Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

RELIEVED…

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…of running around in the sun!  Whew!!!

WonderAccountant and I planned to get together this afternoon: meeting at her place. This would entail my having to walk over there…through 108-degree heat, according to the back porch thermometer.

Well. Ruby the Corgi and I have already traipsed through the heat, thankyouverymuch, and I can tellya: assuredly I don’t want to walk across even the one blacktop road between here and the WonderAccountants’ place!

Mercifully, when I called to arrange this forthwith, she suggested we put it off to another day.

YES!!!!!

Not to say HOOOOORAAAHHHH!

Yah: this was a chore that I absolutely positively was NOT in the mood for today. Any task that involves anything even remotely resembling math (of any variety) is over my furry little head. That’s why I hire WonderAccountant to handle my books, and it’s why M’hijito rides his stallion behind her to check on it and keep himself aware of what’s going on.

So: that was escaped.

And so was the (very short) trip across the broiling asphalt between our houses. Ugh!

Honestly, I’m coming to dislike living in Arizona more and more as the seasons turn. Spring and summer here, taken together, form a variety of Hell, so unholy is the heat. Just walking across the street entails armoring your feet with thick-soled shoes.

Where would I go, if I could escape this place?

Well. The San Francisco Bay Area would be my first choice. Either Parkmerced, where my mother and I lived when we first came back from Arabia and my father (a Merchant Marine deck officer) shipped out of the East Bay, or Berkeley, where my mother’s family lived.

Of course, I couldn’t afford to live in either of those places…but it’s something to daydream about. 😀

Failing that? Well…here in Arizona: we have Prescott, an upscale college town to the north of us. Or the Oro Valley, a suburb of Tucson.

Otherwise? In general: meh! There aren’t many venues that are better than this place. Summers here suck, but the rest of the year, the climate is lovely. The district where I live is solidly middle-class, ringed with pleasing stores in easy walking distance of my house.

Truth to tell, I’d just as soon live out the rest of my life right here!

“Hotter Than a By-Gawd!”

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LOL! That was one of my father’s favorite turns of phrase:

  • Hotter than a by-gawd
  • Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove
  • Hotter than a three-dollar pistol
  • Hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk

On and on…. He was a good Texas boy, a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, and he had a suitcase full of little sayings like that.

😀

Who knows what he’d pull out today, if he were still among us! Thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads 103.  And yeah: he’d regard that as passing warm. Wunderground says we’re supposed to reach 109 today, though.

Me: just back from a dog-free stroll around the ‘Hood. No doubt not my wisest move of the day…. 😮

Probably ought to take a shower to cool down. But…well…I’m too lazy just now to regard cleaning the bathtub afterward as a lovely way to spend time this morning. And o’course, you fail to wipe down the plastic walls after a shower…at your peril. A giant scrubbing job is NOT what I want to tuck into the cards.

Meandering up the sidewalk, I passed workmen at a couple of houses — guys who looked like they were engaged in carpentry or painting. LORDIE! Can you imagine doing that kind of physical work in 110-degree heat?

And yes, it soon will be 110°…at least. Just now, it’s only 10:30 in the morning!

WhatEVER possessed my parents to drag us to Arizona???

Well, they thought Sun City was about the greatest innovation the human race ever devised: “No kids screaming outside my window when I’m trying to take a nap,” my father intoned, with pleased awe.

Adding to that bit of charm, Sun City was then and is now as whitey-white as  you can get. To my parents, that was a positive trait of the first rank.

That was in 1962: sixty-four years ago! 

Even today: an African-American friend of mine — a business professional — had the brazen nerve to buy a house out there. He was literally HOUNDED out of the place. Within six months, he sold up and moved out.

I suggested he buy the house for sale across the street from the Funny Farm. He declined. Apparently felt moving his blackness into our neighborhood was not a kind thing to do. Or maybe he didn’t care to dodge bullets flying down from the slum to the north of us…  😀

We are, after all, parked in lovely Sunnyslope: a crime-ridden slum of the first water.

No kidding. Parts of it — such as our neighborhood — are on the high side of upper-middle class. They qualify as North Central Phoenix, a tony district, indeed. But get six blocks to the north of us, and…hang onto your (hard-)hat!

Lordie! What a place!

And Now…WTF????

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Yesterday was a true, certifiable Day from Hell. Seriously…by bed-time, I knew that if I weren’t trapped here by owning the damn house outright and by the piddling retirement income and by the craving to live vaguely near my son, I would be SOOOO OUTTA PHOENIX!

But now…we have this morning. WTF?????

  • The weather is clear and more or less temperate. On the warm side, but highly tolerable.
  • The peripheral neuropathy: present, but tolerable in intensity.
  • The dawg: prancing along happily.
  • The hole-in-the-ground-into-which-to-pour-money: functioning normally this morning.
  • The toilet: now working normally.
  • The house: spotlessly clean after Wonder-Cleaning-Lady’s ministrations.
  • The laptop computer: apparently working normally again.
  • Outside temperature in the shade of the back porch at 7:30 a.m.: only 100 degrees.

Weird. 

The hound and the human got out the door early enough to circumnavigate the park without melting in the heat.

The babysitters M’hijito hired to ride herd on the Crazy Old Bat have not surfaced (thank Gawd!), or else they came by here while we were doggy-walking and simply ignored the note I left on the door for them, asking them to wait a few minutes until I could get back to the house. Good riddance, say I!

So…I dunno why the Manifestations from Hell have settled down. And I ain’t askin’!  Just hope they STAY settled down for awhile!

How Things Work Out

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Stumbling around through the heat this afternoon — without a car now, I have to walk to every local destination — I happened to think back on my parents, and on how much they loathed and detested my college boyfriend.

This guy was more than a boyfriend. We seriously intended to marry. And our relationship comprised all the features of married life, with the exception of the spoken vow, “…I thee wed.”

Why they hated Paul…well…that’s something that’s always flummoxed me to some degree.

I believe it was his ethnicity: he was Eastern European. And as far as my parents were concerned, anyone who wasn’t Us wasn’t quite human. The prospect of my marrying him and supporting him through a career (he became an academic administrator at the University of California, a highly successful line of work) and bearing his quasi-Asian children…well…that was more than they could bear.

They regarded our relationship with horror, and they made that horror as clear as they could.

Our love affair was going hot and heavy when I made the decision to break it off. Paul was shattered. I felt utterly hideous at having faced him down and told him, as he wept, to go away, that we were finished. But…that was what I had to do.

§ § §

I was my parents’ only child. And the knowledge that if I continued with Paul, I would never see my parents again…well…that was more than I could cope with.

It might have been a different matter if they hadn’t done everything a human being could do to love their child, to support her, to guide her to academic and economic success. But it wasn’t a different matter. And abandoning them — which is what I would have been doing — was simply too ugly a prospect to contemplate.

So…instead of saying good-bye to my parents, I said good-bye to Paul.

And…away I went, into the Southern Arizona dust.

Eventually I came north, got a job with a Phoenix law firm, and married a very promising young lawyer. That match lasted a couple of decades and produced an excellent son. Then I wandered off into the sunset again.

Heh! I do rather more wandering than I should, evidently….

But again, things have worked out. I’m dwelling safely and in reasonable comfort. Own my home outright. Have had an entertaining and productive career. Published several books. Nothing to complain about there.

I guess. But…

Sometimes I wonder…

?

Disaster of the Day…

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Well: make that mini-disaster of the day. And now that my excellent son has addressed matters, it’s the non-disaster of the day.

The Old Bat turned the garden hose on in the swimming pool, by way of bringing the water level up to normal. Then she wandered off and forgot about it.

Right.

When I remembered, the water was all the way up to the level of the deck, within about a quarter-inch of overflowing!!!

Called M’hiijto to ask his advice on how best to address that little fiasco. He announced that he was on his way!

Gosh.

Well, on his way he indeed was. When he got here, he flang around and banged around, drained off the excess water, fixed this and fixed that. So…now the pool is back to normal — or at least, so it appears.

That was close! Another ten minutes with that hose roaring away, and the pool would have overflowed. Allllll over the yard….

At this time of year — early July — the air is SO hot and dry that the excess water will evaporate off in a couple of days. Disaster mitigated! 

***

Just now, though, there ain’t gonna be much mitigating going on for awhile.

***

Added to the Pool Frolic, we also have a fine case of tinnitus. 

Every now and again, I’ll get a spate of this — squealing and ringing in the ears. But it usually goes away overnight, if not in a few hours.

But nay! Not this time! Climbing into bed, we’re going into the third night of wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…..

Ohhhh gawd!

I’ve kind of learned to ignore it. Kinda…sorta… You can’t, in reality, ignore a constant high-pitched squeal. But after awhile, you get used to it. The noise is still there, but it doesn’t stop you from sleeping.

Heh! It certainly isn’t keeping Ruby from her beauty sleep. She’s conkered out on the foot of the bed. Funny little dog. What an adorable companion!

 

Movin’ On! Or is that STAGGERING On?

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LOL! So the Human took it into its pea-brained head to walk down to the nearby supermarket to pick up some stuff for itself and for the dawg.

That was what we call “Not Too Bright.” For godsake, as we scribble, the thermometer mounted in the deep, dark shade of the back porch reads 110 degrees. 

Really? What d’you suppose Wunderground thinks?

Yep: the same. A chilly 110. 

Welp! It’s a good thing I grew up in Saudi Arabia, there on the fringe of Hell. This kind of weather was par for the course there. Most of the time….

My guess is, this afternoon I survived BECAUSE the Arabian desert acclimated me to it.

So… As we’re staggering through that heat, our thoughts turn to…what if?  As in what if we dwelt somewhere else? Somewhere more civilized, someplace where humans were adapted to live?

Ohhh…kayyyy…. So, where would we go?

My cousin, a lovely and brilliant young woman, lives with her family in a suburb called Fountain Hills, over on the east side of the Valley. The area is somewhat elevated, enough to be noticeably cooler than my parts. Yea, verily: in the wintertime they’ll actually get snow.

Whatever THAT is.

It’s a bitch of a long way from my son, though. If he didn’t live in Central Phoenix, I might very well be in Fountain Hills as we scribble. But…f’r hevvinsake! It’s an hour’s drive from there to his house!

Nope. Not doin’ that.

SDXB moved to Sun City, in the wake of our brain-banging quarrel with Tony the Romanian Landlord. He tried to get me to go out there with him. But having lived there with my parents, I wasn’t bloody well about to go through THAT again! So…I felt bad to lose his companionship….but frankly, I can deal one helluva lot better with Tony than with roaring jets, bigoted neighbors, cheesy construction, and grocery stores that don’t carry real food.

Yea, verily! Here’s a terrifying revelation: I’ve come to rather LIKE ol‘ Tony the Romanian Landlord. In addition to being the single hardest-working man I’ve ever known, it turns out he’s remarkably intelligent. This is One…Smart…Dude. And that, alas, is a character trait that strongly attracts me.

So, here we are in a state of détente, quietly and slowly drifting toward truce. And maybe toward — hang onto your hat! — even friendship. We shall see what develops…and hope a move to Sun City is NOT that development.