Life in the Desert

Yes: I stupidly elected to take the Li’l Dawg for a walk, along about 8:00 a.m.  When we say “stupid,” when it came to that maneuver, we DO mean “stupid”!

Exceptionally unpleasant day. Hot. Humid. The air so thick you could swim through it. About as ugly a morning as you can imagine.

No one at the park this morning: other locals having better sense than I. Ditto the neighborhood streets. All the other humans and their dogs are holed up in their air-conditioned digs.

Reminds me of (un)lovely Saudi Arabia. Where we lived — on the shore of the Persian Gulf — we got days like this all summer. Hot. Muggy. Ugly.

My mother, an erstwhile Upstate New York girl, was unutterably miserable there. Me: I didn’t know any better. I was only a little kid. That place — that hideous place — was just life, the universe, and all that.

***

Hope we’re not slated to do anything today. Don’t see anything on the calendar.

That, alas, doesn’t GUARANTEE that we’re free of jaunting, junketing, and time-wasting.

Ugh. I cannot deal with another pointless doctor’s appointment. Nor can I deal with another 40-minute drive to the Mayo Clinic.

It’s too hot to walk to the grocery store (my son having purloined my car).

Too expensive to visit my favorite computer store.

Too far to walk to the Phoenix Mountain Park, there to climb hills through the scorching heat.

Too hot to climb hills anywhere through the scorching heat.

My son was going to put the new pool vacuum equipment together. That didn’t get done over the weekend. If I had my act together, I’d call Pool Dude and ask him to do that. But…act? what act???

When Pool Dude visits — as he does once a week or so — he cleans that pool himself. As long as we don’t get a dust storm (which also includes leaves and debris), the pool stays clean between his junkets. So I feel little urgency to jump up and down and nag my poor son to get over here and put that vacuum into action.

***

Daydreaming of my college boyfriend, an Eastern European fella. Well, he had been born and raised in the US, and so as far as he and I were concerned, he was a 100% red-blooded American boy. My parents, chauvinists to the core, thought otherwise. They considered him a foreigner, an alien, most decidedly not a candidate for the fatherhood of their grandchildren.

My, how they hated Paul. I adored him, and if they’d kept their mouths shut, we undoubtedly would have married.

They didn’t, though — keep their mouths shut, that is. They complained and griped and hollered and threatened….  Yeah: they threatened to disinherit me if I dared to marry the guy.

I finally folded and sent him on his way.

Found him on the Internet. He looks happy! And I surely hope he is.

He became an administrator at the University of California. Had we married, I would have landed a mighty fine sinecure there, or failing that (conflict of interest, y’know), would have found a tenure-track job with one of the state colleges. But when it became evident that if he and I married, I would never see my parents again, I sent him on his way.

Was that a wise thing to do?

Dunno. To this day, I do not know. I dearly loved the man. His sites on the Internet show a happy-looking family man…if I were the wife in one of those photos, I’d be happy-looking, too.

Oh, well!