Coffee heat rising

Glenn Gunnells

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?

###

Another Soggy Doggy Day

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6:40 in the morning, and Ruby drags her human back in the house from the morning doggy-walk. The human is glad to get back indoors. It is overcast out there, and literally, the air IS so wet as to be soggy. 

We managed to avoid the park, which is the “long way” walk for us, and to dodge into the rarified environs of Upper Richistan. Gosh, but it’s swell up there!

Swell…windy…and wet…

The yards are irrigated, not sprinklered. So the swaths of grass in those parts (grass! can you imagine the extravagance??!?) are often ponds full of dirty water.

Thinking about my relatives — in particular my mother’s paternal grandmother, who raised my mother into her early teens. The grandmother had diabetes, back in the day when there was no such thing as insulin. Ultimately, after years of insane dieting, she died of it. Out in the country. On a dirt farm, WAY out in the sticks of upstate New York.

After she croaked over, her husband — my mother’s grandfather — shipped his grand-daughter to the California relatives, since it was thought inappropriate for a young girl to be living alone with a male relative, out in the middle of nowhere.

The Californians, who were relatively affluent (certainly compared to the poverty-stricken New Yorkers), lived in San Francisco’s East Bay. Berkeley, I believe, even at that early date.

My mother was just awed and astonished by her new lifestyle.

One of the things she talked about was riding to school on a school bus. She had — get this! — never seen a bus before! In the sticks of New York, the kiddies rode to school on the back of a horse-drawn wagon. To hear her talk, she was beyond amazed at the affluence of the East Bay lifestyle.

Heh. Think of that!

Now here I am, her daughter, pushing old age in the Fancy-Dan environs of North Central Phoenix, living amidst million-dollar homes.

No, my house is no million-dollar shack: our neighborhood is the low-rent section. But still, it’s as nice or nicer than anyplace she and my father could afford, even on his pretty substantial (for a workingman) salary. Still…

Every time I walk around here, I’m amazed (and grateful) that the Realtor I hired when I looked for my first post-marital house brought me to this neighborhood. Who even knew it was here? I sure didn’t.

It’s part of a downscale district to the north of Fancy-Dan North Central, along that district’s southern border. Yet in the time since I bought my first house here, our parts have caught the plague of Fancy-Danitude from the swell areas around us.

My mother was once again awed and astonished when she saw my new digs.

Truth to tell, this tract was built by the same developer that built out Sun City, where, by the time I moved here, she and my father were established. The houses are well built, on decent-sized lots with actual WALLS running along the alleys behind the backyard. Block construction. Decent roofs. So…even though we’re officially in the ill-favored Sunnyslope suburb, our area looks like it’s part of North Central.

And that jacks up the property values. WAY up. 😀 Even though — truth to tell — the houses are basically the same as the ones in Sun City.

I’d dearly love to stay here until I die.

That’s an unlikely proposition. Even though I hire a cleaning lady (bless her!!!) and a pool dude and Gerardo the miraculous yard dude, eventually the place no doubt will get beyond my ability to care for. Then it will be off to the dreaded Beatitudes for me: an overpriced prison for old folks.

I do hope I die well before I reach the Beatitudes stage!

Not likely, though: longevity runs in my family. And so…Old Folks’ Prison is indeed my most likely final life stage.

Ugh! Sincerely, I do hope I die before that point. But don’t (heh!!) hold your breath. A typical life span on my mother’s side is upwards of 90.

But she died in her mid-60s, primarily (I believe) because she was a walking smokestack. And because she caught amoebic dysentery in lovely Araby, which damn near killed her then. My father and his brothers lived into their 80s, and they all had hard lives. And both of my parents smoked. My mother was never conscious when she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth.

Literally true: you knew when she was awake in the middle of the night or in the morning by the stink of her fukkin’ cigarette emanating from her room.

The cigarettes killed her. But…maybe they gave her enough pleasure to make it worth the peculiarly grim exit she got from them.

Think my father was 84 when he died. But he indeed was one of the smokers, and he never really recovered from the depression brought on by my mother’s death. Plus spending most of your adult life going to sea on an oil tanker couldn’t do much for your longevity. His brother, a good Baptist boy who did not smoke, lived into his 90s…and he died because he fell off a ladder while trying to change a ceiling lightbulb. Busted himself up good!

None of these family deaths, I think, were caused by hereditary disease. They were mostly caused by stupidity: smoking, risking your life for a household chore. How you avoid stupidity escapes me…just have to take your chances, I reckon.

But my great-aunt and my great-grandmother managed it. Maybe I can, too. 

😀