Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

“The Sound of Freedom”!!!

by

Weather conditions are right this morning to waft the breathtaking “Sound of Freedom” 25 miles across the Valley from Luke Air Force Base into our yards here in North Central Phoenix.

My parents’ little house in Sun City was just a few miles up the road from Luke. So there was no escape from that fine melody, no matter what time of day or which way the wind blew.

R-R-R-R-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R!!!!

Jet warplanes ripping their way through the atmosphere.

My mother loved to take her morning coffee on our screened back porch, out there in Sun City. Right about the time the boys climbed into their fighter jets and took off….

“Ohhhh,” she would coo. “It’s the sound of freedom!”

Today I listen to that terrifying racket and wonder, Did she REALLY believe that “Sound of Freedom” b.s.? 

She wasn’t a stupid woman. So when you think about it, it is puzzling that she would fall for that line.

Maybe, I thought then and sometimes think now, maybe it was a way to justify staying in Sun City, where she and my father retired after his 30 years of crushing work overseas and on oil tankers.

If she pretended to like that gawdawful racket, then of course she couldn’t bellyache about it to my father: he who labored like an animal to get them to the bourgeois little house in Sun City.

How would he have felt, one wonders, if she had turned to him, after 30 years of hard labor, and said I don’t like it here! Let’s move someplace else!

You don’t even wanna know. Truth to tell, an admission like that might very well have ended the marriage.

I suppose “oooh, it’s the sound of freedom” was at base a way to smother the terror we all felt, knowing at any time a nuclear war could break out…and we could be in the middle of it.

In San Francisco, where I went to junior high school, the screaming air raid sirens were terrifying. The “duck-and-cover” drills in the classroom: terrifying. The instruction to “get home as fast as you can!” — on foot, a good two or three miles: terrifying. The ridiculous air-raid shelter in the basement of our apartment building — all too obviously about as efficacious as a styrofoam cup: terrifying. The bomb shelter that doubled as a garage for all the apartment dwellers, each automobile filled with gasoline a potential little bomb of its own: terrifying. The beeee-EEEEE-eee alert on the radio: terrifying. The blasting air-raid siren on the tower’s roof: terrifying.

Few if any places to get away from the racket: terrifying. The apartment building’s useless basement where we were to take cover: terrifying. Day by day: terrifying.

Really, looking back on those days, that’s how I recall it: as a time of terror.

What kind of morons were we: we and the Russians and the Chinese and all the rest of the worldwide chuckleheads who bought into nuclear armaments? Peculiarly stupid ones, apparently.

EEEEK! Senility Attack!!!

by

Well…that was a moment of high terror…

This morning I went to get my laptop so I could take it out on the back porch, there to play with the Internet by the dawn light of a gorgeous morning.

Get computer from bedroom…

Uh…no. Nope.

No computer in the bedroom.

Nor on the bed.

Nor under the bed.

Nor in the bathroom…nor…anywhere. 

Repeat searches. Search and search and search.

No computer.

Must have left it in the car, think I.

But…the car is at M’hijito’s house. He’s decided that it’s unsafe for me to drive (no kidding!!) and has purloined the vehicle. If I’d left the laptop in the car (not impossible: I take it to coffee shops all the time, for loafing purposes), then the computer’s at his house, too.

Shoot off an email to him. You know the variety: the “I’m nuts” type…

This is Sunday. He won’t roll out of the sack for another couple of hours, and probably won’t turn on his laptop for another hour or two after that.

Resign myself to having lost my most precious li’l object. Tromp through the bedroom to the bathroom. Tromp back out of the bathroom…and…wait for it! 

Right: THERE IT IS, sitting on top of the bureau drawers, right there in the bedroom.

Yep.

I must have looked at it three or four times and not even registered it.

WTF?

If I ever had any marbles, I seem to have lost the last of them.

***

Meanwhile: hurt hurt HURT lemme tellya HURT!

The gettin’ old stuff is NOT for the faint of heart. No, indeed not.

This morning a hip joint has gone out of whack. Every. Single. Step is excruciating. So is getting up out of a chair. I hurt so much I can hardly breathe!

All that notwithstanding: with no one here to help, I have to get up and limp around….

And…

And….

GOOD GRIEF!

I’ve limped out to the back patio. Plopped down in a chair. Opened the computer.

Realize that (what’s the matter with the damn computer NOW???) (??? naturally it’s stopped doing whatever it was doing…whaaa?) my coffee still awaits…on the kitchen counter.

O Hell O Damn

Drag myself out of the chair. Limp into the kitchen. Pour a cup of coffee. Limp back out here. Pull a chair up to the table…and find THE PAIN HAS STOPPED!!!

Huh??????

Not to say

WHAAAA?????

No idea why it stopped.

But lemme tellya…

THAT

DID

HURT! 

Argh. 

Now I’m afraid to sit down, lest the pain start up again..

So…

What we have here is one of those days!

Need to walk over to the Sprouts and reprovision a few favorite goods. But I’m kinda scared to try it, lest that pain flare up in the middle of the quarter-mile hike.

Hmmmm….what to do, what to do?

When in doubt, nothing. Right?

***

Yep! That seems to be the correct motto…  Just laid down on the bed. Put my feet up…and…OWWWWWWWW!

Holeee MACKEREL does that hurt!

Hmmmm… Whaddaya bet I ought not to stroll across a seven-lane thoroughfare plus a railroad track with this thing doing…whatever the.hell it’s doing.

Definitely something in the hip joint. But what? I cannot imagine.

Oh, yeah…ONE OF THOSE DAYS! 

Doggy-Walk from Heaven

by

INCREDIBLY gorgeous morning! Cool but not cold. Clear skies. Lovely, low morning sun. Neighbors out walking their dogs and taking the early air…  What a fantastic neighborhood we live in.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the park. Said “hello” to half-a-dozen other dawg walkers. Soaked in the gorgeous morning air.

Walked past the house where the family’s son f*cked some teenaged girl and got arrested for the favor. He went to jail. They lost their home. It’s been a wreck for awhile.

But now someone has bought it and fixed it up. Looks like about all that’s left to do is to repair (rebuild??) the swimming pool.

We hang a left onto that neighborhood street: a lovely upper-middle-class neighborhood of handsome, big houses, irrigated lots, and general toniness. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Shortly, we bear north, ever north…again past the lovely park with its expanses of green grass (!!!) and its handsome, mature trees, and its 87 gerjillion other dawg-walkers. 😀

What a place to live!

I hope I can hang onto my home until I croak over. Partly because I do want to live here for literally the rest of my life. And partly because I want to leave it to my son, so he can either move into this beautiful little house or sell it for enough to decamp to Tahiti.

No kidding: this place is Yup Central, the younger generation of the upwardly mobile having discovered it. So by the time I pass on to my furry fathers, the house should be worth a ridiculous amount of money. He’ll be able to sell his house and bank the cash income, or sell both places and move to Upper Richistan.

If things work out the way I hope, it will be a lovely gift to leave him, and something that has the potential to profit him seven ways from Sunday.

Yea verily: the thoughts that preoccupy you as you and the Killer Corgi stroll past a fine green park and piles of fancy houses and little patches of local history. Onward!

Bug Bite Bait!

by

Arrrgghhh!  WHY do biting bugs sooooo love me?

No kidding. This human is walkin’ talkin’ Bug Bait! As soon as the li’l critters see me, they swarm in for the feast.

Interestingly, they also recognize the battery-operated electric bug-swatter I use to chase them around.

Just now, we’re in Arizona’s High Mosquito Season. The li’l monsters swarm in on me in a frenzy of Bug Joy. Bite-bite-bitedy-bite-bite-bite!

But…they recognize the bug-swatter, too. 

No kidding. When I pick that thing up to give one or two of them a whack, the rest of them shoot outta here like little bug rockets!

And no, I can’t spray insecticide all around the room, because the damn stuff makes me sick. (Maybe I’m a bug????)

What I need is…lizards. A tribe of lizards. Geckos, by damn!

The only question is…how to catch them and persuade them to linger in the house.

Ohhhhhh gooodie!  Just to make things perfect, the fukkin’ power just went off. And then, less than a minute later, came back on. Now I have to traipse all over the house and reset the clocks on every goddam electric appliance.

Ohhhhhh dammit!!! The power just came back on, but now all the electric clocks are hung up. None of them is working. And the phone is not working, either.

dammit dammit dammit!!!!! Now I’ll have to traipse across the street, lean on the neighbor’s doorbell, and beg them to let me call the phone company from their house. And NO, no indeed I still haven’t figured out how to use the goddam cell phone, because no one will take a few minutes to teach me how to use it.

………….

Nope! Now the land-line phone has come back on. That’s a relief: one fewer hassle for the day.

Well…heh! We’ll see how much longer THAT lasts…

*********

😀  Seriously, in Arabia (where I grew up, lo! these many decades ago) we had tribes of geckos living around the house. Wonderful little critters…they were.

Saudi Arabia, as you might imagine, is awash in flies, moths, and various other bugs. The place is Gecko Heaven. So those glorious little lizards used to take up residence around the humans’ habitations — and we, of course, would encourage them, to the extent that we could figure out how. And they did help considerably with the bug problem.

Flying bugs, that is.

Oddly, other than ants, there weren’t a lot of crawling bugs out there. You didn’t see armies of cockroaches, for example. I always figured the lizards ate the roaches…but surely do not know that to be a fact. Maybe it was just too damn hot out there for roaches, same is it was for gringos….

{sigh} There’s a roadside doctor’s office about six blocks down Main Drag West. I ought to get off my duff, walk down there, and try to get them to look at this nasty rash.

But meanwhile…

…the day is gorgeous…
…the pool beckons, come to me, come to m-e-e-e…
…and I yam hungry….

Hungry hungry hungreeeee…..  

How do I not want to trudge down to the neighborhood doctor’s office? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

Hmmmm…..  Welp…I can’t count that high. 

Life in Lovely Uptown Phoe…DUCK!!!!!

by

LOL! Here we go again. 

JUST got my fanny sat down in a big comfortable overstuffed leather chair when ROOOAAARRR whirrrr whirrr whirrr… Yet another goddam cop helicopter soars over the house. 

Naturally, Ruby is peregrinating around the backyard, whither she wandered through the open back door.

Set aside the coffee. Leap up, race through the kitchen. Call the dog…..

Call the dog….

Call the dog….

Obedient beast ambles idly across the yard and in through the door.

Good daaawg!

Slam the back screen and kitchen door shut. Lock the deadbolts on both. Amble back to my easy chair, next to which a cup of (cooling…) hot tea resides.

What.
A
Place.

And why do I persist in living here?

Well…I’d say because I’m here and I ain’t movin’. But the truth is, I do like it here in the northerly reaches of North Central Phoenix.

For one thing, there’s never a dull moment around this place. That’s f’r sure!

It’s centrally located but out from underneath the flight paths of the jets that roar in and out of Sky Harbor Airport all day and night.

We’re in a decent school district, which means the neighborhood hosts legions of laughing, cavorting kids. Not to be missed!!

It’s populated enough to support not one, not two, but three high-quality grocery stores within an easy stroll, plus a large bookstore, a nice hair salon, a computer store…and more that I have yet to explore.

Up at the corner, we have a superior car mechanic’s garage. Don’t have to get the clunk towed far to deliver it to those guys.

The city has installed a train that now glides back and forth between ASU West (on the west side) and the Tempe campus (on the east side). Truth to tell, for most purposes, you don’t have to own a car…or even borrow one.

The place gets more and more like a real city as the years slide past. In San Francisco, my mother and I didn’t even need to own a car: we could get everyplace we wanted to go by bus, by trolley, or on foot. Same in London. Same in Paris.

While that’s not true of everyplace in the L.A.-like Phoenix area, public transit here is already pretty good, and it’s continuing to evolve apace.

As a result, I no longer hate living in Phoenix (as I did in my early years stuck in this place). Matter of fact, I’m coming to rather like it. In another few years it will be a real city. And a pretty livable one, at that.

So that’s a good thing.

Then we have the ever-burgeoning crime level. The bloating cost of living. The mobs of people, people, and more people….

Oh well. You can’t not have everything, right?

The Big Apartment Adventure

by

Well…make that “the LITTLE apartment adventure.” The hovel in question was the first place I rented all by my young self, with the proceeds from my first full-time office job.

LOL! Yes, it was tiny. A one-room studio with a fold-out bed that disguised itself as the sofa when it was put away. But oh my: I was proud of it. And I did love living there.

I’d finished the bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona and come back up to the Phoenix area with no place much to live and nothing much to do. Quickly found that living with my parents in Sun City was decidedly not my speed. So I landed a receptionist’s job at a law firm (yeah: that’s what a B.A. and a Phi Beta Kappa key got a female college graduate in 1966…) and moved into that cute little apartment.

Yahoo! FREE from Mom and Dad, and NO ROOMMATE. 

What better way to define Nirvana, eh?

Well. Probably like you, I wouldn’t think much of it today. But boy oh boy, was it the business then! 

Ahhh, the good ole’ days!   😀  😀  😀  😀