having us treasonous bastards in their home. But I enjoyed her and her kids. Politics aside, they were nice enough folks.

Dear step-sister died in 2018: IMHO much, much too young for a journey to The Other World. But that’s only from my point of view: in reality, she was some 15 years older than me. And a good 90 degrees further to the right than me! :-d

SEriously: I did enjoy Marilyn. Her mother, Helen: not so much. And ultimately my father turned out to be pretty miserable in that marriage. He was afraid to divorce Helen: “She’ll get all my money!!!” 

Yeah. Well. Some things are worth more than money, eh Daddy?

Actually, what I should have said to him was Daddy! I’m married to  a partner in one of the most powerful lawfirms in the Southwest. She’s NOT gunna get all your precious money!

Probably not so much as a penny of it…

Oh well. I was too stupid to think of that. So was he. And so they lived miserably ever after…

And we’re b-a-a-c-k!

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Yep: the Hound and the Human are back from another park circumnavigating junket.

WHAT a beautiful night! Perfect temperature. Velvety dark evening. Kids playing. Kids playing. Kids playing. Teenagers batting baseballs and batting baseballs and batting baseballs. A brilliant full moon pouring light down through the darkening sky.

Just freakin’ gorgeous.

Walking through the dusk, I’m reminded of what an evening at sea must have been like for my father. He was a seaman: a merchant mariner, mostly shipping on oil tankers. This vocation got him a very fine, handsomely paid job in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia: one that included housing for his family and a short leave with a two-week trip to venues like Beirut and Delhi and a long leave with a trip back to New York, whence we would launch our biennial automobile trip across the United States.

Start in New York City.

Cruise southerly and westerly, down through Maryland and waypoints. Eventually arrive in Dallas.

Camp there with his brother for two or three weeks. Then get back on the road.

Westerly, westerly, through Colorado and across the Rockies, through Nevada, Arizona, and them-such waypoints. Arrive at the home of my mother’s best friend, in Long Beach, California.

Hang out with her for a week or two.

Then northerly, northerly, up the coast to the Bay Area. Hang out with my relatives in Berkeley for a month or so.

And back, like a rocket, across the continent to New York City, there to turn in the car, hop on a plane, and head back to Dhahran.

Some vacation, eh?

Well. I guess it would have been cool…once. But we did it every time we came back to the States. That was every two years. 😀

So that is what I’m reminded of by a brilliant azure night with Venus hanging over us and warm air circulating around us. What a life!

‘Round & ‘Round They Go…ARF!

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Eighty-nine degrees out there, sez Wunderground, with 12% humidity.

Ohhh yah? Couldn’t prove that by me.

Just back from a junket around the park, dragged forth by a small dog. I’d have said it was nigh unto 90 degrees, ayup… and freakin’ WET. Humid. Soggy. 

😀

Thinkin’ about my late stepsister as we traipsed along. Many of the 70s-ish ranch houses remind one of her family’s place. I do miss her. Even though her politics were somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini’s, she was a smart woman, an interesting woman, and a fun person to be around.

{sigh} Ah, the bygone days…

How she came to spring from the loins of the witch my father married after my mother died: that escapes me. That woman was one of the meanest humans I’ve ever met: nasty, nasty, and nastier. In startling contrast, her daughter, who became a Superior Court judge, was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet.

They’re all dead now: Witch stepmother, smart step-sister, sister’s bright daughter, sister’s mentally stunted son, and her lawyerly husband. Ohhh well: nothing lasts forever.

Which is probably just as well…

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.

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. 

Really: There is no answer, is there?

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He had already decided that he wanted to move out of Sun City and into Orangewood, the old-folkerie of his choice. But she was having none of it.  Because he adored her, he wasn’t about to insist that she move someplace where she didn’t want to live. Surely 10 years in Saudi Arabia must have been enough of that!

So they stayed in Sun City until, eventually, her cigarette puffing and the effects of the gawdawful meds for the gawdawful gastric diseases she picked up in Arabia killed her. And he was ready: within hours after she died, he had the place packed up, an apartment rented at the old-folkerie, their house on the market: and he was ready to move.

I couldn’t have lived there, at that old-folkerie. It was institutional misery on a grand scale…just horrid! I could barely stand the rules in grade school, to say nothing of having to accustom oneself to living in a prison for the elderly.

The key, I think, was that he didn’t mind institutional living. He’d spent most of his adult life on ships, going to sea, What would have made me crazy felt like normal living conditions to him. And without my mother at his side, there was no reason for him to have to take care of a house.

To him, living in Orangewood, a holding pen for the elderly, felt normal. It must not, at base, have felt much different from living on a ship: Crowded conditions. Bad food. Someone else’s schedule dictating your life. He seemed to like it…and in fact, my guess is he may have liked it more than owning and having to run his house.

My mother, sadly, died soon after he retired — in her mid-sixties. She smoked herself to death. Her relatives — rabid Christian Scientists — didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. She did both: a-plenty. Basically, she smoked herself right into the grave.

Seriously: she was never awake when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth. You knew when she woke up in the night because you could smell the stink from her f*cking cigarette. You knew that she was awake in the morning because the first thing she did before she lifted her head from her pillow was light up a f*cking cigarette. You knew when she was about to turn out the bedside lamp at night because the last thing she did before she went to sleep was to puff her way through one last f*cking cigarette. And that, amazingly, is no exaggeration.

He smoked, too, but not every living, breathing moment of conscious existence. He probably went through eight or ten cigarettes a day, if that many.

She smoked constantly.

Literally: she was never conscious when she wasn’t smoking. And no, she did NOT care that her sidestream smoke made her little girl sick. No, she did NOT care that I asked her to please not smoke so damn much around me. No, she did NOT care that doctors told her the smoking would kill her.

Not surprisingly, the habit did kill her. In a way, the surprise is that it let her live so long: she died on my birthday in her 65th year.

Sixty-five is a lot of years to puff your way through every goddamned conscious moment, eh? So you’ve gotta figure she was a pretty tough character…all things considered.

He loved her so. Oh, my, how he loved her.

***

No, he never complained about her f*cking tobacco habit. He smoked, too, but nothing like as much as she did.

He cared for her, lovingly and richly, through every ugly minute of the last weeks and months of her life. Did it even register with her that her idiotic habit created weeks of torture for him? If it did, apparently she didn’t care; no more than she cared that her fu*king clouds of smoke made her little girl sick.

***

After she died, he moved out of their sweet Sun City house. I’d say he couldn’t stand to stay there after the torment she’d put him through…but that wasn’t true at all. Before she fell ill, he had already decided to move into the (horrid, IMHO!) retirement/nursing home in town, an institution called Orangewood. It consisted of tiny apartments, barely big enough for one or two people, in an environment where you were watched every G.D. moment, regaled by the neighbors’ idiot TV shows, and fed disgusting institutional food.

Couldn’t have been much different from living on shipboard, I guess.

He seemed OK there, and before long took up with a hag whom he (foolishly!) married. And there he lived unhappily ever after.

Yeah. My mother killed herself. And she sure as Hell didn’t do him any good.

***

I never did understand why, when she knew she was making herself hideously sick, why she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was making her daughter sick. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she was piling awful, ugly work onto the man who loved her more than life. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she’d have a shot at living longer if she’d quit with the cancer sticks. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew she stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew her whole home stank. And stank. And stank of fucking cigarette smoke. But she just kept right on puffing away.

She knew he would have to watch her die, one ugly inch at a time. But she just kept right on puffing away.

WHY???? What on earth, what in the name of God would make you persist with that?

That was the thing that puzzled me, and still does. She must have known how much she was making him suffer. She must have known how miserable she was making her daughter. WHY would you do that to the people who love you?

Yeah: it’s an addiction. But y’know: people can get over addiction. When you can see you’re harming the people around you who care about you, the sane thing to do is to quit harming them. How hard is that, really?

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