Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Women and Terror

by

Loafing late in bed of a Friday morning (nya nya nyaaa! I don’t hafta go to work!!!), I find myself wondering about a peculiar behavior of my mother’s. She was scared, y’know.

Not just scared. But absolutely fukkin’ TERRORIZED. All the time. Any time she was alone in the house. Any time after dark.

One evening she came down to our house in Phoenix’s middle-class, rather boring Encanto district, having decided to spend the night. So we pass a nice day and watch TV all evening and then we unfold the big ole’ sofa-bed (queen-sized, it was) so she can hit the sack.

Make the bed, get everything all nice for a good night’s sleep, and, as she’s getting ready to climb into the sack…what does she do?

She opens her purse and pulls out a pistol! This, she sets on the TV table next to the bed.

No…

Kidding….

She was SO SCARED that even though she was at my house, with a German shepherd at her side, she felt she needed a gun.

I was just floored. 

No, she wasn’t putting me on. She really and truly was so frightened, of life the universe and all that, she needed a pistol at her side.

Trying to reassure her did nothing to help her to feel any braver. It just convinced her that I was crazy and not too bright.

****

A lot of women feel that way. I used to be scared to death all the time, too. That, as you might surmise, was the reason for the German shepherd room-mate.

Had something happened to her? Dunno. If it did, she never told me about it. But on the other hand, I’d never been seriously attacked (harassed, yes; but actually attacked, no), and I wasn’t scared witless in my own house. Scared: yes. That’s why we had the GerShep. But scared enough to be waving a pistol around? Not so much.

That German shepherd did earn her keep one night, after some poor wretch got into the house while she and her humans were sound asleep. Unfortunately for him, she did wake up…and got between him and the door he came in.

LOL! He found a door he could get out, just as the fangs were about to rip off his rear end. Last I heard he was still running.

It brings you around to the question of whether you really do need a gun in the house. And that question brings up a whole slew of other questions:

* Do you know how to use it?
* Would you use it? Really? On another human being?
* How are you going to recognize a false alarm? Hubby coming home late at night, for example. The teenagers roaming around in the wee hours….
* Can you (or can you not) get out of the house safely if some jerk comes in a door or window?
* What are you gonna do if you shoot some schmuck and kill him? How will you prove he didn’t belong in your house and you really didn’t know who he was? How DO you prove a negative, anyway?
* Wouldn’t you be better off just to close the bedroom door and lock it when you go to bed?

On and on.

I tend to feel that keeping a gun at hand every night is probably a bad idea. Definitely a bad idea if you have kids in the house.

Do I feel safe alone in the house here in lovely North Phoenix? Hell, no! It’s a dangerous area, no question of that.

But EVERY place where humans live is a dangerous area. So you can’t get too paranoid over your own neighborhood. Nor can you barricade yourself in the bedroom every night, armed to the teeth with pistols and shotguns. That just doesn’t make sense…and serves only to scare you more.

My own guess is that your best defense is an alarm system: whether the kind that runs on batteries or the type that runs on four feet. If someone’s around, you want to know it in time to get out, or at least to barricade yourself inside the bathroom. A phone in every room, including the bathrooms, is de rigueur.

***

I’ve lived most of my life now, and lived it with few truly dangerous incidents. I’m not a pretty young girl anymore (thank Gawd). With my boobs lobbed off, that’s one fewer attraction.

But that was true of my mother…well…she still had boobs, but she also had lots of wrinkles and stank to high heaven of tobacco smoke. And she was scared half to death: alll the time. As for me: well… Dude! Make my day!

Seriously: I don’t feel especially scared. I don’t recklessly put myself in situations where I might be at risk. But neither do I forget that there is NO situation where a woman is not at some risk. 

Thank You, Good Realtor!!!

by

Y’know, my good Realtor Friend, a guy named John Shackleford, did me one of the greatest favors anyone ever did for me: by bringing me to this house, in this neighborhood.

What a lovely, peaceful, pretty place to live!

Ruby and I just got back from one of our circumnavigations of the ‘Hood. And oh, my! What a pretty day.

The park: brilliant emerald green in the spring sunshine. The weather; insanely beautiful. The kids: playing magnificently in the park, kicking  balls and chasing around. The dogs: handsomely trotting along  beside their humans. The sky, delicately painted with fine, thin white clouds against a deep blue background. The birds: singing and flying around in avian joy.

What more could you possibly want, eh?

Just now, I can’t think of much.

It really is a beautiful, upper-middle-class North Central Phoenix neighborhood. Just about anything you want or need is within easy walking distance — as I’ve discovered to my amazement, now that my son has kiped my car.

Yes, it’s true: living here, I actually don’t need a car! Get rid of the chariot, and come to find out you have, within easy walking distance,

  • 3 top-flight grocery stores
  • a veterinarian
  • a computer store
  • a bookstore/computer software store
  • a hair stylist
  • a doctor (of sorts)
  • a magnificently stocked drugstore
  • 3 pharmacies
  • 2 major urban hospitals with top-rated emergency rooms
  • a fine young lawyer

One could go on and on…but basically, the message is, you can get about 95% of the goods and services you need without ever setting foot in a gasoline-powered vehicle. 

Y’know, this characteristic of the neighborhood never fully dawned on me until after my son kiped my car. I mean…well, of course I knew all these places were here. But until the car disappeared from my garage, it never really registered with me that I didn’t need to drive to these places!

Seriously: in the summertime, get going early enough and you can do your errands before the heat comes up. Raining? Call an Uber…like, the one whose owner lives straight across the streeet. (Turns out a half-dozen Uber drivers live right here in the Hood!)

It’s every bit as good as San Francisco in that way. When my mother and I lived there, back in the Dark Ages of the late 1950s and early 60s, we did have a car. But we never used it unless my mother and I had to drive across the Bay to pick up my father when his ship came in. (He was a Merchant Marine pilot.) I’d guess we never turned on the ignition more than twice a month.

And now, between Uber and just about every daily need within easy walking distance, I find myself in the same situation. I don’t really need a car! 

Mwa ha ha!!!

My son has it in his garage. And frankly, he can have the damn thing. I may sign over the registration to him, next time I have to pay for it.

Glub!

by

Yeah, verily: It’s a glubifarious morning. You should see that rain pouring down out of the skyfull of dark gray clouds! Thank Gawd for coffee, that’s all I can say!!

It obviates my plan to traipse to the grocery stores this morning. What with my honored son having persuaded the stump-dumb doctors at the Mayo to cancel my driver’s license (!!!!!!), I can’t get to a store except on foot or by paying through the schnozzola to hire an Uber cab.

Our beloved Uber driver lives right across the street…and I can assure you that he will not want to be rousted out to schlep the Little Old Lady six blocks to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts. Fortunately, there’s enough Dawg-and-Humann food in the house to sustain Ruby and me for a few days. So whenever the rain stops, I can run (literally!) to the nearest shopping center and grab enough chow to tide us over until the weather clears.

Wow! What an ugleeeee morning! Wunderground seems to have missed the boat (heh!!) by predicting a mere 30% chance of rain today. Asleep at the switch, eh, folks?

Today…

by

Today while the horrors
Still cling to your vines…
I’d taste your strawberries if I could get to a store to buy some…
I’m not allowed to drink your sweet wine…

😀   Not to say “LOL”….  

Continuing in general misery this morning. Maybe, though, not as bad as it has been the past weeks. The gawdawful peripheral neuropathy is still present, but it seems a little milder than in past weeks…or maybe I’m just getting used to it.  Ear-whistling is torture. Lip-burning hurts, hurts, and hurts some more. Afraid to take an ibuprofen or aspirin for it, because we’re told that those fine nostrums can cause neuropathy.

Who knows, then? Could be I’ve brought this particular aspect of the ailment on myself, madly gulping down pain-killers. Wouldn’t that be par for the course?

Computer says today is Saturday. Who knew?  If you’d asked me, I’d have said it was mid-week.

Learned, by chance, that the old-folkerie where my son would like to consign me will send a worker to your home to babysit you.

!!!

Turns out Wonder Cleaning-Lady used to work for them, doing exactly that!

So, this presents two possibilities:

One is to call the old-folkerie and ask what they offer in-home, for how much money.

The other is to ask WC-L if she will come over on a regular basis — at least several times a week — to oversee me, drive me to grocery stores, help prepare a few days’ worth of food…and whatnot.

The latter…I think not. I’m still radically pi$$ed off at her for snapping a photo of me when I’d laid my head down on the dining-room table after a meal, because I was so, SO sick. With a wine glass standing by the dinner plate, that picture made me look like I was passed-out stone-cold drunk.

Ha hah, very funny, eh?

To add to the humor, she e-mailed the thing to my son! And “passed-out stone-cold drunk” is exactly what he thought. 

This threw a monkey-wrench into the mother-son relationship. Big time!

Things have never really gotten better: he’s now convinced I sit around getting snockered all afternoon, and nothing will persuade him otherwise.

Do I indeed sit around getting snockered all afternoon?

Not so much. As in “not at all.” I have one (count it: 1) glass of wine with my big meal of the day, which I take at mid-day. At an American’s evening dinner-time, I have what you would think of as a light meal or a snack.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was at the university in Tucson, I had a boyfriend who did indeed start to drink around lunch-time and continued merrily through the afternoon. And I did indeed keep up with him. He, too, ate “dinner” at mid-day. So we were taking in a lot of food as we were swizzling away after our morning classes.

But in fact, I eventually tired of these shenanigans — and my parents just hated the man. When it became clear that I had a choice — him or my parents — I decided that my parents were the best bet…and so sent him on his way, weeping into the night.

Life: one little drama after the next, eh?

At any rate, the Internet reports that he seems to have had a successful career as a university administrator and to have spawned three kids through a long-term marriage. So apparently he wasn’t much harmed by my giving him the parental heave-ho.

Unfortunately, though, the habit that he had instilled — starting in with the wine at noon, along with a full-course dinner — stuck with me. I passed it along to DXH, and he and I were in the habit, through two decades of marriage, of swizzling wine around every major meal.

Bad habit, apparently. Especially when that major meal takes place in the early afternoon. 😀

These days I refrain, if for no other reason that I’m just too sick to enjoy a nice glass of wine. And of course, because I suspect the alcohol may have something to do with the peripheral neuropathy.

You’d think if it did, after a few weeks or months on the wagon, the PN would go away. But it hasn’t. So either the wine has nothing to do with the ailment, or I’ve poisoned myself permanently and am headed off to the Other World with a constant buzz in my ears.

Oh, well…  Just now it’s time to head off for a Doggy Walk!

Roaaaarrrrrrr!

by

Gosh, what a…classically Arizona winter day. How strange, how weird, how…funny.

Coming on to 10:30 of an early November morning. Ruby and I go out front to oversee The Property. Yeah: get Gerardo to fix this. Get him to trim that. Admire the other plant. Loaf, loaf, and loaf…

The sky is deep gray, coated in thick, non-raining clouds. This makes for a strangely beautiful morning, hard to understand why. But one supposes “why” doesn’t matter, eh?

Off in the distance, a steady RROAARRRR rumbles up toward the ‘Hood from the southeast side. It’s the song of the the commercial airlines taking off and landing at Sky Harbor Airport.

Living closer to that place — where my stepsister’s house was, for example — would be even more annoying than living in Sun City, where one is blasted from dawn to dusk by jet fighters roaring in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Purely by accident, I happened to stumble into my present neighborhood: staidly middle-class, centrally located in spades, and far enough from the local noise-makers to be relatively quiet.

Seriously: I am so pleased with this house that I absolutely positively do NOT move out of here when I reach a stage of such decrepitude that I need a baby sitter.

And really: considering how much it costs to live in an old-folkerie (the place where my father retired took all the proceeds from the sale of a very nice suburban house, and then pretty much cleaned out his savings accounts), it does seem to me that rather than move into a retirement “home” (snort!!), you might be better off to hire staff to come in and care for you in your present, paid-off manse. Especially if you manage to die in a timely way.

Seriously — sorry, I realize Americans are scared of talking about Death, but do get over it! ‘Cause we ain’t a-gunna get away from it!

Just as seriously, it strikes me that with the roof over your head paid for, you could be better served by your own hired folks than you would be living in one of those old-folks’ prisons.

Luz — Cleaning Lady from Heaven — remarked at one point that she’d had a job like that.

So I’m gonna ask her who she worked for, what she did, and how much she got paid. Learn who to hire and where to find them when you reach the point where you really can’t care for yourself, reliably and safely. Then start looking around, talking with employers, and figuring out how to get such a person on the private payroll.

***

Ahhh, what a nice little neighborhood, indeed. The WonderAccountants — who live straight across the street from the Funny Farm — just installed a new set of exterior windows. They apparently called the same guys who installed mine several years ago, and it looks like they selected the same model of windows, or one very much like mine.

They put up classy wrought-iron fake shutters on either side of each window, far more sophisticated than anything I could dream up… And now the front of their house REALLY looks nice. They should be amply pleased with the result.

They say that double-paned windows save you a bundle on AC and heating bills. Couldn’t prove it by me: I’d say the monthly power bills are about the same as they were before I replaced my single-panes.

Still, a double-paned window would be a bit more hassle to break into, so that would up your security level. And a perp would have to make a fair amount of noise to cut or break out such a window, thereby alerting you in plenty of time to dodge out a back door and run off down the street.

***

{sigh} I love this neighborhood. I love the neighbors. And I love my house. GOT to find ways to stay here until I croak over.

The prospect of being locked up in one of those holding pens for old folks fills me with horror. Honestly, I would rather be dead. (No: I’m not contemplating suicide anytime soon, so please don’t panic.)

But y’know….life is short. We only have around 70 or 80 years in this sylvan vale. So why spend any part of it in misery, just because you’re getting on toward the end of the road? Locking up a person in a holding pen to await the end is forcing that person to spend the last part of her or his life in misery.

How, really, is that the right thing to do?

Would it not be better…would it not be morally preferable…to hire someone to come in to your home and care for you until you totter over into the grave? Or at least until you fully and permanently lose consciousness?

That’s no easy job — caring, not tottering, that is. My father worked like an animal caring for my mother in the last dreadful weeks of her tobacco-poisoned life. But…well…he did her a magnificent service.

I watched him die in the old-folkerie where he banished himself….and to tell you the truth, his best friend there did himself a favor when he took a pistol and blew out his own brains.

My father found the guy’s corpse.

What a horror! But…why not make it possible for a person who knows Death is on its way and knows insurmountable suffering will accompany it…why not make it possible to choose your own exit door?

*** *** *** 

Darkness has fallen
Dog has frolicked
Human is pooped

*** *** *** 

And here we are, once again, loafing in an easy chair by the breeze of an electric fan and the light of an elegant old electric lamp.

😀

What a day!!! One depressing thought after another. One depressing predicament to cope with after another.

Ohhhhh well.

Tomorrow’s another day. Uhm… I hope…

wooo-OOOO-ooo Argha!

by

Dog and human return from circumnavigating the ‘Hood and its park. Pick up the Funny Farm. Fix breakfast (of sorts). Chow down…

…and…

woooo-OOOOOO-ooooo wooo wooo! 

The Song of the Yard Dude!

DAYUM! So much for loafing outside over coffee, eh?

Look out the window to see where our guys are. No sign of Gerardo. Ungodly racket, no Yard Dude.

Closer inspection reveals that the racket is coming from across the street: some guy is blowering up the neighbor’s yard.

{sigh} That’s good…i guess… At least I don’t have to come up with the cash to pay my guy today.

Yet.

It’s a gray, gloomy day, threatening rain. Not an occasion when I personally would want to be frolicking with yard work…but thanks to the ineffable Gerardo, i don’t hafta do that anymore! 😀

Unduly sleepy. Don’t know why. Want to go back to bed.

And THAT, dear reader, is an iron-clad 12-karat way to get Gerardo and his boys to show up at the house. Right now!