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Life in the Desert

“Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…

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“…Leave us all enjoy it!”

LOL! That was the buzz-phrase of a long-time local radio personality here. He had a morning show, and every day he opened with that little theme-phrase.

“Beautiful” is not the word I’d use today…especially if you have to go outdoors in it! Yes, it’s clear and sunny. Yes, at this hour it’s pretty quiet. But… ugh!

It is soo humid!!! Wet and hot.

Back in the Day, most of the mornings were “beautiful days.” Not so much anymore. The place is no longer semi-rural: it’s all built up with commercial strips and vast oceans of ticky-tacky houses. Every one of those structures runs large air-conditioning systems that suck in the air, drain the moisture out of it, and emit it back into the atmosphere as hot, dry, stinky exhaust. This makes the developed areas even hotter (by far!) than they would have been in the absence of humanity.

It was sort of a pleasant place to live, back in the day. Now…?  Well…ick. If you like Southern California — crowds, noise, heat, insane traffic, smog — you’ll love this place. If you prefer a quieter mode of living…hmmmm…

Where would I go if I could escape?  Well…hmmm indeed…..

  • Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • Berkeley, California
  • Certain suburbs of Tucson, Arizona
  • San Francisco
  • Paris
  • Parts of Rome

Ohhhh well.

Ruby and I walked by our old (literally: elderly) friend Garnett’s place this morning. She’s long gone. The classic old ranch house is vacant, and has stood vacant for several months.

This morning we walked up and peered in the windows: looks like they’ve finally removed the furniture.

She told me she wanted to leave the house to her son — and so I expect she did. But he clearly has exactly ZERO interest in moving to Arizona. Certainly not in living a block from one of the busiest, loudest main drags in the city.

She loved that house. Loved the neighborhood. He? Not so much. He’d made his escape to California years ago. And clearly he has no desire to move into his mother’s manse.

Why he hasn’t sold it escapes me. I imagine she must still be living, locked up in one of those horrible old-folkeries. He’s probably waiting until she passes to get rid of her beloved home.

Either that or he’s too damn lazy to get off his duff and do something with the real estate she left him.

Who knows?

If I manage to hang onto this house until I croak over, my son will get the place. It will be a handy asset for him: either a pleasant venue to live in a fairly decent, in-town neighborhood, or something he can sell for a half-million bucks. Whichever he selects, he’ll profit nicely.

These days I feel like I must be the New Garnett of the ‘Hood: traipsing through the upscale realms behind a cute little dawg, every morning. Saying hello to the passers-by. A conspicuous landmark, hm?

But I’m not as friendly as Garnett was. At heart, I don’t like people, having been mistreated royally during the ten years we lived in Saudi Arabia. God, how I hated that place! And how I hated the kids and the idiot teachers and my father’s cruelty and the institutionalized ignorance…just about everything there.

It was in the nick of time when my parents decided to come back to the States. I had become almost hopelessly misanthropic by the end of the fifth grade, and come the sixth grade, simply hated people. Especially people in their “kid” phase. That changed when we got to San Francisco, where the new classmates didn’t know they were supposed to scorn me, and the teachers — some of them, anyway — possessed measurable IQ’s.

Heh! I can’t imagine what would have happened to me if we’d stayed out there even another year. Not that I would have brought a machine gun to school and shot up the place — though similar antics crossed my little mind. But that another year with no friends, another year as the butt of all the other little darlins’ scorn and hate, another year with a teacher who measured her IQ in the single digits…Jayzuz! If a kid could have a nervous breakdown, I sure would have.

😮

Soggy Doggy Day

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7:34 a.m.   Another soggy-doggy day in (un)lovely Arizona.

Just back from the morning stroll around the neighborhood with Ruby the Corgi.  Ugh!!!!  It’s sooo hot and sooo wet out there it feels like a seaside morning in accursed Saudi Arabia.

Not quite that soggy, though. There, you’d wake up to clear skies in the morning to see water dripping off the eaves like rain. By the shore of the Persian Gulf, the air was so wet that literally you could see it start to rain out of a clear blue sky. The morning drizzle, though, wasn’t rain. It was just humidity. So humid was the air that water would coalesce on the eaves and drip off in a nearly convincing simulation of rain.

Horrible place!

Arizona has its moments of horribleness, too. Fortunately, those don’t occur year-round. In another couple of weeks, the current damp spell will have dried out, and even at 80 degrees or so, an early-morning walk will be just fine.

Contemplating the fact that our corner of the ’Hood was built by the same company that built out Sun City, where my parents dragged me when they retired early. What a place!

No one under 50  was allowed to live there. But because my parents had enrolled me in the University of Arizona a year before I finished high school, technically I didn’t live there. I lived in Tucson. Right?

Far as I know, no complaints were lodged. I was a bookish kid, very quiet, so presumably none of the neighbors were discommoded. And yes: I spent 9 months out of 12 in Tucson; make that 11 months after we’d been there for awhile and I’d learned I could extend my escape time through summer school.

Anyway, my present house is remarkably similar to the tract shacks that filled Sun City. Ours are a little better than those — by the time Del Webb got to the Sun City phase of his career, he’d learned all the corners to cut. My house, for example, has a garage.

Yeah. You know: a place to park your car, with walls and a ceiling and a door that opens and closes?

Their house had a carport: an open shade structure with only enough space for one car. Mine holds two, in theory.

But the overall appearance is similar: low-slung single-story tract houses built with gray cinder-block walls and gray asphalt roofs. Ugleeeee.

But affordable. WTF.

Anyway, the dawg and I have circumnavigated the’Hood. That, at least, was a halfway decent way to start the day.

This is not a day I’m looking forward to. M’hijito is dragging me out to the Mayo Clinic this afternoon: a trip I hate for another visit I will hate. The doctors there are wonderful, of course. But my gawd! That drive!!! And doctors are not folks I wish to spend a lot of time with…they make me want to run away! 

The Mayo is almost an hour’s drive from here, through horrible traffic. Hit the road at the wrong time of day, and you’ll be plodding along for a lot longer than an hour.

My local “doctor in the wild,” as  the elite set at the Mayo calls doctors with their own practices, has moved to freakin’ Sun City! That’s an hour’s drive in the other direction from the Mayo. And…well…  Lemme tellya: the horror show that we experienced with my mother and the damned doctors out there left me convinced that I would NEVER, EVER go to another doctor who practices in Sun City.

The quacks who attended my mother as she was dying of (obvious!) cancer were so incompetent, so lazy, so arrogant…  The quacks out there are such ba!tards that…well… The medical “care” is among the top reasons that you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City.  Horrible beyond horror.

So my son and I go just as far in the opposite direction. Certainly the Mayo is one helluva lot better than anything in S.C. But I’ll tell ya: overall, the Christian Scientists have got somethin’….

Anyway, just now the Out of Doors is hot, wet, icky. Pool Dude was just here slaving in the backyard: another of many jobs I’m glad I don’t have. Forked over $150 to him, for the privilege of not having to do that damn job for another month.

Honestly. If I weren’t pretty certain my son wants this house, I would sell it right now and move to a nice high-rise apartment on Central Avenue.

Heh! Or at least buy a house here in the ’Hood that’s free of a swimming pool.

After several years in apartments in San Francisco, I’ve had my fill of high-rise apartments and garden apartments and…whatnot. Gotta have SOME space between me and the clowns next door.

😀

At any rate, in a block house on a quarter-acre lot, Ruby the Corgi can bark merrily and not bother the neighbors. So for the nonce, that makes this house worth the hassle of pool care and yard care.

ARF!

 

Back at the Hubs…

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Quarter to eight in the morning. Hot. Sticky. Yucky out there.

The balmy weather blocks all but the balmiest of dog owners from circumnavigating the park, so Ruby the Corgi and I had the place almost to ourselves.

Traipsed down Main Drag Central. Eastward across Fancy-Dan Street South. Back north along Palm Row…passed the lady who HATES me because I asked her to please quit shoving junk-food “treats” in Ruby’s mouth.

Some people just flat refuse to believe you. Ever notice that?

Gosh, but humans are stupid. As animals go, that is.

The house once occupied by the young guy who got in trouble with the law and bankrupted his parents with legal bills (he still ended up in the slam) is vacant. Those poor folks lost their shirts!

Apparently a speculator bought the house. The pool is all torn up and it looks like the same is true of the interior. But then whoever got the place abandoned it. So it just sits there. Hideously.

The neighbors must just love it.

Eastward, eastward…that street reminds me of the exceptionally tony Palmcroft district, one of the Fanciest-Dan neighborhoods of Phoenix.

We used to live in a lesser neighborhood just to the east of Palmcroft — I could walk over with the dawgs to that park and its surrounding Richistan, and did. Still very nice. Still highly unaffordable for the likes of moi, today.

We moved out of our beautiful historic house there just in the nick of time. About six months after we escaped, the city bought a house right behind ours and turned the damn thing into a FIRE STATION!

Yeah! WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEEE-UUUU WEEEE-UUUU…all hours of the day and night.

Couldn’t believe it…y’know, there were plenty of commercial slots on the surrounding main drags where the city could have parked that thing. And the huge regional hospital with a gigantic parking lot that could have accommodated a fire station. And a defunct shopping mall with its own huge parking lot: perfect for a fire station. But ohhhhhhh no! The city has to stick the thing next door to or across the street from NINE residential lots!

Natcherly.

Honestly, I really think the City Fathers deliberately work at downgrading the quality of living in the beautiful old central neighborhoods. My guess is, the developers who build out the surrounding suburban tracts fund election campaigns for their stooges, to get them on the City Council and into county government. Once there, these sleazeballs work actively to trash centrally located neighborhoods, so they can be converted to commercial properties and generate $$$ for their sponsors and emptied of less-profitable private households.

I love my present neighborhood, though. And would like to stay here until I die.

Exactly how to pull that off kinda escapes me. 

My son wants to consign me to a high-rise old-folkerie called The Beatitudes. Ugh!!! Just the thought of it makes my skin crawl.

I hate, loathe, and despise institutional living. 

* No, I do not want to listen to your effing TV blatting away all day and half the night.

* No, I do not want to eat disgusting foodoid dumped out of cans and boxes into steam tables.

* No, I do not want to have to pretend to be nice to you as I hover, disgruntled, over a plate of disgusting foodoid.

* No, I do not even faintly care about your Ailment of the Day.

* Yes, your bird-brained politics make me want to bite you.

One thing is for sure: I wouldn’t last long in a place like that. I would die of depression, if nothing else.

Speaking of the Joys of Old Age, my son is dragging me out to the damned Mayo Clinic again this afternoon. Why, I do not recall. Just now, whatever Blessing of Age was afflicting me seems to have gone away. And frankly, I don’t even remember what I might have been whining about that would have led him to make an appointment.

Ugh!

Yuck! …and… WHY am I Here???

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Hot. Humid. Sticky. Feels almost like Arabia.

The park: overrun with early-morning dog-walkers, all trying to get the daily calisthenics out of the way before it gets seriously hot.

All these folks leave their IQ points at home when they take their dogs out. So, when you have an aggressive dog — especially one as cute as a corgi — you’re dodging morons to the right of you and morons to the left of you, all of them grinning stupidly and cooing Don’t worry! They just wanna pwaaayyy!”  Result: I get home plumb exhausted.

In the wintertime, I can wait an hour or so to take the dog out, meaning I miss the morning office-hour rush. But in the summer; forget about that. If you don’t get out the door before the sun is more than a few degrees above the horizon, you and the dog will be fricasseed by the time you get home.

***

This rumination led me to yet another tangent: Why am I staying here at all? 

SDXB moved to Sun City, there to join the beloved New Girlfriend. The two of them have been very happy out there, far as I can tell. My parents, who decamped to Sun City back in the 1960s (they moved there the minute they got me into college!), loved living there.

Still, my father would have been better off, later in his Sun City tenure, had he not remarried after my mother died. (And my mother would not have died had she not smoked herself into the grave…). But with those lessons in mind… set up and accept a few retirement realities for yourself. To wit:

  • Don’t be in any hurry to replace a dead or divorced spouse;
  • Buy a house with amenities comparable to your present castle (i.e., similar kitchen; about the same overall square footage — assuming you live in a modestly sized middle-class home;
  • Restrain yourself from installing a swimming pool;
  • Evade the grassy lawn;
  • Be sure the carport has a garage door;
  • Use Amazon and similar services to find and purchase the kind of household and personal items you’re used to buying;
  • Find a hobby or activity that will keep you busy several days a week — if at all possible, one that gives you some outdoor exercise;
  • Get used to having no privacy when you’re out in the yard;
  • Understand that you can’t, in any practical way, have a dog out there (no fences around the yards!);
  • Learn to golf…
  • Oh yeah: and don’t imagine you’re gonna get decent medical care. The doctors and medical facilities my parents encountered…oh my!!

Seriously: my mother would have died anyway of what ailed her, no matter who or what she had as a doctor. But she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Not. At. All.

If you’re female and American, your problem with doctors is that too many American doctors presume you’re a neurotic hypochondriac. So when you go in with a real ailment, real symptoms, real signs of something serious going on…they just pat you on your pretty little head and go “there, there little girl…” No matter what your age, gender, or ethnicity, you need a doctor who will take you seriously. And in my experience, the quacks in Sun City did not — and presumably still do not — take women seriously.

So…there y’are: The main reason I don’t move to Sun City is that my son lives within a few miles of the Funny Farm and can ride herd on my eccentricities. The secondary reason is that you have a much better chance of finding a competent doctor in the center part of the city.

***

Another potential retirement destination is a large development over on the east side of the Valley, Fountain Hills. 

It’s a little tonier than Sun City: still middle-class, yet more upscale than the west-side tracts. But…as far as I can tell (and yes, I have inspected), the construction in Fountain Hills is no better than what you find in Sun City, and maybe not as good.

Fountain Hills poses other issues , some of them similar to Sun City’s, some unique unto itself.

For example, it’s not in the city. Neither is Sun City, which itself is a bland (one could say dreary) suburb.

Fountain Hills is right under the flight path to Sky Harbor Airport, a huge commercial lash-up where planes fly in at dawn and dusk…just when you’d like to sit outside and enjoy your coffee or your bourbon & water. Both tracts are blasted with noise on a regular basis…especially in the mornings and evenings. Sun City gets its morning serenade from Luke Air Force Base, which exercises its fighter jets right at dawn.

While Sun City is whitey-white (don’t even think of moving out there if you’re of the duskier persuasion), so is Fountain Hills. I don’t know for a fact that darker-skinned folks are also chased off from Fountain Hills…but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s easy to find some indications that folks of the African-American persuasion might not be altogether comfortable in Fountain Hills. Far less easy to find indications of enthusiastic welcome….

So…uhm…to return to the fundamental question driving this post: Why am I here? 

Well, because there really isn’t anyplace better. Not here in the Valley of the Sun, anyway. Or for many leagues around it.

Hotter Than a Three-dollar Cookstove!

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LOL! That was one of my father’s favorite sayin’s, usually applied to a car — or to a warm afternoon. And as we lived out in Saudi Arabia, on the arid and fricaseeing shores of the Persian gulf, it was often a particularly germane folk phrase.

He grew up in Texas, though in fact he had been born and partly raised in the deep, DEEP South. So I reckon it’s within reason to guess that turn of phrase could have come out of the South rather than Texas.

Hm. Apparently there’s a version, “hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” that refers to a car — especially a Corvette. But the folk phrase seems to have been born in the Deep South or the Wild West.

Welp, hereabouts the three-dollar cookstove has been simmering away all day long. The sky is overcast and hotter than a by-gawd. 😀

Seriously: for an Arizonan, a cloudy day that’s also HOT signifies a visit to Hell. And that’s just what we have this afternoon: Middling-low cumulus clouds floating in hot, almost damp air. I’d say it was strictly for the birds, but just now the birds have disappeared, presumably taking cover under any shade they can find.  Just now, Wunderground tells us the afternoon’s temperature is 101 degrees, with a 24% of rain.

Hm. Could be, could be… We shall see, in due course. 

And speakin’ of real estate…

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…as we were saying yesterday, briefly, Zillow claims my li’l middle-class house is worth (hang onto your hat) $563,000!  And change.

What????????

Over half a million dollars for an aging tract house within walking distance (easy walking distance) of a dangerous slum? Seriously????

And horrors!

****

I return to the idle thought that maybe I ought to think about moving out to Scottsdale — more specifically, to the district known as McCormick Ranch. Once a very fancy-Dan tract, McCormick ranch is now a mid- to upper-middle-class suburb, filled with ticky-tacky construction set in seas of Bermuda grass. The area is relatively safe. Of course, no place in a big city is “safe,” but McCormick Ranch is far more so than the swaths of North Phoenix that border the alarming Sunnyslope tract, where I live now.

This proposition presents its challenges. The main one: I very much doubt I could get anywhere near that much for this house. And houses out in Scottsdale are pricier by far than the ones here in North Central on the edge of Sunnyslop.

To get into Scottsdale housing, I’d probably have to move into an apartment. And I don’t wanna.  I love my house and all its roominess. I love my swimming pool — my pool and no one else’s. I love the trash pickup service from the alleys. None of these appertain to apartment living.

And another important adjunct to this issue:  unless there’s something I’m misunderstanding, it doesn’t look like it would be worth moving unless I could get into a better area.

McCormick Ranch is not a better area than North Central Phoenix. The two districts are about on a par. Fairly affluent. Relatively low in crime. Close to upscale shopping. Attractively built middle-class homes. Decent schools. Sooo….

Why would I want to live there? 

* It’s ten minutes from the endlessly importuning Mayo Clinic. The gawdawful drives to see MayoDoc would go away, once and for all.

* Shopping is excellent, ranging from the high side of middle class to the high side of very much upper middle class.

* Proximity to lots of great restaurants.

But…but…waitminit here. 

* I don’t go to restaurants. I can cook lots better than that…for lots less change!

* These days I do about 75% of my clothes shopping online.

* I should base where I’m gonna live on the proximity of a doctor’s office? Uhhhh… don’t think so…

* The Ranch is a long way from my son’s neighborhood. If I moved out there, I’d hardly ever see him!

* I dunno if the Cleaning Lady from Heaven would be willing to drive way to Hell & Gone to clean the Funny Farm if it were in North Scottsdale.

***

Hmmmmm….  To my mind, the “Waitaminits” outweigh the benefits by about ten to one. Seriously: there aren’t enough positives to convince me that I should pull up (expensive!) stakes and move to the far side of Scottsdale.

So…one is led to apply that Fine Old Saw: When in doubt, don’t!

  • Doubt, indeed. There’s just not enough there to persuade me that I would benefit from moving. Benefit: in any way…
  • Socially (I know one! person who lives out there.)
  • Financially (Any benefit from moving to a tonier area will be outweighed by the costs of selling, buying, fix-up, and moving.)
  • Comfort-wise (My house is a luxurious palace; noplace on McCormick Ranch is any better, and most are not as good.)
  • Gasoline and mileage savings (I probably drive out to the Mayo Clinic no more than once a month. That’s hardly a motive to pull up stakes!)

So unless my son decides to move someplace else — say, he gets a job in another city — there’s really no reason for me to even consider buying a place in McCormick Ranch.

If he did move out of North Central Phoenix, I might move out, too. Either to follow him or to put some distance between me and the gangs. But as long as he’s in these parts…well, so am I!