Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Duck! Cover! Or something….

by

Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!

Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….

Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!

My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.

The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!!  The endless grocery list!

The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀

But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.

****

SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”

No doubt they’re right.

Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀

SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?

Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?

Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.

***

And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.

What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.

Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.

And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.

Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.

Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.

And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!

Wow!

by

Wow,  indeed! What a GORGEOUS evening!

The sun has settled into a turquoise and orange bed. The sky is dark enough for some stars to shine out, but the sunset irradiates the western sky. One star — no doubt Venus — hangs above us in the evening air. Incredibly beautiful!

Ruby and the Human: just back from circumambulating the neighborhood, duly awed.

Truly: I do not know that I’ve ever seen a more awesomely beautiful sunset.

The little brown dog trots along like a four-legged brown rocket, no doubt having a gay old canine time. We encounter no other doggy nuisances, and almost no other humans, except a family playing in a front yard with their toddler.

Turn off the TV, folks! Come outside and look around: a far better show awaits you.

<3

WHY do people do this?

by

What if your bright and educated daughter showed up one day with a Certified Total Jerk and announced, “We’re in love! We’re getting married and moving to a dump in the middle of nowhere because — y’know! — he’s a mining engineer!”

What on earth WOULD you do?

That’s the story of my (former) mother-in-law. She married one of the Great Turkeys of the Western World — proving that love does go blind at the garden gate, or somewhere along the path.

He couldn’t hold a decent job — not for love nor money — because  he was such a jerk that he insulted just about everyone he met. At some point, someone in our tribe remarked that he never stayed on a job more than about six months. If he didn’t piss off the bosses enough to make them fire him, he’d quit on his own before things reached that point.

The particularly Looney-Toons aspect of this saga is that M-i-L was a very bright woman who, in a time when few women even thought about going to college, much less actually did it, had a four-year degree from a major university.

It always posed a kind of mystery to me…because she wasn’t an unattractive woman, and there was no reason she couldn’t have hooked up with a decent human being. Instead, she flang herself down the pit of a marriage to one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met.

They were divorced by the time their son and I married. Dear Dad had remarried by then. Crazy Mom never remarried, and indeed, after some years, came out openly as a lesbian.

At one point along the line, Dear (ex-)Father-in-law was visiting at our house. I asked him — truly mystified, I must say! — why on earth he married the woman.

“Because,” said he, “our parents disapproved.”

Well. That was the kind of fliply stupid thing he typically said.

No doubt the story was more complex than that. But it does beg another question: Why didn’t you wait for a year or so and see how things worked out?

If you were intent on scandalizing your small-town parents, you could have taken off on a prenuptial fake honeymoon: shacked up together for three months or so, just to drive the relatives crazy. This would have allowed you to see how that relationship would work out, and….

…yeah: And maybe have spared you 20 years of married misery.

Jeeemineee! I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d had a daughter who showed up with a jerk like that in tow. Nor what if I’d had a son who jumped into the marriage bed with a wacko like the character Chuck selected.

Nothing, I suppose. They were both of age. Their parents rightfully had no say about who they chose in the mate department.

Huh…. It puzzles me to this day: not only that they got married at all, but that they stayed together for some 20 years. It must have been 20 years in Hell!

Lost Times, Lost Friends, Lost Family…

by

Phoenix…ugh! The place gets more and more like L.A. as the days pass!

I was reminded of this, fairly vividly, when I drove through a tract just to the south of the ‘Hood, probably built out in the late 1950s or the 1960s. The houses there remind me so much of my mother’s best friend, Anna. The Long Beach, California, neighborhood where Anna lived could have been built by same developer — the houses practically clone Anna’s little place.

It was a nice little place. Her husband, Capt. Fred Ellison, was a sea captain just like my father, and he made a pretty good living, for a blue-collar guy.

And their house was nice enough: a sweet little place in a blah, faceless Southern California tract. Every shack looked the same as the next one, really. If you didn’t know Anna’s address and didn’t know where you were going, you’d never find her place.

The two men were coming on to the end of their careers, along about 1960 or ’62. They both planned to retire soon.

Capt. Ellison was on the last inbound leg of his last sea voyage. We were all looking forward to the great retirement and all the fun the friends would have and maybe talking Anna and Capt. Ellison into moving to Sun City, where my parents had already decided to retreat.

And damned if he didn’t drop dead on the ship’s deck.

No exaggeration: he had a heart attack and literally fell down dead. As the ship was heading in to harbor.

Well, the Ellisons’ house in Long Beach, a pleasant little place, was paid for. Their only child, a daughter who had some mental problems that seemed to entail a shortage of IQ points, was married and had two kids. And she had an appropriately mindless job on a factory assembly line, also in Long Beach. The son-in-law was a decent man who had reached the apogee of his career in a similar job.

That, of course, was the end of any inchoate schemes to inveigle Anna into moving to Arizona.

So there was something kind of heart-rending about driving through a neighborhood that looked so much like the one where Anna and Fred had lived. Absurdly, I wondered if my parents would have moved into town if Anna and Fred had bought a place over here, in that tract.

They might have. But probably not. My father, who was not fond of kids, thought Sun City was the greatest innovation since gin & tonic. The child-free appeal of Sun City, for him, was just huge. One rather doubts that Anna and Fred, who had grandchildren, would have thought the same way.

Also, Anna was massively overweight: so much that a good-quality bathroom scale could not measure how much she weighed. The ensuing health problems would have made it difficult for them to move. Plus their daughter, who was not overly endowed in the compos mentis department, was happily ensconced in that assembly-line job and a stable marriage. And Anna’s grand-daughter, who seemed to have developed a normal contingent of IQ points, was in high school and no doubt needed her grandmother to keep her more or less on track.

So…it’s reasonable to doubt that Anna and Fred could ever have been talked into coming over here, even after Fred retired.

Too bad. They’ve been missed over the years.

The Insane Fidgeting of Tempus…

by

Tempus fidgets, as my mother used to say. (Yah: very funny. Chortle!)

Yesterday evening I was thinking about my college boyfriend — let’s just call him P. — whom my parents hated, loathed, and detested.

Why they so reviled the man was something I could never figure out. To this day, it’s just a guess…but revile is the word. The detested him at a professional level.

My guess is that it was because he was from an Eastern European background, and they were bigots at a professional level.

You understand: he was NOT European. He was born and raised in Chicago, as were most of his nearest relatives. But in my parents’ minds…well…once a Bosnian, always a Bosnian???

My parents demanded that I break up a two-year relationship with P., one that had become serious enough that he and I assumed we would marry after we finished at the University of Arizona. When my mother made it clear that I would have to choose between them and him,…well…there really wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t about to abandon my parents, who had hauled me all over the world, provided a sterling upbringing, and sent me, on their dime, through four years of college.

A few other details frosted that cake, though. I think the one that cinched my decision came when his best buddy took up with a barfly, frolicking merrily in the sack with her…while his wife was too pregnant to accommodate him.

Seriously: the guy’s wife is eight or nine months along, and there he is, screwing this chippy. And P thought that was cool, just hunky and dory…after all, his wife couldn’t or wouldn’t let him have any. What’s a man s’pposed to do?

Right?

All my mother’s vociferous objections to P had little effect on my taste for him. I was madly in love, after all. Right?

But when, that night as we lingered in bed together, he remarked that “A guy has gotta have it,” excusing his friend’s faithless lust, I thought…ah hah! If you think that’s OK for your pal, you’ll figure it’s OK for you.”

Right?

Uh huh… Well, right or not, out he went. I flang him out: sent him off weeping into the night.

That that was the last I saw of him.

From what I can tell, he went back to the Midwest, got a master’s degree in those parts — in Education, the easiest of all possible programs — and then dove into a series of bureaucratic jobs. Turns out that for some time during my last stint as an Arizona State University bureaucrat, he was working in the ASU president’s office!

I had no idea. Didn’t find out about it until I was long gone from the Great Desert University, as was he. If ever I encountered him on the campus, I didn’t recognize him.

Which, I suppose, is just as well.

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…