Coffee heat rising

Glenn Gunnells

Home or Old Folkerie?

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Sittin’ around the house thinking….

Am I gonna be able to stay in my home until I croak over?

Or will I be forced to sell this place and lock myself up in one of those prisons for old folks?

You know whereof we speak: “life care communities.” All the rage for keeping elderly delinquents off the streets these days.

Welp, y’know… Those institutions had just come into vogue as my parents entered their dotage. My father, having gone to sea all his life, was not the slightest bit daunted at the prospect of selling their little home in Sun City and consigning himself to the care of an institution.

But…my mother would have none of it! NO WAY in hell was she going to put herself in a nursing home before she needed it!

Little did she know how soon she would need it. She died on my birthday in her 65th year.

The cancer so generously gifted to her by the world’s tobacco companies killed her….less than a month after her 65th birthday. The nursing home was rolling her, in her hospital bed, down to the Medicare ward when she passed.

She was decently cared for in the nursing home…probably because my father drove in from Sun City every day. walked in the door when they opened at 7 a.m., and sat there beside her bed, watching, until they threw him out at 11 p.m.

But…

Frankly, I think my father was right: They should have imprisoned themselves in Orangewood, the “life-care community” of my father’s choice, before she got sick. He had discovered the existence of such places about eight months or a year before she fell ill, and he’d tried to persuade her to move into one. She would have none of it.

And…

Well, I don’t blame her. Personally, I loathe institutional living. Truly, truly hated living in the dorm. And that is why I don’t want to move into one of them. Too much like living in prison…

After she died, he promptly sold the little house in Sun City and forked over most of his net worth to move into Orangewood. And I can assure you that he liked it there. Well: except that he made a key and unreconcilable mistake: he married a horrible dragon lady who, once she had him trapped with a wedding ring, made his life miserable.

No, he wouldn’t divorce her, because

a) He was afraid she would “get all my money” in divorce proceedings; and
b) He was afraid of the gossip a divorce would create among the other prison inmates.

Dragon Lady was outgoing and busy: she was extremely popular with the Orangewood natives. And he probably was right: if he did divorce her, he no doubt would want — if not need — to move out of that place. But…those “life-care communities” glom ALL YOUR CAPITAL. He probably wouldn’t have had enough money to get himself into some other place, plus all the money he had given to Orangewood was basically disappeared.

Result of that: he lived out the last few years of his life in utter misery.

***

Would my father have been better off if, instead of institutionalizing himself, he had hired people to come in and take care of him at his place in Sun City?

Putting aside the fact that he was too tight to do that…let us think about it:

* Here, Pool Dude keeps the drink pristine. My father’s Sun City palace had no pool. However, because it was so poorly built (basically uninsulated), its AC bills were far higher than mine. So one might regard SC power bills, compared to my house, as a wash…in the pool.

* Wonder-Cleaning Lady comes in every two weeks and renders the house spotless. Because there are no kids or cats here, the place stays reasonably clean between visits.

* Gerardo wrangles the landscaping — which, because it’s xeric, doesn’t demand much. It has an automatic watering system: I don’t even have to do a hose-drag to maintain the place.

* I have no problem caring for a small dog. Ruby is basically effortless, as roommates go.

Given that my father’s house was paid for, to have stayed in Sun City and hired a yard guy and a cleaning lady wouldn’t have cost him anything LIKE what Orangewood cost. Not even if he hired someone to come into the house daily, check on him, take him to the grocery store, maybe prepare a week’s worth of meals for him.

Zillow estimates my house’s current value at $484,100. Borrowing against that would buy a WHOLE lot of service from Pool Dude, Lawn Dude, and the Cleaning Lady from Heaven. Years’ worth.

And again, let’s remember, he didn’t need either a pool dude or a lawn dude…

Now, what did my father get at the honored old-folkerie?

At Orangewood: a two-bedroom apt.  They refuse to tell you the cost on their website…which ought to tellya something….  As I recall, it took the entire proceeds of the sale of his house to get him into that place. The apartment was tiny: I would describe it as an elaborate studio apt. It didn’t have a real kitchen — just a counter with a minimal stove and a sink. The living room, dining area (if you could call it that), and kitchen occupied one (count it: 1) room.

Median monthly cost of “independent living” in Arizona is $2,738.

He couldn’t have afforded that. ONE YEAR would consume almost a third of his life savings. That’s $32,856/year, bare minimum. Without maintaining your car, without going anywhere, without even buying clothes. Basically what was happening was that he was forking over ALL of his Social Security, plus a substantial chunk of his savings.

It certainly would not cost $35,000+ a year to hire someone to come in and take care of my house. The total cost of everything — maintenance, car, groceries, utilities, pool care, and general living expenses — may come to something like that. Or not…. just now I’m not drawing anything like that out of savings, but I get a decent amount of SS. Not enough to live in middle-class grandeur, but certainly not so little that I would starve.

What that suggests, IMHO, is that moving into one of those places would cost as much as — or more than! — I would have to spend to stay here and hire people to come in and help me. The money I take out of savings, in most years, is recovered because the remainder stays in professionally managed investments.

I would be better off — and my son would be better off — if I can manage to stay in this place until I die, or at least until a few months before that happens. Proceeds from the sale of this house would nicely plump up his retirement savings. Or he could sell his place, invest any profit from that, then move into this place and invest the monthly amount he’s been forking over to his mortgage company.

Speaking of the value of a shack, my parents’ house in Sun City last sold for $255,000: two and a half times the amount of my father’s life savings. Lest you think that was bargain, the place was about the size of the first apartment DXH and I moved into. I think they paid about $8,000 for that house.

Indeed, that first apartment may have been bigger than the SC house…it certainly was no smaller.

Our apartment:

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
Walk-in storage closet in kitchen
2 bathrooms????? Can’t recall…maybe not, though

SC house

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
2 bathrooms
Don’t recall a storage closet, but think there was space behind carport
Lots of wasted space in hallway

The SC house last sold for $255,000!!!!!  2 1/2 times the total nest egg that my father saved for his retirement!

NOW it hits me???

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Ever have anything dawn on you, or strike you with an unnoticed significance, years after the event? Betcha most of us do. But…I’ll bet this one takes the cake.

My mother died of self-inflicted cancer — she smoked herself to death — when I was pregnant with my son. Said son is now around 40 years old.

That means she died about four decades ago.

At the time, my parents lived in Sun City, Arizona — a revolutionary dwelling arrangement for the still-kickin’ elderly and retired. Their dearest friends from their ten-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia had joined them there shortly after they found the place. Ruth and Hollis, this couple were named.

Ruth and my mother were like sisters. The four of them — the two women and the two men — formed a tightly knit unit, almost as close as a family. When my parents retired to Sun City, Arizona, Ruth and Hollis soon followed, buying a house in the same tract a couple miles from my parents’ place.

Over time, my mother smoked herself to death.

After it was discovered and announced that tobacco smoking was linked to a number of cancers, my mother went meh! and continued to puff away. WTF? It was coming from Big Brother, after all, and his evil Gummint Agents who desired nothing more than to control our lives. Right?

Yeah. Right.

She smoked constantly. No joke: She never spent a conscious moment without a fu*king cigarette in hand. First thing she did before she lifted her head from the pillow in the morning was light a cigarette. Last thing she did before she turned out the light at night was light a cigarette. Hell, she even smoked in the shower! She smoked every goddamn one of her cancer sticks down to the filter. Or, if it had no filter, until it was about to burn her fingers.

Not surprisingly, she did indeed develop a nasty cancer, and it did indeed kill her.

***

Some years before then, Ruth and Hollis had moved to Sun City, where they passed much of their time in my parents’ company.

My father struggled to care for my mother through her hideous last months, weeks, and days. And when she died…

…when he most needed a friend…

…those two moved away.

Ruth remarked to me that the horror of my mother’s ugly death was more than they could cope with.

Uh huh.

And how was my father — their alleged dear friend — supposed to deal with the horror?

Let me tell you what I think about that:

A thousand curses upon them

Damn them, damn them, and damn them again.

He needed their friendship.

He needed their support.

They didn’t have to do anything other than BE there, out in ugly Sun City, to be his friends, to say they cared, to assure him that (maybe) life would go on. Yes, even without Julie.

But they yanked that out from under him.

Ruth told me they couldn’t stand to watch my mother die.

For the LOVE of  God, how the fu*k did they think my father felt, watching my mother — the most profound love of his life — die in horrific, terminal agony?

The cruelty of their abandonment, the meanness of their behavior, has only recently struck me…come back to smack me upside the head.

Damn them!

I never knew what happened to them, after they left Sun City and fled back to Texas. Sincerely, I do hope they each suffered horribly. But…rather doubt it. If they were smart enough to stay out of an HMO (my parents had no clue!), maybe they got decent medical care in their last days. But…who knows?

A thousand curses on them, and may those curses ring down through Eternity.

What Does Inflation Do to Your Savings Goals?

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Every now and again, I think of my father and his goal to earn back the substantial fortune his mother had squandered that her father, the 19th-century buffalo hunter, had accumulated in the process of clearing the Plains of Indians and wild livestock.

She herself was an Indian woman: Choctaw. If you happened to know that and you looked at my father closely, you’d realize “yup! Injun lad.”

Not surprisingly, she had no inkling of what money was or how to manage it.

When she refused to accede to her husband’s demand that she abort the unplanned, late-in-life pregnancy that produced my father, said grandfather(again!)-to-be climbed on his horse and trotted off into the Texas boondocks, never to seen alive by her again.  Supposedly, he shot himself, but when you get into the facts of the story, it looks suspiciously like he was murdered by a guy who had been an inmate where he — the father — had been a prison guard.

WhatEVER…the whole drama essentially burned a brand into my father’s psyche. It produced an obsession:

He would earn back the entire sum that his mother had squandered: $100,000.

Today, that wouldn’t seem excessively difficult.
Hell, I’m worth three times that…and what am I? A freakin’ teacher!

In those days, though, a hundred grand was a LOT of money. By 1962 (when he tried to retire), it would have been something in excess of $300,000.

Understand: my father dropped out and joined the Navy a year or two before he finished high school, out in the Texas boondocks. So his target actually represented much, much more money and MUCH more work than he understood. In today’s dollars, it would come to $3,131,660.

Can you imagine? For a guy who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma…

Well, he did it. By dint of canny investment and a lucky choice of investment counselors, when I went off to college in 1962, he had his 100 grand in the bank, and he retired from his job with a pocketful of dollars.

That didn’t last long.

Remember: this was a guy who did not understand the first thing about economics.

By the time I graduated with a BA, we had hit a recession and his vast fortune went down the tubes. He panicked, packed his bags, and went back to sea, leaving my mother in Sun City…a hole in the middle of the Sonoran Desert into which to dump elderly folks.

That which he did not understand — the mechanics of inflation and deflation — eventually came to pass, and by the time he died he did have a pile of dollars to leave to me, despite having moved into a rapacious old-folkerie.

All very nice…but the point to the story is that the workings of the larger economy have a much greater significance for the individual’s savings and retirement plan than most of us realize.

For one thing, you need to bear in mind that the absolute value of the dollar slips and slides over time. Sometimes, yes, over time the value goes up. But more likely, it will go down…and down…and down. By the time you’re ready to retire, a hundred grand will be worth….far from a hundred grand!

This implies, of course, that you need to inflate your savings goal by some extravagant factor if you are to arrive at a sum that can be expected to support you through your dotage. Take the amount you think you need to live in retirement and multiply it by about 3: that will probably be the minimum you’ll need to have on hand when you finally quit your job.

Because, y’know: inflation.

 

If you want a job done right…

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…DO IT YOURSELF, dammit.

The problem with cleaning ladies is that when they don’t know what to do with something, they take it upon themselves to invent something to do with it. And that invention is rarely anything you or I would think of.

I like to hide a front door key outside, in a truly weird place, so that I can get into the house if I lose my regular keys. This has saved my tuchus twice in the years that I’ve lived here, and I have NO reason to want to change that.

Well, apparently Wonder-Cleaning Lady thinks that’s just silly. By this morning’s early light, I discovered she took the front door key out of its hiding place — inside a hummingbird feeder — filled up the feeder with sugar water, hung up the feeder, and put the key….WHERE??????

When I got home w/ the dog this a.m. I couldn’t find my key ring. So I went to look for the key in the bird feeder…and…NOPE

Holeee shee-ut!  Now I couldn’t get into the house, not for love nor money.

Eventually I did find a key. Not THE key, but at least one that works. Later on today, then, I’ll have to drag this key over to the hardware store and have a couple of copies made. Find new hidey-holes for them where the burglars and the delinquents across the street can’t find them. That’ll soak up half the day.

Why would you think a person would put something in a specific place unless the person WANTED the thing in that place?

This will form a nice little distraction from lunch with my son, as planned. Don’t know what time the hardware store opens on Sunday…probably not before noon: whatddaya bet? Maybe not at all, on a Sunday.

****

Next week’s Project from Hell will be to find out if I can get my parents’ “cremains” away from the mortuary in Sun City where the Evil New Wife’s relatives deposited them — without bothering to consult me.

These urns of ashes, I would like to move to the close in the church that I attend, where I wish to get myself deposited.

Turns out the rip-off artists in Sun City CHARGE YOU TO MOVE YOUR DECEASED PERSON’S ASHES out of their effing mortuary! It’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars just to get them out of there and move them down to the church.

I may be talking with a lawyer about that.

My father died of a stroke that turned him (briefly) into a vegetable. Between the time the stroke hit and the time he died, he had no consciousness of anyone around him.

Meanwhile, the hag that he’d married after my mother died was THE single nastiest person I have ever met. He was miserable with her. A number of tartly funny stories depend from those circumstances…among them his strategy of going out into the parking lot and sitting in the car all day long to get away from her, and his secret flight to another old-folkerie, where he contrived to rent a studio on a month-to-month basis, equip it with a TV set, and sit there all day in front of it.

He would tell the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be worked on. Day after day…. Incredibly, she was SO astonishingly stupid that she believed it!!!

Well.

She did...until some mutual friends came over for bridge one evening. As they sat there, the “friends” announced they had discovered THE MOST AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!

They’d been over at the other old-folkerie to visit a friend, and while there had seen a list of residents’ names…that had my father’s name on it!

Ohhhh boy oh heee hee, wasn’t that the most AMAZING coincidence!

Pissed, my father growled that it was no coincidence: he had a place there.

😀

As you can imagine, this cast a bit of a pall over the bridge evening.

Incredibly, it did not bring an end to the miserable marriage. He was afraid to divorce her because, wailed he, she’ll get all my money!

Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to re-earn the $100,000 inheritance his own mother had squandered on spiritualists and on building a mansion in Ft. Worth. So…money was a bit of an obsession for him. So, incredibly, he was willing to spend the last years of his life in misery if that was what it took to hang onto the precious money.

She had inherited that amount from her father, who was a buffalo hunter, trading hides out of Oklahoma and Texas. Apparently a LOT of money was to be made in exterminating the native wildlife, especially when that wildlife’s hides could be turned into hats and coats. She herself was mostly Choctaw Indian…apparently one with no compunction about clearing the plains of her people’s livestock.

A hundred thousand dollars at the turn of the twentieth century would be like about a million dollars today.

Now….if I’d possessed even half a brain, I would have said to him, “Daddy, she’s NOT going to get your money. I’m married to a lawyer who’s with one of the most powerful law firms in the state — quite possibly in the Southwest. She will have no claim on an estate that you owned before you married her.”

But no. Of course not. Proof positive that I do NOT possess half a brain. It never entered my mind to ask the then-husband about this. It never entered my mind to ask him to assure my father that the Dragon Lady was not going to clean out his savings.

So, he stayed miserably married to her until a stroke carried him away. He managed to transfer most of his life savings to me, which is why I own my home outright and why I will have something to leave to my son.

Ugh. What a way to earn a living, eh?

😮

Ohhh well. When I talk with our priest next week, I’ll ask how I can extract their Cremains from the Sun City rip-off artists, and also arrange to have myself disposed of down at our church.

This is not very respectful to my father’s memory: he hated loathed and despised organized religion. But…he ain’t here, folks. I am. And I hated, loathed, and despised living in Sun City. I ain’t about to be disposed of out there. But since I have no other family but my son, I do want their remains with me.

It’s the principle of the thing.

Who Was Joe Kelly? Can memories be inherited?

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When I was a little kid, I lived about half my life in a fantasy world. Of course, I had to go to school, and so that dragged me out of Never-Never Land for seven  hours a day, maybe nine months a year. But that notwithstanding, about half to three-quarters of my waking hours were spent daydreaming and fantasizing. And no, I didn’t pay a whit of attention in school.

Because…you understand (this is not an exaggeration)…I already knew all that. What I didn’t know, I learned by reading the textbook and doing the homework. All the teachers did, academically, was rehash the information in the texts. Otherwise their job was to babysit, which they did honorably enough. Well. Except for their failure to protect the Weird Little Girl from being tormented by all the other little darlings in the classrooms.

**

Eventually I grew up and escaped from the mania of loneliness. This happened when we came back to the States. The kids in my new school in San Francisco had no idea I was the Odd Brat Out. They accepted me and were nice to me and made friends with me and never once tormented me with teasing and mocking and ostracizing.

The fantasy worlds in which I lived faded away. The jungle where I was a kind of female Mowgli, surrounded by solicitous large cats and a community of wolves: that went away. The alien worlds I explored in my spaceship: gone. The ancient Egyptian society where I lived as a young slave girl: buried under the pyramids.

Only one of the fantasy worlds persisted.

It was the story of Joe Kelly, an underage criminal who was busted for some vile crime, convicted, and — at the age of about 16 — sent off to San Quentin.

Quite an elaborate tale grew up around Joe, richly populated with characters ranging from prison guards to fellow convicts to the warden and the prison’s pastor. Joe was richly imagined.

I could tell you what he looked like. What he did. What he thought. How he reacted to people around him…on and on. And the world — the story — that grew up around him was also vividly, richly imagined. It was a persistent story, one that did not go away after we got back to America.

And I could tell you about Mac, the big, tough prison guard who took Joe under his wing and did his best to reform the kid.

All very nice…but…

but…

Now, fly through time some six or eight years later. I’ve grown up and gone off to college. My parents have retired to Sun City. My father, not having anticipated a major recession, has gone back to sea to try to rescue his crashed retirement investments.

It’s a holiday break, so I’m home with my mother. And somehow — I don’t recall how — the subject of my father’s upbringing and his parents arises.

He was a change-of-life baby. His father decidedly did not want another kid to raise — so my mother’s story goes — and he asked his pregnant wife to abort the pregnancy.

She refused to do so.

Distraught, he ran off into the boondocks. Some months later he was found dead by the side of a rural Texas road. His death was deemed a suicide by the local hayseed sheriff.

Hm.

In the course of relating this story, she also tells me that at one point in his life he had been a prison guard.

Hm!

Now you no doubt know, as I do, how brutal Southern prisons were back in the Day. If he had been a guard in one of those august institutions, he would have made a lot of enemies. And what do you suppose would have happened if one of those fellas had come across him out in the Texas boondocks?

Yeah. Would’ve been easy to shoot him in the head, put the gun in or near his hand, let his horse loose, and take off into the sunset.

…hmh…

Obviously, he could have shot himself in the head. Hard to know, all these years after the fact. Hard to know what some small-town Texas sheriff could have known or figured out.

But the question is…where did the “Joe Kelly” fantasy narrative come from? Why would a little girl develop a story about life in a state prison? A men’s state prison…

Is it possible — even remotely possible — that my grandfather’s memories of his time as a prison guard could have been genetically handed down through my father?

***

O’course, it’s an unanswerable question. But it’s interesting. Intriguing.

Another day, another cuppa coffee…

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Ohhhh-kayyyy…. Let’s see if WordPress will give us sane formatting today, or whether we have to jangle up our honored Web guru and make him crazy with whatEVER is going on.

Not that we’re not already crazy enough with whatever is going on. Do you still have the temerity to read the news? If so, how exactly DO you retain your grip on your marbles?

Here we are, busily charging a former (if incompetent, yes) president of the United States with THIRTY-SEVEN felony counts of what is basically a treasonous act. Oh, gooood….  Moving on (surely there must be someplace to move on to??)…

Meanwhile, the Republican Party worries that the Presidential Fiasco will come back to haunt them. Guys…if you didn’t want to have to handle a mess, why did you put a mess in the White House? 😀

We have our Native American brethren being (once again) madly ripped off by yet another huge Belagana scheme: hundreds of Navajo being exploited…and God only knows how many members of other tribes.

The Ukrainians are beating the bedoodles out of the Russians. That’s nice…I guess. Be careful who you pick a fight with next time, Vlad baby!

Our brats aren’t buying enough booze to support profits in the concert industry. Awwww….

*****

Enough of that, already! Quite enough to prove that WordPress’s paragraph-break function is working again.

*****

Meanwhile, as we discovered yesterday, the pool is decidedly NOT working. Swimming Pool Service & Repair’s guy surfaced (heh!) yesterday evening and made off with the pump. He figures it’ll take them about three days to fix it and get it back over here.

So far, the water hasn’t turned green. He said not to fuss with it: if algae starts to grow, just take a gallon of chlorine and walk around the pool’s perimeter, slowly dribbling the stuff in.

Ugh! Chlorine: not my favorite choice of drinks…. 😮

*****

Dawdled wayyyyyyyyy too long to get out the door for Ruby’s morning doggy-walk. It is spectacularly hot and humid out there by 7:00 a.m. And the Doggy Jamboree was in full swing by the time we reached the Richistans.

Ruby wants to clear the earth of other dogs, a little characteristic of which other dog owners seem utterly oblivious. While I’m trying to keep my dog from eviscerating theirs, they’re cooing ohhhh don’t worry! they just wanna playyyyy! 

How does a species with so many stump-dumb stupid members manage to survive?

Ninnies of this sort had permeated the Richistans, so we doubled back and walked through the tract of 1960s ranch houses just to the north of ours.

Man! You do not even want to KNOW how much it must cost to air-condition those old piles. In the 1950s and 60s, power was not very expensive here. Consequently, houses and office buildings were never built with effective insulation…often not with any insulation at all. My son’s house, which is of that vintage, just about bankrupts him in the summertime, even when he jacks up the thermostat and has big floor fans blasting in every room.

Once the back yard…now the back porch of the back porch!

I remember my parents’ house in Sun City, each of whose walls was built of one layer of slump block. Period. Didn’t even have a slab of drywall inside, to pretty it up. Put your hand on one of those walls and you’ll burn yourself.

But…in those days, people didn’t stay in Phoenix over the summer. Without a doubt, Del Webb assumed his hordes of retirees would all drive back to Michigan and stay there in their RV’s between May and October. And many of those folks do. SDXB, who now lives in Sun City, does in fact clear out of the Valley for as long as he can, every summer.

My parents didn’t. They’d had their fill of living out of suitcases and driving back and forth across the country, what with my father’s Merchant Marine job and living in lovely Saudi Arabia. And yeah: that house got pretty hot in the summer. My mother jacked that AC so it never went off at any time of the day or night.

Here’s their house, photos taken during the last time it was on the market. It’s much modernized…didn’t have a dishwasher when we lived there, for example. The original screened porch along the back of the house has been enclosed, adding a nice dose of extra square footage to have to air-condition. They’ve laid down some reasonably decent tilework on all the floors– we had ugly carpets throughout.

My father! Just makes me cringe to look at this place and remember what he went through as my mother lay dying in one of those bedrooms.

That poor man. He worked SO hard, all of his life, just to build a comfortable, care-free retirement for them. And how thrilled he was to find Sun City! Boyboyboy: “no brats hollering outside your bedroom window when you’re trying to take a nap!”

Yeah.

Meanwhile, all the time my father was working like a mule, my mother was smoking herself to death. And what a way to go: just freakin’ hideous!

After he had “retired,” happily moved the two of them to a ghetto for old folks, and ensconced me in the University of Arizona (he got me into college a year early, for his convenience), his investments crashed. He’d put everything in insurance securities, which went down the tubes just a year or two after he had retired and deposited us in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. He lost his shirt and had to go back to work, to restore at least some of his retirement savings. I can’t even imagine how horrible that must have been for him. All his life he drudged away so that he could retire at the earliest possible moment and live happily ever after with his bride.

Who, we might add, really was the love of his life.

For his trouble, he got to attend her as she stumbled off to the Next World. And a mighty gawdawful trip that was.

As soon as she died — literally within days — he bought himself into Orangewood, a life-care community in the North Central district of Phoenix. It was ideal for him, because he was accustomed to institutional living and in fact liked it. My mother had refused to go, because a cramped little hole in a warehouse for old folks was not where she wished to spend the last years of her life.

Little did she know how few years she had…

Oh well. Forthwith he moved himself over there. And honestly, I think he would have been very happy at Orangewood had he not been instantly snabbed by the witch who seduced and married him. What a harridan! He didn’t know that until it was too late, though. Upshot: the last few years of his life were pretty damned miserable.

Keep that in mind: when you get old, don’t be in any hurry to lock yourself into a marriage. Nobody cares whether some old buzzard is living in sin with some old bat!

That house is lookin’ mighty good now — or at least, it was when those photos were taken. They enclosed the carport — which was on the west side of the building. Another layer of block plus a large space of empty air (garage) would cut the heat level in that living room, very nicely. They also enclosed the back screen porch, much enlarging the indoor living space.

And they added a dishwasher — my mother never had a dishwasher, in all the time she lived with my father…thirty-some years. All nice new appliances, very good. Ceiling fans: good. Those room air conditioners would have made it a LOT more comfortable for her…really, when you come down to it, it’s kind of odd they didn’t think of that. But then again, maybe not: they bought central air-conditioning to have central air-conditioning, after all. The bathrooms are basically the same, no doubt with updated fixtures. That gawdawful Pepto-Bismol pink tile in the back bathroom was the height of style when they moved in!

Really, if there just weren’t SO many unhappy memories associated with that place, right now today I would seriously consider buying it.