LOL! That was the radio signature of a long-time talk-show host here in the earlier times of Arizona. He would sign on to his program and then crow,
It’s another beautiful day in Arizona! Leave us all enjoy it!
LOL! Right: if 100 degrees and humid is beautiful, this morning is just GORGEOUS. 😮
Actually, it’s only 81 out there just now, at 7:20 ayem. So it’s not very hot at all. Objectively speaking. But it’s so damp that after circumambulating the park, my hair is wet!
That little jingle was the signature doodad of Jack Williams, who became mayor of Phoenix and then governor of Arizona. He was a pretty amazing guy, all things considered.
Arizona is — always has been — a strange place. Strikes you most when you look at its history and consider the characters who feature in that history. Jack Williams…good grief! Barry Goldwater…he actually was a pretty interesting guy, in person. Bruce Babbitt was cool — we knew him and his wife, Hattie.
Oh well. If hot, partly overcast, and muggy are characteristics of “another beautiful day in Arizona,” it must be pretty spectacular out there.
Let’s see…it’s mid-August now. So we’ve got another month or six weeks of this stuff. Ugh!
Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.
UGH! Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.
This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.
Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…
Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.
Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.
Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona! She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.
My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!
LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.
But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.
Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.
She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.
No kidding.
Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .
Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.
And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.
All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.
When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.
In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.
Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.
Oh well.
My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.
Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.
And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.
Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.
Cruisin’: yes. Cruising through classic North Central neighborhoods, eyeballing the real estate: the big old classic ranchers on their half-acre+ lots, admiring how handsome they are and remembering what it was like to live in Phoenix’s version of Upper Richistan…
Musin’: ohhh yeah! Thinking about how I just did NOT fit in with Phoenix’s upper middle-class strata. How after all the time we lived on East Hayward, a block off the famous and ritzy North Central, I’d made one (count her: 1) friend, a woman who’d come from the same direly deprived middle-class social strata as I had. Remembering how much I loathed the snobs who lived in that neighborhood, and how much they seemed to disdain me.
As handsome as those big old 1950s ranch houses are, how beautiful their emerald-green irrigated lawns, I would never want to go back there to live.
Still…it was entertaining to wander through the old neighborhood, eyeballing those big old houses (and thinking “thank God I’ll never have to clean that thing, or get someone else to clean it!”). The places were, after all, handsome 1950s and ‘6os mini-mansions in the “ranch house” mode: sprawling one-story affairs, each in the middle of a vast yard. Any way you look at it, 3000+ square feet is a lot of real estate to keep clean, whether you push that vacuum cleaner yourself or whether you supervise someone else at the job.
Living in North Central wrecked our marriage. Though I was already a bit bored with married life by the time we moved there, I surely wasn’t ready to fly the coop. A couple years of being made to feel like Poor White Trash, though, did indeed push me over the border…into the Never-Never Land of Singletude.
It’s surely fun to drive around and look at real estate, though. Lately, I’ve been thinking more of going back and getting a Realtor’s license — as my mother did. But instead of trying to sell houses, as she attempted, my thought would be to write about real estate.
Even without a license, back in my Young Journalist days I was able to get a passel of assignments to write about the subject, mostly for the local city magazine and a local business journal. An old crony of mine was editor of a national real estate magazine, and he would give me assignments, too.
I think that rag is justly out of business — and he has retired. But there are other real estate rags. And if you’re not trying to make a living from journalistic writing, it doesn’t really matter much where you publish. What matters is wringing interesting assignments out of the editors. Take a look at these, for example. It’s not a bad market. Looks like there’s plenty of room to pick up fun and interesting projects. And being able to claim a license would make that pretty easy.
***
Time having passed…
Cruising the real estate ads,ogling houses in Tucson. That town has its own distinctive character…I could live there happily, if only my son weren’t way up here.
My best friend and her husband bought a house down there, after he got a job with VisionQuest, a nonprofit that wrangled junior delinquents. The architecture and interior design of Tucson real estate is distinctive…and it’s something I do rather like. If I’m to retire and leave lovely Phoenix — i.e., L.A. East — that would be one place I’d consider.
But the evening grows late. I tire. More real estate dreamin’ (or something!) tomorrow….
We’re all scared of something, whether it’s a real something or a something we blow up all out proportion. Most of the time, the more we think about it, the more we scare ourselves. 😀
Me, I’m scairt of…what?
The local burglars. We live…what: about a mile?…south of a dire, drug-ridden slum. On the east, the ‘Hood runs adjacent to an aging, crime-infested apartment shambles. So we have a pretty high crime rate. Everyone here lives behind deadbolts and burglar alarms and steel security screens.
Crazies on the road. Every now and again, some hapless driver gets shot because they annoy a fellow homicidal driver. People carry guns around in their cars, and when they get mad, they break the things out and use them.
Along the same lines: crazy traffic. You have to stay alert every second you’re behind the steering wheel. If you don’t, you will get into a fine crash. Even if you do stay as alert as a cat after a bird, eventually you probably will be rear-ended or side-slammed anyway.
The vicissitudes of old age. Just now I hurt. Have developed some new ailment that I never heard of. It does hurt, yes. And no one seems to have clue to how to treat it or whether it will go away. The Mayo has suggested a drug that will make me sicker than the disease…so…yeah.
Doctors. Not my favorite species. And speaking of “just now,” well…just now I’m having wayyy too many dealings with them.
LOL! So it goes.
My mother was scared. Of everything. In particular, she got it into her head that a perp was going to climb up on the roof of their car (which in Sun City was parked under an open carport), open the hatch to the attic, jump up into the attic, walk across a beam to the living room, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house. Apparently this actually did happen out there, at least once. It must have been reported in the Sun City newspaperoid.
But….but…if she was so scared of the bogeyman jumping down into the living room from the attic, why not install a burglar alarm in the attic? It would’ve been easy to do.
Weird, though, that I never thought of that until just this minute. Why don’t people think of the obvious?
Probl’y she was afraid my father would pooh-pooh her, tell her she was a lunatic. He was an artist at little-womaning. But if she could show him a news story proving it had happened, surely he could’ve been persuaded. Maybe.
Even SDXB, the Man of Steel, carried a loaded pistol in his car’s glove compartment. Just in case, y’know. And he slept with a shotgun right at hand.
A good thing, despite the implicit paranoia. He needed that shotgun when he got up at 2 in the morning to find a pair of perps had sliced out a window pane and were climbing through the gap into his living room.
Ohhhh well.
I was gonna drive downtown to the Cathedral this morning — it being Sunday — in hopes of picking up old friendships from the choir and…maybe???…even seeing if I can get back on the choir.
Here at the church in uptown central Phoenix our choir director retired. His replacement changed the gist of the choir’s offerings — as was his perfectly reasonable right. The new repertoire was — and is — way, WAY over my head. We had no music teaching where I grew up, in Saudi Arabia. So…I can’t read music unless I can hear it.
That makes it impossible for me to perform with the New! Improved! All Saints choir. Had to drop out.
As it develops, a lot of the folks on the choir did the same: they ended up on the choir at the downtown cathedral. So…I’ve been thinking I would drive down there, sit through the service, and try to schmooze with the choir members a bit. Maybe even get back on the choir.
But…hmmmm…. Maybe not today. Given my current state of decrepitude, it’s just too dangerous to cruise the homicidal streets in the rain. It’s been pouring all night; no sign of a let-up.
Therein lies the barrier to following fellow ex-choir members downtown: “just too dangerous.” You have to park in a covered garage…and I do NOT feel safe there, not even in broad daylight. Certainly would not feel safe walking around there at 10:00 p.m., after choir rehearsal. Maybe if someone would go with me — I could park my car at their house, say — but to go down there alone? Not. So. Much.
So…yeah. An aspect of living in Phoenix scares me so much, I’m afraid to do something I miss terribly and very much want to do.
Ick! It is SOOO HUMID out there at 7 in the morning that by the time the pooch and I got home from a leisurely mile’s stroll through the ‘Hood, I literally had to peel my jeans off my legs!
NASTY weather, hideously reminiscent of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…only without the beautiful beaches on the Persian Gulf. Just desert, repetitious middle-class tract housing, and swampy heat.
At the crack of dawn.
Garden spot, this….
Actually, it is a garden spot! 😀 Irrigated lots sporting bright green lawns; big ol’ 1950s ranch houses; huge and ancient shade trees; citrus trees abounding.
As we perambulated through the lower reaches of Upper Richistan, we passed a young dad pushing a pair of twins in a double stroller. Dad: white. Kids: brown. Cutest li’l thangs you ever saw in your life…and evidently adopted.
A couple of families over there have taken in youngsters from duskier races. A house on the main road into U.R. is home to two teenaged boys of the African-American persuasion; all the adults in the house are whitey-white. The young fellas like to practice basketball in the front yard, which is grand fun to watch.
As the sun has climbed into the sky, humidity is a balmy 30%. Clouds and haze lurk overhead. The AC labors mightily, groaning to keep the indoors moderately livable.
Loafing, I daydream about the Old Neighborhood, where DXH and I lived for well upwards of a decade after we were married. Loved that place!
It was so beautiful. Here’s the old house. It was so beautiful — even more so inside than outside. Built in 1929. Zillow claims it’s worth something over $1.2 million.
Yeah. Well…whatEVER.
It is a LARGE place, in a famed historic neighborhood, smack in the middle of the city. If you worked downtown, your commute would essentially be nil. Same if you taught at Phoenix College or worked in any of the gerzillion office buildings up & down Central Avenue.
I loved that house. Didn’t want to move. But…
We moved because we didn’t feel safe. The transients and the crime level in those parts will take your breath away. After a couple of hair-raising incidents — German shepherd notwithstanding — we moved to get away from the bums and the crime.
{sigh} I miss it, and I miss our classy neighbors.
But I don’t miss feeling scared half to death at night. Don’t miss the guy who broke in one night, chased off by said German shepherd. Don’t miss the guy who tried to break in, another night, but couldn’t get past the deadbolt. Don’t miss the bum who took up residence in D-XH’s car one night…he flew into a rage when D-XH had the nerve to climb in, start the engine, and begin to pull out of the driveway, headed to work.
No. Encanto is a beautiful historic district. But if you have any common sense, you don’t wanna live there.
I.e., you have to be balmy to keep on living here!!! Just now it’s 106 in the shade of the back porch, 20% humidity. Clouds built up to the north, tantalizing with a vague promise of rain…but as we scribble, they’re burning off.
Arizona…what a garden spot!
Man, I’ll take San Francisco fog over burning heat, any day.
Speaking of the which: spent half the afternoon doing battle with the pool. The current Pool Dude seems to have f*cked things up royally.
Had to buy a big heavy bucket of chlorine tablets (none remained out there at the pool or in the pool shed). Dosed the drink with that stuff.
Next: decide whether to backwash…decided it’s toooo damn hot to wrestle with that task. Get the vacuum system to work properly: see that it’s picking up most of the debris. Think gotta clean out that filter NOW. Decide it’ll hafta wait.
ohhhhh gawd, tell me I don’t have to track down and hire a new Pool Dude.
See, the problem with these guys is a substantial proportion of them are jailbirds. If they’re on probation and they get into trouble — apparently that includes so much as a traffic ticket! — they end up back in the slam. This, as you can imagine, does not help to keep the algae outta the pool.
😀
Maybe what I should do is install some cages in the backyard where the Authorities could store the Pool Dudes. Then I’d always have one of the critters around to contend with the drink. And maybe I could even get the state to pay me for putting up the resident convicts….
Arrrrggghhhhh! What a place we live in!
Teeth hurt. Don’t know whether it’s from aggravated clenching or whether there’s an infection or some other such nightmarish pending dental bill. We shall see over the next few days, no doubt.
If I were a grown-up, I’d stumble out to the kitchen and bolt down an aspirin or an ibuprofen.
But I’m not a grown-up. Consequently, I’m bolting down a glass of wine. Oddly, that does nothing for the sore tooth.
Ohhh well. It sure tastes better than ibuprofen, though!
😀 😀
Driving around this afternoon eyeballing real estate.
Yknow, my mother was a real estate agent. Like me, she felt some strange magnetic attraction to Reel Estate. What it is, I do not know. But the whole business fascinates me.
I used to write about real estate for Phoenix Ragazine and for the weekly Phoenix Business Journal. Sometimes I think I should try to wriggle back onto a local publication’s staff — actually for awhile I wrote for a national real estate trade rag, but the truth is, I find the local market a lot more fun.
Yesterday I stopped by an open house and met a lovely young Realtor. Ohhh how ambition blooms forever… Well, I wish her well and hope she gets rich…or at least finds a nice rich man to support her. 😉 Real estate is one of those endeavors that looks like it should make you rich, but that at best maybe won’t make you poor.
***
Dog’s conkered out. I should conker out, too…dawgs having better sense than humans…
It was so beautiful.