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Idle essays

What Did My Mother In

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Re: My mother’s nicotine addiction: she smoked and she smoked and she smoked and then she smoked some more. You knew when she was still awake in bed late at night and you knew when she awoke in the morning: by the stink of her goddamn cigarettes.

To me, the horror of it is that she truly never wanted to stop. She had NO INTENTION of quitting the accursed cigarettes, no matter how sick their sidestream smoke made me. And she never did. Eventually the habit killed her.

“You’re so susceptible!” I remember her whimpering that about my tendency to come down with every virus that floated past on the breeze. For the luvva gawd! Is it even remotely possible that she didn’t see that what made me “so susceptible” was her trashing my lungs with her fucking sidestream smoke?

Much as I hated grade school, junior high, and high school, today I have to say: THANK GOD for public schooling. Those hours on campus got me out of her house and out of her unholy stinking miasma for at least some part of the day.

What incredible evil!

To my mind (what remains of it…), the thing that was so disturbing was that she knew what she was doing. She read widely in popular and middle-brow publications: and those were awash in reports to the effect that smoking causes cancer. Journalistic publications of all kinds ran article after article going on about how smoking causes cancer. It was on the evening TV news reports. It was EVERYPLACE.

But she believed — truly did believe — it was all blather emitted by Big Brother in a campaign to control the thinking and behavior of the general public.

Once, as I recall, she even said so explicitly: used the term “Big Brother.” /eyeroll/  How stupid can you get?

Do you need to be told? She died of tobacco-induced cancer. A pretty damn hideous way to go…

 

What a Place!

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Ugh! Arizona…WHAT a dump!!!

It’s 95 degrees in the deep shade of the back porch, under overcast skies. Wunderground predicts we’ll hit a crisp 100 degrees today, with 15% chance of precipitation. The skies are solidly gray, so…Funny’s Weather Service predicts one helluva lot better chance of rain than 15%.

I hate this place. (In case you hadn’t noticed…)

WhatEVER possessed my father to drag us to the middle of the baking Arizona desert after he retired?

Oh, yeah. I know: Cheap!

Compared to California, where we’d been living for the six years after we got back from Saudi Arabia, this place was a bargain on steroids.

* Housing: cheap
* Utilities: cheap
* Gasoline: cheap
* Doctors’ fees: cheap

On and on and on….

The fact that he cut off my opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. from Cal Berkeley? Meh! Who cares? She’s just a girl. Why does she need a Ph.D. to cook on a stove and wash dishes in the kitchen sink?

Yeah, I did eventually finish the doctorate…from Arizona State University.

And yeah: it most certainly DOES matter where you got your advanced degree!

Except for the ego gratification, I might as well not have bothered.

No, a guy who never finished high school could not be expected to understand why his kid would want a Ph.D. and what advantages it would present to her. Still…how pig-headed can you get?

So, yeah…I hate Arizona. Wish I’d never been dragged here. Wish I’d had the initiative and the ambition to get myself out of here while I was an undergraduate, or, forgodsake, at least for graduate school.

But…by the time I hit the Ph.D. program, I was married to a well established lawyer here in Phoenix. He wasn’t going anywhere (nor should he have!), and neither was I. So…Okay: Ph.D. from Arizona State. Whoop. De. Doo.

What a place!

I Want My Mother Back

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She was murdered, y’know. My mother was.

She was murdered by the tobacco bastards.

They got her hooked. And she smoked and smoked and smoked and smoked herself right into the grave.

So the evil greed-masters did her in.

Oh, well. We all have to die of something, eh?

She lived long enough to see her grandson. Briefly. My son was born while she was hammering at death’s door…there in her bed floating on drugs and soaking up pain. When I brought him to her, a newborn infant, and showed him to her as she lay on her deathbed, she took one brief look at him, shrugged, and said “Meh!”

Nope. She didn’t care that she had a grandson. She was too damn sick to care.

There ya go, folks! That’s what tobacco does for you. Makes you not care one thin damn about the people around you.

A lot has happened since that grim evening. My son is now a grown man with an excellent degree and a fine job. I’ve made myself unemployable by getting my own degree, a Ph.D. I’ve written books. We’ve traveled around the world. My son landed an excellent position in the insurance industry. Life has gone on.

I just wish her life had gone on, too…

Ohhhh well. You can’t have everything, eh?

So much evil in this world. So much of it manufactured for profit…

Another Yucky-Ducky Day in (un)Lovely Arizona

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ECCHHHH!!!!!  Hot and humid and sticky and just ICKY out there!  WhatEVER possessed my father to retire to Arizona and drag me and my mother to this dump?

Truly: I hate Arizona. If I could afford to move someplace else…well…you may be sure I’d be someplace else.

We’re here because of (un)lovely Sun City. When the old man and my mother found that place, they were beside their workin’-class selves with joy: CHEAP and NO KIDS.

Yeah. They didn’t like children — abominated the sound of kids playing outside — and they were inveterate penny-pinchers.

I was still in high school: you couldn’t live in Sun City with your kids unless they were sent off to college. So to get themselves into that ghetto for old folks, they applied to the University of Arizona, saying I was sooooooo bright I should be admitted a year early. And…forgodsake! The goddamn university accepted me!

Yeah: a year early.

So I missed my senior year in my Southern California high school. Lost all my friends. And landed in Tucson with no friends and no credible preparation for a university curriculum. Totally uninformed, I majored in French — for no other reason than that I was fluent in French and could get straight A’s in the courses just by showing up in class and snoozing through each session.

Understand: I wanted to major in astrophysics or in microbiology…  In those days neither field was especially welcoming to women. Add to that the lack of a senior year in high school — no calculus, no fourth-year language, no final science course — and a major in anything that wasn’t “girlie” was pretty much out of the question.

Yeah. I ended up majoring in French. Why? Because I was fluent in it and didn’t have to put out a fraction of an erg of energy to get A’s in every course I stumbled into.

After that — with a Phi Beta Kappa key and an unsaleable major — I ended up answering the telephones and greeting clients as a receptionist at a law firm.

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Ohhhh goodie. WordPress is doing something weird here. Don’t see how to fix it.

Let us circumvent the frustration factor and bring this post to an end.

Weird!!!!

Soggy Doggy Day

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Just back from the a.m. DoggyWalk. What a morning! At 6:30: hot, wet, overcast, soggy. REALLY an unpleasant day. Feels like horrid Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the ever-humid Persian Gulf.

Sometimes I wonder how my mother survived nine years in that hell-hole.

Well. She didn’t, really. She came home with amoebic dysentery — a gift from a brainless neighbor who failed to soak the salad greens in Clorox before serving them up to guests. That evolved into the enteric cancer that killed her.

WHY are people so stupid?

WHY do people flat refuse to follow instructions (like “disinfect all raw vegetables & fruit before eating them”)?

WHY can’t people keep their damn dogs under control when they’re in public?

“Doggy-walk” means “dodge idiots and their rampaging animals”… In cooler weather, Ruby and I would wait until the resident morons get done hauling their dogs through the neighborhood, so we can go out in relative peace. Today, though, you can be sure will soon be even hotter and even more humid than it is right now. And so: out the door as dawn cracks!

Spotted a crew of workmen slaving away on the exterior of a house that’s being rebuilt. LORDIE! Talk about jobs you’re glad you don’t have! How those guys survive in this swampy weather escapes me.

This is the kind of day that makes me deeply miss the San Francisco Bay Area. My relatives lived in Berkeley, which really was a lovely venue. My mother parked us in the City, in a bourgeois apartment development called Parkmerced. Not my favorite place…but about 110% better than unlovely Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed my mother. The amoebic dysentery that she brought home morphed into an enteric cancer. And so she lived horribly for 10 years out there, and then back here she died horribly in about 10 months.

Not before she and my father dragged us to Arizona, though. She thought it was some variant of Paradise. I think it’s a variant of the opposite venue…  What a place!

Ohhh well. The dog and I are back inside, where the air-conditioning is blasting away. The kitchen needs to be picked up. The house tidied. And the human driven to a grocery store.

Ugh. Another lovely day in Arizona…leave us all enjoy it!

 

Hotter Than the Hubs….

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HO-lee maquerel!  As we scribble — coming on to 6:00 p.m. — the thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads 109 degrees.

Garden spot, eh?

Just walked over to the park and back… Couldn’t take the Ruby, because the pavements — all of them — are too hot for her feet. Couldn’t make it all the way around, either: the air is too hot for the human!

Ugh! WHAT a place!!!!  What on earth possessed my parents to drag us to this corner of Hell, lo! these many years ago?

O’course…you could ask what on earth possesses me to stay here….

Just crazy, I guess.

Actually, it’s because my son is here. He has a job here. His dad is here. And he ain’t about to go anyplace else.

So…. I reckon as long as he stays in Phoenix, I’ll stay here too. If he decamps to some other garden spot, I may follow him. If he goes someplace where I can’t follow…well! Then I’ll be on my way to the higher altitudes of the hills around Tucson or else headed for Payson or Prescott (small towns in the plateaus above the desert) or…maybe straight back to San Francisco, where I belong.

Those exigencies don’t make me like this place a helluva lot more, though. It’s fine in the fall, the winter, and the early spring — climate-wise, anyway. The overall Los-Angelization is a trait I could do without, any time of the year or the day.