Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Things That Shouldn’t Have Happened

by

My father: Good God!

I look at his life and think of it as tragedy. Truly heart-breaking tragedy.

  • His mother going off the deep end
  • His bigotry: given that THEY WEREN’T WHITE!
  • That he dropped out of school
  • My mother, the love of his life, killing herself with tobacco
  • Me thinking that I was better than him: what a little twit!!
  • Why didn’t he go to work for Metzgers Dairy in Texas, as his brother did? The brother became an executive with that outfit.
  • Actually, he did have a delivery route for them, when he was a young pup. Why didn’t he get further?
  • Apparently, it was spending hours watching the rear ends of horses as he delivered milk around the countrified environs of Ft. Worth, then a hick town in the middle of nowhere.
  • So, it was off to join the Navy!
  • And from there, to move on to the Merchant Marine.
  • Why did he dislike queers…uhm, gay men…so much…but also enjoy the company of teenaged boys to a surprising degree? What WAS he trying to say to us? Or…to not say?

Every glance at the man’s life brings up a slew of questions. But…isn’t that so of everyone?

Possibly he and my mother shouldn’t have moved to Sun City, here in balmy Arizona. If they had stayed in Southern California (whence they came), would a competent doctor there have recognized her cancer in time to save her?

Probably not.

Smoking tobacco should never have been legal. The accursed, poisonous stuff should have been banned the minute it was proven that smoking that shit causes cancer, and that it is addictive.

Some doctor should have had the wherewithal to at least TRY to talk my mother into quitting.

My father should have insisted that she quit, at the same time he did.

Their horrific experience in the Sun City nursing home, as she lay dying, should have been actionable. We should have sued that outfit.

Why didn’t DXH, a partner in a heavy-hitting law firm, suggest that? Probably because I’d already taken up with TJK and so he didn’t give a damn about my family.

My father shouldn’t have had to transport my mother 20 miles from Sun City into North Central Phoenix to get decent nursing-home care.

DXH and I shouldn’t have blithely acquiesced to my father’s proposal that he marry the Dragon Lady, after my mother had died. We should have suggested he wait for a year. And during that year, we should have socialized with him, taken him on trips, had him meet people.

I should never have taken up with TJK. By the time my mother got sick, DXH probably didn’t want to have anything to do with any of us.

Hmmmm…. Y’know…about a third of my life shouldn’t have happened…

Soggy Doggy Glorious Day…

by

WHAT a spectacular morning!

High clouds make for a glorious sunrise as Ruby the Corgi sets out to drag the Hu-mann around the neighborhood. Oh, my: it’s just gorgeous out there.

And damp. And sticky… Very humid: 31%.

What really, dear Wunderground, does that mean? Are you saying that 31% of the atmosphere we’re trudging through is water?

😀

Could be, I reckon. But Ruby doesn’t mind. She charges ahead, a little furry brown rocket. We fly through the ‘Hood, around Upper Richistan, up toward Gangbanger’s Way. Past Marge’s house, apparently unoccupied (????) but not for sale yet.

Marge was (is?) well into her 80s. She wishes, more than anything, to evade being stuck into the Beatitudes or Orangewood or any other such holding pen for the elderly. But there’s no sign she’s living in the house. So…I fear the worst.

She said she had willed the place to her son — meaning she willed him about half a million bucks worth of real estate. He doesn’t live here, so…as soon as title to the house passes to him, he presumably will put it on the market.

It’s a pleasant old 1970s ranch-style house. Not to my taste, and now needing a bunch of repairs and upgrades. But still…lots of people would fall all over themselves to get it.

I actually might be among them, if it weren’t so nerve-gratingly close to Gangbanger’s Way. The traffic racket there would be just unholy! It’s a drag strip for the local delinquents, so all night you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the brats. And it’s a main drag into town from the west side, so every rush hour you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the unholy mobs of commuters trudging to work. And let’s not forget the hospital up the road on Gangbanger’s, bringing you WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO from the ambulances racing toward the emergency room.

{sigh} I do miss Marge, who had become my morning walking buddy. I’m afraid she probably fell — or else had a heart attack or stroke — and ended up in one of those horrible prisons for old folks. She dreaded that fate even more than I do. Truly: I would so rather be dead. If she had passed on, surely her son would have sold her house by now (he lives in some other part of the country). She probably landed in an old folks’ slam and asked him to hang on to it lest she somehow manage to escape.

Oh well.

The spectacularity of the sunrise has now passed, and what we have are high, pale gray clouds. Not the rainy type…just the humid type.

What do I hafta do today?

* Pick up the office.

* Call Cox. Demand that they send paper bills. (They’re shifting to “paperless bills.” No, thank you!!)

*Figure out, come to think of it, whether Cox is auto-paid now, or whether I have to send the ba*tards an e-payment or check every month. I think the latter, because I don’t trust Cox.

* Make a grocery store run.

* Argue with my son over medical bullsh!t.

Hmm…. Actually, I could physically go to the credit union and have one of their staff check on the autopays for me. This, while it entails an annoying drive, would take me past THE best Sprouts store in the Valley. And that would allow me to stock up on a pile of outstanding foodoids.

***

Cleaning out the e-mail in-box. OVER 500 NUISANCE E-MAILS, just in August!

Can you imagine? Hope I’m not deleting anything important. I just don’t have the patience to check every goddamn one of those things — not even looking at the email but just checking the subject or sender line. So WHAM! They all get deleted.

But even that is a nuisance. After hitting mass-delete after mass-delete, there are still A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX junk-mail messages sitting there waiting to be sent to trash. And that doesn’t count all the real messages from outfits like Amazon and from my client whose work I’m not in the mood to do…

Crazy-making!

Soggy Doggy Day

by
Musical Instrument in the Sound of Freedom Band

Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.

UGH!  Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.

Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…

Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.

Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.

Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona!  She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.

My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!

LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.

But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.

Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.

She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.

No kidding.

Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .

Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.

And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.

All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.

When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.

In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.

Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.

Oh well.

My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.

Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.

And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.

Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.

Cruisin’ and Musin’…

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Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…

Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.

As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.

Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.

Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.

It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.

Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.

I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.

***

Time having passed…

Cruising the real estate ads, ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.

My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.

But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….

Soggy Doggy Day…and a Sentimental Journey

by

7:45 a.m. Ninety degrees in the shade. 41% humidity.

I’m so parboiled I can’t think: don’t know why WordPress is letting me write in this post, since apparently I’m not actually logged in. Or something.

But lo! It let me out AND let me back in. Weird!

Just back from a truly unpleasant doggy-walk. The heat and the sogginess would be quite enough, without the fellow moron dog-walkers. Where does it say that stupidity is part of the job description of “human being”?

**************

Never did get around to posting this.

ohhhh well…

Now it’s a few days later. The weather has attenuated some. Actually pretty pleasant out there this morning: much drier than it was when this post started. Just finished wrestling with the pool, to little avail. Hope Pool Dude shows up shortly to get it set up properly.

Where were we?

**************

Ah yes: the junket with VC. My friend VC and I went over to a classic old Phoenix shopping mall (believe it or not, we were around when it was NEW!!). Roamed through a couple of tony upscale department stores; then roamed up and down the mall and peered at the tony individual stores. That was fun.

Who has the money to shop in those places? More to the point: these days who has the TIME to do so?

Our stroll brought back memories of my mother, who dearly loved to putter around a shopping center that contained a couple of big department stores and a slew of expensive little stores. In Long Beach (where I went to high school), we lived within walking distance of a sprawling mall. She was a bit too crippled up (from the malnutrition she suffered as a child) to walk from our apartment to that mall, so of course she would drive us there. Occasionally, though, I would walk over there by my li’l teenaged self and roam around the place.

One of the large department stores there — I believe it was a Broadway — had a classic department-store coffee shop/restaurant, up on the third floor. She dearly LOVED coffee shops! So, not surprisingly, we ate there fairly often…maybe once a month or so.

Yesterday, after I dropped VC off at her house — she lives in a historic downtown neighborhood — I drove back up to my parts through the Central Avenue corridor.

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve cruised around those parts! I used to live in the historic mid-town district. We had a beautiful old house west of Central Avenue and south of Thomas Road, one that I miss to this day. It was so pretty, and the neighbors were so nice!

Unfortunately, we moved out. I stupidly thought we would send our son, who was coming onto grade-school age, to the well respected public schools in the Madison District, up on North Central Avenue.

Yes. Central Snobsville…

Unbeknownst to me, my husband had NO INTENTION of sending our son to a public school, no matter how well rated it was. If I’d had any idea that he would flat-out refuse to put the kid in a Madison school, I would never, ever have lobbied to move out of that lovely house.

The mid-town Encanto area, though, really wasn’t very safe. We had several hair-raising incidents while we lived there, as did some of our neighbors. The most unnerving adventure, though, really was our fault: Having come home late from a Bar Association shindig, very tired and pretty drunk, we left the back door open so our German shepherd could go out and get herself back in, allowing us to go to bed without waiting for her to do Her Thing.

Mistake!

Shortly, DH started to snore: a roar like an 18-wheeler’s. I got up to sleep on the living-room sofa, since sleeping next to him in the bedroom was out of the question.

Sometime after I dozed off, we were awakened by an ENRAGED ROAR from Greta the German Shepherd. She exploded like a cannon, taking off from her snoozing site outside our bedroom door.

A local sh!thead, exploring for places to burgle, had hopped over the six-foot backyard fence and lo! Found that back door open!

YaHOO!

So he walked right in and made himself to home.

He got well inside the house before he woke up the German shepherd and she registered that whoever was in the kitchen was not DH and not me.

She ROARED after the poor son-of-a-bitch, getting between him and the door he came in. By the time DH woke up and came out to see WTF was going on, the chucklehead had found the side door. DH got there just in time to see him dart out the door and slam it in the dog’s face.

When I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen to see what was going on, DH said, sounding outraged and suspicious, “Who was that man?”

Welp. That was the beginning of the end. Who was that man, indeed.

This episode accelerated our desire to move uptown, and within a year we were outta there.

Mistake, IMHO. No place in the Valley is safe — as one of the cops who rescued me from the home invader in my present house remarked. You can not get away from it, no matter where you are. Hence: the proliferation of walled, gated “communities” hereabouts.

So, would I move back down there?

Hmmm….  Probably not.

Yes, I do love those beautiful old custom homes and the park and all. But… The crime and the transient issues are still there. And it’s noisy. Very noisy.

The lovely Encanto district is trisected by a one-way road leading downtown, a one-way road leading uptown, and Seventh Avenue, a main drag that runs from points WAY north to points WAY south. So the traffic is pretty much constant, and so is the noise.

Add to that two major hospitals: one up on Thomas road (north border) and one down on McDowell (south border). The one on McDowell is east of Central, so ambulances headed there rarely cut through Encanto. But the one on Thomas is right on the north border, and it’s HUGE. Ambulances and fire trucks race up and down those two one-way “neighborhood” streets all hours of the day and night, all the time. Plus shortly before we moved, the idiot city bought a private home on the street just north of us and about two lots to the west, and they turned it into a fire station!

Yes! Fire trucks and ambulances roaring back and forth, 24 hours a day! Not to mention the helicopters.

So…that, along with my hallucination about the school, was why we moved out.

To this day, I miss it. We no doubt would still be married if we’d stayed there, because I would never have become quite so discontent if we still lived in a beautiful house with beautiful neighbors.

Not that the house we bought up on North Central wasn’t beautiful enough. But the neighbors? Not so much.

North Central truly would be better named Snobsville. With one (count her: one) exception, our new neighbors were roaring snobs. And they knew a blue-collar girl when they saw her. They treated me like white trash…which, I guess, is not far off the mark. But my mother taught me to be polite to everyone, not only to the wealthy and the fancy. Those people around us were just horrid. Nouveau riche parvenus…

Cruising through the beloved old neighborhood, I thought maybe I should sell my house, here on the fringe of Sunnyslope, and move back into Encanto. We certainly have our share of crime and cop copter fly-overs and roaring ambulances. They seem to have moved the Fire Department out of that house around the corner from the old place, so that problem presumably is resolved.

But…truth to tell, those old houses entail even more work and more expense than this place. So that would be ill-advised, as moves go.

Really, the only practical moves at this point would be either to move into a high-rise on North Central or to a patio home in the Biltmore area. And neither of those appeals very much. I don’t want to live in a hive.

Besides, my son wants this house. He doesn’t understand about the longevity issue on my side of the family: women who had reasonably quiet lives lived into their 90s. With no medical care! They were Christian Scientists!

My mother died in her mid-60s…but she smoked herself to death.

Literally: the woman was never conscious without a cigarette in her hand — not even in the shower! So, no surprise, she died of a fine visceral cancer. That and the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Saudi Arabia picked her off relatively young.

****

For me, sometimes I do wonder…what next?

If there is a next, that is.

There may not be: it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion.

Truth to tell, I surely would not mind moving out of this neighborhood. The presence of the Romanian Landlord represents, IMHO, an ongoing threat, even though he’s presently quiescent and has been for quite some time. He’s closed the juvenile delinquent home across the street and turned it into a rental. Just now the tenants are quiet and the yard is well kept up. But…yeah: what next?

Just to the north of the hood, a dangerous slum spreads up to the foot of the North Mountains. To the west: banks of deteriorating apartments, running down as fast as they can run. To the east, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.

It’s not the worst place in the city. But there are better places — at comparable prices.

This, That, & the Other

by

Hotter than the Hubs out there...and wetter than the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Seriously: it is SO hot and SO humid, you step out your (soggy) front door into a corner of Hell. Or…more likely, into a corner of Lovely Saudi Arabia.

Today and yesterday have been weirdly reminiscent of the balmy old days beside the Persian Gulf.

There, the air would get so wet that sometimes rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky. We’re not that bad…yet. And I sincerely hope we don’t get there.

Ugh! Gotta go to the store. Get stuff for me and the hound: stuff that can’t wait. Then another errand…while I’m running around, I prob’ly SHOULD run by the mid-town Best Buy and get another power cord for this li’l computer.

Because…AS YOU AND I BOTH KNOW….wherever you are, you can’t get there from here. Whatever room I happen to be in, when the power runs low on the MacBook, the power cord is on the other end of the house!

😀

Ogling real estate in Moon Valley, a sprawling Mittel-America tract where my friends La Bethulia and La Maya moved. Look at this shack, for example. It’s on the high side of houses out there: not the best available, but far from the tackiest. I’d say it’s comparable to my current hovel, in style and size and maintenance.

Guess if I wanted to run away from the Romanian Landlord, that would be a likely candidate. It’s not quite as large as my house…but truth to tell, my shack is one bedroom too much.

Relatively pretty, as tract houses go.

But…y’know…so is mine. And my house is closer to M’hijito’s, by some miles. And click through the photos to see that thing next door to it. That’s a weird lash-up, isn’t it? It looks, for all the world, like a commercial structure with an underground garage.

?????

Not likely, in a suburban middle-class tract. But…weird, isn’t it?

Dunno that I could live in Moon Valley: too much emotional baggage.

A dear friend of mine: her husband died out there. He had cancer, and he died excruciatingly. And…well…her behavior left something to be desired. So did mine, come to think of it. We should never have been socializing in the kitchen while he was dying in the bedroom.

Horrible.

After he passed, I never heard another thing from her. She sold the house in Moon Valley; moved to Scottsdale. Then, apparently as she herself sank into decrepitude, she moved back to the Midwest, where her adult kids lived. And that was the last I knew.

Moon Valley is a bland tract of bland, throw-’em-together stick-and-drywall huts. For my purpose, it’s kind of a sentimental journey, cruising the Web and eyeballing the overpriced ticky-tacky. But in fact, my house is far nicer: block construction, real walls that keep out the burglars.

Seriously: a good-sized man could break right in through a wall out there, simply by delivering a good-sized kick. When my friends moved into that house, I went out to help her paint and fancify the place. You would not have BELIEVED the ticky-tacky construction!

No kidding: you could break in with swift kick to an exterior wall. The walls, which were pretty much all stick-and-plaster, were so poorly insulated that as I stood on the tile floors painting the living-room (she had the whole house tiled before they moved in!), I could feel the HOT heat under my feet. You don’t even wanna know what their power bills must have been.

***

Here I am at the neighborhood doc’s office. Waiting. And Waiting. And Waiting.

What I wanna do is ask him if he’ll refer me to the Alzheimer’s facility at Good Samaritan Hospital, in downtown Phoenix. That’s about a 10-minute drive from my house…as opposed to an hour’s trudge to get out to the Mayo.

Also, quite frankly, I want a second opinion. The Mayo is halfway to Payson from my house. Good Sam is straight down 7th Street: outside of rush hour, an easy shot. Soooo….we’re talkin’ two advantages here:

  • If the staff at Good Sam do indeed appear to be competent, then we have excellent doctors within easy reach; and
  • Good Sam is right on the route to my son’s house and to a dear friend’s house! Thereby producing an excuse for visiting. 😀

*****

Didn’t get far with that scheme. Oh well: I’ll have to keep at it.  A little peripheral neuropathy isn’t gonna kill me. Soon. And if my brain has turned to Swiss cheese, there ain’t much anyone can do about it.