Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Roar! Roar!! Roar!!!

by

Ruby and I take our morning stroll, serenaded by the roar of jet planes. Yea, verily: one of the reasons I hated living in Sun City: Luke AFB, just a few miles to the south and west.

Every goddamn morning: Blasts of jet engines greeted the rising sun.

Other reasons to find Sun City tedious:

* racism
* hatred of young people
* distance from decent shopping
* isolation
* ugly, cheaply built house
* ultra-tidiness
* gravel “lawns”
* no pets: nobody had dogs, though they were allowed.

We did: we had an annoying chihuahua…but my mother preferred cats. And you hafta say: cats don’t yap.

Way over here in North Central Phoenix, a good 20 miles away from Sun City and Luke, we can get the dawn jet blasts. Even though the planes don’t fly directly over the neighborhood, their engines are SO LOUD that you can hear the damn things INSIDE your amply insulated, solid block house with its double-paned windows and its attic blown full of insulation.

What a racket!

SDXB, a long-time newsman and then a PR guy, took a little job for Luke after he moved out to SC: answering the phone to citizens calling to bitch about the jet engine noise. It was a task that kept him busy.

My mother was one who did not bellyache about the racket. “It’s the sound of fweedom,” she used to simper.

No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way. 

Of course I didn’t say that to her. She’d have backhanded me into the middle of next week for any such sass.

She did love living in Sun City, you hafta say that. So much so that she not only wasn’t bothered by the ungodly roar from Luke, she even claimed to like it.

Ugh. Never been so glad to move away from a place in my life.

And after 10 years in Saudi Arabia…that’s sayin’ something!

Strange Weather…

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Looks like rain, but doesn’t feel like rain…know what I mean?  It’s a very weird-looking day out there this morning: high overcast. Is it gonna rain? I’d put 50-50 odds on the proposition. Right now, tho’, I doubt that it’ll rain soon.

So…I should get off my duff and walk down to the Sprouts or over to the Albertson’s. Or to some such. Just now, though, I’m a bit too lazy to work up that much ambition. Ruby and I have traipsed all over the neighborhood and the local park — probably a couple of miles. And despite the high clouds, it’s starting to warm up. Do I really want to trade a heat stroke for a handful of chocolate chips?

😀

Well. Possibly. Quite possibly.

My kid has made off with my car (note how tactfully I refrain from saying “stolen”…), and so shopping is restricted to stores within walking distance. Well, unless I want to brave the public transport system.

Believe me: I do not. Been there, done that, ain’t doin’ it again.

Truth to tell, Phoenix has grown into a Big City. And in such a venue, you can usually get most of what you need or want within a reasonable walk from your home. What that means, amazingly enough, is you really don’t need a car. And if you do? The place is swarming with taxicabs, Ubers, and busses. From here I can easily walk to…

* Albertson’s
* Sprouts
* Walgreen’s
* Bookman’s
* Walmart
* a computer store
* several restaurants

Plus a local shoe store, liquor store, coffee store…and on and on.

If I wanted to wait on a bus until after the cows come home, I could even get to the beloved AJ’s car-free. A guy who drives for Uber lives right across the street. He’d probably drive me down to the pricey AJ’s; from there I could get back home by bus and on foot.

The main problem with getting around on foot is that it takes A LOT longer than driving. In a vast, spread-out urb like Phoenix, there is a limit to how much time you want to kill traipsing from Point A to Point B. Same is true with the public transit system here: conveyances don’t come by very often. You can easily stand around a half-hour or forty-five minutes waiting for a bus. And it’s decidedly not safe for a woman to be standing on the street by herself here.

LOL! It ain’t San Francisco, that’s for sure!

When my parents and I lived there during the 1950s, a bus came by our high-rise apartment every 15 minutes or so. I could hop on the bus and ride to a stop within a block of my school. Down the street from the school, you’d find coffee shops, an ice-cream parlor, several decent restaurants, and a variety of nifty stores.

Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, you’ll wait as much as 45 minutes for a bus — any bus — to show up. If you’re female, you’re likely to be harassed as you stand there (and stand…and stand…and stand) on the corner. It decidedly does not feel safe. And that is why I would be willing to pay an Uber driver a fistful of dollars to take me wherever I need to go.

Then, too: it’s about to get VERY hot here. If I left the house right now — 9 a.m. — I could probably get to a nearby supermarket and/or drugstore and then reach home before the heat becomes absurd. It’s overcast today, and so the weather is only supposed to reach 99 degrees. Tomorrow, though, it’ll be 104.

And no, even an old desert rat like me ain’t about to walk across block on block on block of concrete and asphalt through 104-degree heat.

My son is willing to take me to doctor’s and dentist’s appointments…but that presents a monster time suck for him. Paying an Uber driver looks a lot more attractive than having the kid take off from his job every time he turns around. On the other hand…hmmm…he’s the one who ripped off my car.

Maybe he should be paying the Uber guy’s fees. 😀

If only she were still here…

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I wish…i wish…i do wish she were here to see it.

The’Hood, I mean. My beautiful ‘Hood. “She”: my mother, gone these past three decades.

She had seen this tract before SDXB and I moved in here. And she thought it was OK.

Today — oh yeah: I can assure you — she’d think it’s a lot more than OK. This place is right up her alley — the alley we traversed  over 30 years ago, when i was a kid and she was coming to the end of her life.

***

Ian the Great: what a hoot she would have gotten out of him, her fine grandson!

And how proud of him she would have been. She would have thought he was about the best thing that ever trundled up the pike.

If she hadn’t been murdered by the tobacco peddlers, she might still be with us…though she would be older than Methuselah and all his sisters by now.

Women in her family who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke — because they were wacksh!t Christian Scientists — lived well into their 90s with no serious ailments. And no medical care. So…that would have taken her past the year 2000, give or take. Gosh! It’s hard to believe that much time has passed.

LOL! It’s a little hard to believe, too, that I’m still kickin’after all those years and all those relatives have passed. 😀

***

Heh! In its way, it explains why I’m so sick. Who knew I’d be kicking around this earth after 80 years!

Sure doesn’t feel like that long. On the other hand, we live in a culture that despises the elderly, and so we try to put our longevity out of mind. That makes sense.

Though yes, I do feel like it’s time to go (and then some), knowing that my great-grandmother and my great-aunt each still had another 10 years to go at this point in their lives makes me feel…well…strange. On the one hand, sorta encouraged that there may be another full decade left. On the other hand, sorta miserable at the prospect of ten more years to spend feeling this awful.

If there’s a God, I kinda wish She’d set me free, along about now…

Now What???

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In a moment of misguided chumminess, I lent my laptop to a business acquaintance. This is a guy I’ve known for years, outwardly very professional, a successful chiropractor by trade.

Bad move! Among other antics, he contrived to break the computer, rendering it nonfunctional. My son has taken it to a computer store, in hopes of getting it fixed…but that hope ain’t one I hold out.

Can’t afford to buy another one. That unit was tax-deductible, purchased when I used it mostly for the editorial business. Now that I’ve pretty much retired from that gig and from teaching, I get no break on its cost. And my son is more than ever convinced that I’m crazy, largely because of long-standing friendship with Mr. Computer Vandal.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago my car was trashed, when I rear-ended some woman on a dark, wet, rainy road.

Now I’m banned from driving (by the Kid) and so have to walk to the stores. I do still have a driver’s license…but no vehicle! He has glommed it and stashed it at his house…rather too far to reach without a car.

Luckily, the ‘Hood is richly endowed with neighborhood stores and chains: Sprouts, Albertson’s, Fry’s, Walgreen’s, Bookman’s, and a cute little liquor store in which to feel righteous by “buying local” when scoring a bottle of wine.

Dunno which way to jump just now. I could sneak around and rent a car. But frankly, that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. In the first place, I don’t want to go behind M’hijto’s back, no matter how unreasonable I think his driving ban is. Plus…about three houses down the street, a neighbor has gone into the Uber business. If I would get off my duff long enough to contact him, I could probably get him or one of his colleagues to drive me just about everywhere I need to go.

One damnfool thing after another, eh?

Yet to decide whether to pursue the scheme to convert the garage, now empty, into an art studio. Probably not: sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Still…hmmmmm…. I do like it as an idea.

 

Ohhhh Most Brilliant of Web Gurus!

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Well, our wonderful Grayson, the guy who keeps this site online and functioning, got me back in after I forgot (lost??) the password.

God bless him!!

Geez. I must be Alzheimering out. The more I fool with computer hoo-hah, the more opaque it gets to me.

Even when I print out this kind of ditz and tape it to the computer monitor’s frame, I still cannot get reliably in to this website, that website, or the other.

{sigh} I’m awfully afraid this is part of memory loss associated with aging. As the days go by, I recall less and less. Eighty-seven gerjillion passwords? F’geddaboudit. Due dates for bills?  Gimme a break. Who borrowed my laptop? I dunno.… Nothing is distracting me. I’m not sick. With no job, I’m never harried by work tasks, office politics, and general b.s. It looks alarmingly like the brain is simply wearing out.

Then we have mundane questions like…oh, say…what time is it?

  • The computer says it’s 8:47 a.m.
  • Clock on my desk: defunct. Can’t find it.
  • Bedside clock in the other room: 10 minutes to 2:00 (huh???)
  • Timer on the kitchen stove: 8:47
  • Clock in the dining room: 8:55
  • Best guess: HUH??????

 Figure out that it’s quarter after 9:00. Reset clocks, changing battery in one of ’em.

Cute li’l clock…wonder where I got it? Oh well. If only it didn’t have to be reloaded with batteries and dorked with to show what is apparently the current time.

Seriously: I can NOT keep track of all this ditz, much less make sense of six conflicting blobs of data.

Please, dear God: next time you bring me back to this planet, would you drop me on a desert island? One with no clocks? No computers? Maybe even no other humans???

But coffee, Sire. Plenty of coffee. Pleeze…..

Why Did They Hate Him So?

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It was in the summer of my sophomore year that I took up with my college boyfriend. We met at the University of Arizona’s swimming pool, where we each had taken to hanging out when we weren’t attending summer-school classes.

Paul was eastern European. I wanna say he was Bohemian or Slovakian. What he was, though, was American. His family had been here for a couple of generations, and he grew up in Chicago

Nothing about him shouted ALIEN!!! If no one had told you his predecessors had immigrated from Eastern Europe, the idea would never have crossed your mind. If it did and you had stared carefully at him, you probably would have thought his background was middle European or maybe British. English, that is.

But…

I brought him home from school one weekend, so as to proudly show him off to my parents. Little did I know…

They were shocked and dismayed, I tell you: shocked and dismayed. Seriously: it was instant hate…the minute they saw him.

I knew my parents were wracked with racial hatred. They would have disowned me if they’d caught me dating someone of the African persuasion. Or Chinese. Or Japanese. Or…apparently anyone even faintly different from themselves. My guess is, British was the desired ethnicity, and American the only acceptable nationality. My mother’s antecedents were English with some French thrown in. My father’s: Germanically English.

I met Paul in the summer between my sophomore and junior years. After having spent my first college-age summer at the new parental home in Sun City, I realized living in a ghetto for old folks was not for me. So, the following summer I engineered the opportunity to stay in Tucson and go to summer school. There, I used to hang out at the campus swimming pool. And that’s where Paul and I met.

How he triggered my parents’ racist instincts mystified me. And it escapes me to this day: he was as white as I was. The damning difference was that his family came from Eastern Europe.

Whaaa?

They had trained me up effectively to hate racial groups that were Not Us. But European nationalities? Huh?????  I had no idea we were also supposed to hate people who came from certain regions of Europe.

WhatEVER…. /eyeroll/  They were just abhorred when I brought Paul home one weekend. And from that moment on they launched a campaign to get rid of him.

I was madly in love with the man, myself. He was handsome, smart, fun to be with…what more could a college kid want? And as for our family’s tradition of rock-solid racism: to my eye, he was as white as me.

Having seen The Enemy and realizing he was about to be Us, they set out to get rid of him. I resisted for quite some time, even though I understood that if I married Paul, I might never see my parents again.

No, that is not an exaggeration.

What did in poor ole’ Paul for me was this:

His best buddy — closest male friend on this earth — was married. This guy’s wife was advanced in pregnancy. So much so that she could not accommodate him sexually. Determined to get what he believed was his by right, he took up with a bar maid, whom he met one evening while out drinking with his pals.  So now he’s having grand fun fu*king this chippie and bragging about it. Paul thinks that’s just hunky and dory.

No kidding: Paul saw nothing wrong in his pal’s philandering with a chickadee the guy picked up in a bar!

Because, after all, his wife couldn’t “give him any.”

This episode removed the scales from my li’l teenaged eyes: my parents’ racism aside, the guy was an immoral lout. So I dumped him.

Years have gone by — a lifetime of years, eh? He went back to the Midwest and became a university administrator. Had a successful career. Photos on the Internet show a handsome man; reports indicate he did well for himself. And incredibly, for awhile he was working in the president’s office at the Great Desert University. That was during the time when I was working on the campus editing a research publication for the graduate college.

I had no idea he was there. I must have stumbled across his path now and again, but never noticed him or heard his name uttered. Did he know I was there? Dunno. Probably: he was smart, and that publication did ultimately come out of the university president’s office. But…possibly not: there was no reason he would have known my married name, which I was using by then.

On reflection… Today, I think my parents were right, in a way. Given his morals — or lack thereof — he would have made an undesirable husband. At least, for me…