Coffee heat rising

Retirement

Reel Estate….To Move or not to Move

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Sittin’ around enjoying the effects of covid — which, BTW, are milder than expected just now — and ogling real estate ads.

As I mentioned yesterday, I stumbled upon a real estate ad for my parents’ home out in Sun City. Nicely updated. Very pleasant. Cheap, too: real estate out there is hugely undervalued, when compared with other middle-class tracts in Phoenix. It last sold for $255,000, about a hundred grand less than I could get for the Funny Farm.

Would I want to live there?

Not in THAT house: too much old baggage. But in fact, Sun City has quite a few pleasant, highly livable houses that are perfect for a single person or an aging couple.

So this morning I found myself reconsidering. Maybe I wouldn’t mind living in a ghetto for old folks, not so very much. The houses are designed for couples or singles. When updated, they have everything you’d want and then some. As the West Side has expanded out in that direction, there’s no lack of amenities: Costco stores, grocery shopping, a huge old-fashioned shopping mall full of retail stores, a big hospital, doctors, whatnot upon whatnot.

If I stay put:

a) Here I have to put up with Tony’s depredations, now inflicted by his home for juvenile delinquents across the street.

But…do I care? Truly, why SHOULD I give a damn? The brats are quiet most of the time. Does that institution depress property values? Probably: but again: why do I care unless I’m hot to sell the house and move?

b) The crime flowing along Conduit of Blight Blvd is a problem.

And there’s no answer to that. As we saw just yesterday, the cops-and-robbers highjinks can be quite a problem. It’s an issue that’s certainly not going to go away…and that very likely will get worse.

c) This house is fairly close to my son. He can get here easily and I can get to his place easily. More to the point, we can go out to eat (whenever the plague ends) at the drop of a hat, and many appealing eateries are all around us.

d) This house is sorta kinda within driving distance of the Mayo, the best medical facility in the Valley. If I lived in Sun City, I’d have to charter a helicopter to get out there! And given the experience we had with my mother’s hideous final illness, well…I am NOT impressed with the medical folks in Sun City.

If I move out there:

a) It’s a pretty safe area to live. Crime rates are very low.

Again, though: do I care? Am I not armed to the teeth? Do I not have a dog that goes batsh!t anytime someone comes around?

b) The houses are designed for the convenience and comfort of singletons and couples.

A-n-n-d…why, again, do I care? My present house was built by the same developer who built those tracts, and the layout is very similar to the places out there.

c) Given the endlessly time-consuming and crazy-making drive between North Central Phoenix and Sun City, I’d never see my son. Neither one of us would welcome that traipse.

d) My parents’ experience with the medical offerings out there was beyond horrific. Incompetent, uncaring doctors; fuckup after fuckup; neglect…did I mention “uncaring”?

e) Getting to the Mayo would be impractical. It’s a bitch to drive out there now, and Sun City is twice as far from the Mayo as I am here.  Dealing with doctors is always difficult — more so when you’re elderly and the sight of your gray hair and your wrinkles elicits all sorts of presumptions and prejudices. But at least the Mayo’s doctors are by and large competent….quite the opposite of our experience during my mother’s final illness.

No. I’m pretty sure I don’t wanna live out in Sun City. Mighty sure, come to think of it…

Too bad. It does have some advantages, not least of which are the economically designed house plans. Yet my house works just fine for me — one bedroom too many, it’s true, but BFD. And I do like having a swimming pool. And not having to worry too much about coyotes coming after my pint-sized pup. And having a Sprouts AND an AJ’s AND a Walmart AND a Costco AND three large supermarkets within a couple minutes’ driving distance. And having young couples and their cute li’l kids as neighbors.

Hmmm… Speaking of the sociological conditions…. Yeah!

Here’s a cop helicopter circling right over the street just north of me. And circling. And circling. And circling. And cir….on and on. Now he’s right over the house…

DAYUM! I was just about to go out and fire up the barbecue, thereon to heat up one of the gorgeous lamb shanks I picked up yesterday. And to toss on some frozen taters.

Hmmm… Not about to strap a pistol to my waist. So…wot to do?

We could microwave the dinner.

Ugh. Great way to ruin a beautiful piece of expensive meat. Nor do I care for soggy microwaved potatoes.

Heat them in pans on the stove?

Right. That’ll make a fine mess to clean up.

Pour another glass of wine and watch what happens next?

Hmmmmm…. Okay. Time to decide:

  • Drink myself into a stupor waiting for the cops and the perps to go away?
  • Fire up the grill and risk my life, for the sake of a lamb shank and a fistful of fries?
  • Continue surfing the Web?
  • Toss the dog in the car and drive down to Encanto Park, there to kill an hour or so?
  • Toss the dog in the car and drive over to Petco, there to see if I can score a dog harness proclaiming that Ruby  is a “service dog,” which would let me take her into AJ’s with me?

No kidding. Some guy who’s a regular there has got a dwarf dog no bigger than Ruby, gussied up in a harness proclaiming that it’s a service dog. Nobody does a THING to stop him from taking his dog into the grocery store.

Hmmmm…More from the young folks on the neighborhood Facebook page:

Cheryl:

Citizens App says Circle K was robbed

Bobby:

(Inserts image from cell phone)

Lorraine:

Thanks, Bobby. I didn’t see anything on AZfamily or ABC15. Anyone know?

Liz, Top contributor:

At least 20 police cars at 19th Ave and Florence

***

Welp…either the cops caught him or the perp escaped. Helicopter just flew off into the wild blue yonder.
Makes Sun City look better and better!

Another day, another cuppa coffee…

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Ohhhh-kayyyy…. Let’s see if WordPress will give us sane formatting today, or whether we have to jangle up our honored Web guru and make him crazy with whatEVER is going on.

Not that we’re not already crazy enough with whatever is going on. Do you still have the temerity to read the news? If so, how exactly DO you retain your grip on your marbles?

Here we are, busily charging a former (if incompetent, yes) president of the United States with THIRTY-SEVEN felony counts of what is basically a treasonous act. Oh, gooood….  Moving on (surely there must be someplace to move on to??)…

Meanwhile, the Republican Party worries that the Presidential Fiasco will come back to haunt them. Guys…if you didn’t want to have to handle a mess, why did you put a mess in the White House? 😀

We have our Native American brethren being (once again) madly ripped off by yet another huge Belagana scheme: hundreds of Navajo being exploited…and God only knows how many members of other tribes.

The Ukrainians are beating the bedoodles out of the Russians. That’s nice…I guess. Be careful who you pick a fight with next time, Vlad baby!

Our brats aren’t buying enough booze to support profits in the concert industry. Awwww….

*****

Enough of that, already! Quite enough to prove that WordPress’s paragraph-break function is working again.

*****

Meanwhile, as we discovered yesterday, the pool is decidedly NOT working. Swimming Pool Service & Repair’s guy surfaced (heh!) yesterday evening and made off with the pump. He figures it’ll take them about three days to fix it and get it back over here.

So far, the water hasn’t turned green. He said not to fuss with it: if algae starts to grow, just take a gallon of chlorine and walk around the pool’s perimeter, slowly dribbling the stuff in.

Ugh! Chlorine: not my favorite choice of drinks…. 😮

*****

Dawdled wayyyyyyyyy too long to get out the door for Ruby’s morning doggy-walk. It is spectacularly hot and humid out there by 7:00 a.m. And the Doggy Jamboree was in full swing by the time we reached the Richistans.

Ruby wants to clear the earth of other dogs, a little characteristic of which other dog owners seem utterly oblivious. While I’m trying to keep my dog from eviscerating theirs, they’re cooing ohhhh don’t worry! they just wanna playyyyy! 

How does a species with so many stump-dumb stupid members manage to survive?

Ninnies of this sort had permeated the Richistans, so we doubled back and walked through the tract of 1960s ranch houses just to the north of ours.

Man! You do not even want to KNOW how much it must cost to air-condition those old piles. In the 1950s and 60s, power was not very expensive here. Consequently, houses and office buildings were never built with effective insulation…often not with any insulation at all. My son’s house, which is of that vintage, just about bankrupts him in the summertime, even when he jacks up the thermostat and has big floor fans blasting in every room.

Once the back yard…now the back porch of the back porch!

I remember my parents’ house in Sun City, each of whose walls was built of one layer of slump block. Period. Didn’t even have a slab of drywall inside, to pretty it up. Put your hand on one of those walls and you’ll burn yourself.

But…in those days, people didn’t stay in Phoenix over the summer. Without a doubt, Del Webb assumed his hordes of retirees would all drive back to Michigan and stay there in their RV’s between May and October. And many of those folks do. SDXB, who now lives in Sun City, does in fact clear out of the Valley for as long as he can, every summer.

My parents didn’t. They’d had their fill of living out of suitcases and driving back and forth across the country, what with my father’s Merchant Marine job and living in lovely Saudi Arabia. And yeah: that house got pretty hot in the summer. My mother jacked that AC so it never went off at any time of the day or night.

Here’s their house, photos taken during the last time it was on the market. It’s much modernized…didn’t have a dishwasher when we lived there, for example. The original screened porch along the back of the house has been enclosed, adding a nice dose of extra square footage to have to air-condition. They’ve laid down some reasonably decent tilework on all the floors– we had ugly carpets throughout.

My father! Just makes me cringe to look at this place and remember what he went through as my mother lay dying in one of those bedrooms.

That poor man. He worked SO hard, all of his life, just to build a comfortable, care-free retirement for them. And how thrilled he was to find Sun City! Boyboyboy: “no brats hollering outside your bedroom window when you’re trying to take a nap!”

Yeah.

Meanwhile, all the time my father was working like a mule, my mother was smoking herself to death. And what a way to go: just freakin’ hideous!

After he had “retired,” happily moved the two of them to a ghetto for old folks, and ensconced me in the University of Arizona (he got me into college a year early, for his convenience), his investments crashed. He’d put everything in insurance securities, which went down the tubes just a year or two after he had retired and deposited us in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. He lost his shirt and had to go back to work, to restore at least some of his retirement savings. I can’t even imagine how horrible that must have been for him. All his life he drudged away so that he could retire at the earliest possible moment and live happily ever after with his bride.

Who, we might add, really was the love of his life.

For his trouble, he got to attend her as she stumbled off to the Next World. And a mighty gawdawful trip that was.

As soon as she died — literally within days — he bought himself into Orangewood, a life-care community in the North Central district of Phoenix. It was ideal for him, because he was accustomed to institutional living and in fact liked it. My mother had refused to go, because a cramped little hole in a warehouse for old folks was not where she wished to spend the last years of her life.

Little did she know how few years she had…

Oh well. Forthwith he moved himself over there. And honestly, I think he would have been very happy at Orangewood had he not been instantly snabbed by the witch who seduced and married him. What a harridan! He didn’t know that until it was too late, though. Upshot: the last few years of his life were pretty damned miserable.

Keep that in mind: when you get old, don’t be in any hurry to lock yourself into a marriage. Nobody cares whether some old buzzard is living in sin with some old bat!

That house is lookin’ mighty good now — or at least, it was when those photos were taken. They enclosed the carport — which was on the west side of the building. Another layer of block plus a large space of empty air (garage) would cut the heat level in that living room, very nicely. They also enclosed the back screen porch, much enlarging the indoor living space.

And they added a dishwasher — my mother never had a dishwasher, in all the time she lived with my father…thirty-some years. All nice new appliances, very good. Ceiling fans: good. Those room air conditioners would have made it a LOT more comfortable for her…really, when you come down to it, it’s kind of odd they didn’t think of that. But then again, maybe not: they bought central air-conditioning to have central air-conditioning, after all. The bathrooms are basically the same, no doubt with updated fixtures. That gawdawful Pepto-Bismol pink tile in the back bathroom was the height of style when they moved in!

Really, if there just weren’t SO many unhappy memories associated with that place, right now today I would seriously consider buying it.

Times Have Been a-Changin’…

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Couple days ago, I had occasion to drive through the neighborhood around the old-folkerie where my father chose to live out the last years of his life.  It’s over on the easterly side of North Central Phoenix — actually, within (almost reasonable) walking distance of the big North Central house where DXH and I took up residence, just to show the world what we could afford.

Killing time drivin’ around the other morning was kinda fun, kinda sentimental. After running away from the church, being told we had no choir today (why??????), I filled the gas tank and then cruised up into some of the (relatively) old neighborhoods over in the area of my favorite QT station. Part of this area comprises the easterly section of a renowned slum known as Sunnyslope.

My! We’ve been told that the ‘Slope has gentrified…. They ain’t kiddin’!!

WHAT a difference. Houses and whole streets that used to be run-down dumps have been cleaned up and painted up and spiffed up…gosh! Some of those little houses — built as homes for working-class folk, downright tiny — are suddenly VERY cute.

A decade ago, you couldn’t have gotten me even to drive around in there — because it wasn’t safe. Now, if I were in the market for a centrally located house with “charm,” that would be one of the areas where I would look.

Meanwhile, in the center of this middle-classifying neighborhood, the old-folkerie where my father retreated after my mother died has been HUGELY revamped. “Gentrified” ain’t the word for it.

When my father was there, it was a sprawl of single-story garden apartments arranged around a dining/activity center/nursing home. Renamed — no longer “Orangewood” but the ever-so-snootier-sounding “Terraces” — it’s three stories, painted in the latest, most stylish eye-searing white and beige. It’s spread out vastly — probably three times the footprint of the old place. And it looks bloody expensive.

Apparently it is: I hear tell it costs even more than the Beatitudes, whose business model is based on bankrupting the inmates.

It used to be that the neighborhood where this fine institution resided was…well…shall we say trending toward shabby (not to emit the word “slummy).”  Now it’s all been cleaned up, spiffed up, painted up, even in some areas rebuilt! Who’d’ve ever thunk! I would call it an upper-middle-class neighborhood now.

Weird!

In other precincts for the agèd, my dear friend L. (of the J. & L. duo) passed on a few days ago. He and his wife J. had, you may recall, moved into a similar institute called the Beatitudes, over L.’s vehement objections. But L. was very elderly — 94 years old — and his health was failing fast. He’d fallen a couple of times, and J. found she couldn’t help him get back on his feet by herself…so was justifiably frightened of what might happen if she couldn’t find someone quickly to get him back upright. Additionally, they had a demented neighbor who took to making trouble for them. One of this character’s more recent antics was making like she was going to run him down in her car.

So even though L. did not want to go, it was clear that getting away from their pretty little patio home was the wisest move, and, given that, the nursing care offered by the Beatitudes was a godsend for J., if not for L.

On the other hand…speaking of getting away…

J. was right, and within a year or so, L. passed on. A-n-n-d…within a week of the burial service, her daughters packed up what remained of her worldly goods and drove them and her off to California, where they live near Sacramento.

GONE!

So much for the glories of the old-folkerie. As soon as the most pressing need was past, she was outa there.

That has to have been a very pricey maneuver. Shortly after they moved into the place, she told me it cost her everything she netted from the sale of their handsome North Central Avenue patio home to get them in there. Basically, she forked over a huge chunk of her net worth to obtain end-of-life care for L.

Think you could do better at the Terraces? After a bracing buy-in, you’ll pay a staggering monthly fee. For that you get a far better designed and roomier apartment than the cramped space J. & L. landed in. But…good luck to you if you run out of money before you run out of life.

Heaven help us.

Why should we have to impoverish ourselves, our spouses, and our children to pass from this world in peace?

Life in the ‘Hood: Stay or Flee?

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Summer storms blowing in, along with a few gangsters and fruitcakes…

Didn’t notice this exchange on the neighborhood Facebook page yesterday evening:

***

Police website…
7:25 p.m.
August 13
Report of Shots Fired
North Feeder Street NW and West Feeder Street EW
[Map with dramatic visuals…
[This is one block from my house]
GV(Neighbor): I am at 18th and Feeder E/W, didn’t hear anything. Hope everyone is safe!
I can hear a helicopter right now , its circling right down south from my house
Funny: At Side Street and Funny Farm Drive, also heard nothing. Helicopters are hardly noticed, they’re so ubiquitous. Any news on what this shenanigan entailed?
***

….a-n-n-n-d…nary another word.

Could’ve been firecrackers, I reckon. We have a lot of nitwits around here who like to set off fireworks, which, annoyingly enough, are legal to sell anywhere in the county. I would’ve been swimming at that hour. Still would have been way too hot for an evening doggy-walk. As a practical matter, I don’t recall if we went out last night at all. But if we did, it wouldn’t have been until 9 or 10 p.m. By then it was raining, though.

***

Now as evening ambles in, we have a little melodramatic wind (not enough to do much damage, that I can see) and a sky full of dark gray and dimly white clouds that started out as thunderheads but now are pretty well shredded and turned into high overcast. If it rains tonight, my bet is that it won’t be much.

What a place! Why do I stay here?

Probably because there’s really no place much better, at least not that I can afford. In Paradise Valley, entire neighborhoods are fenced and gated off, with private security guards roaming the streets 24/7. Ain’t that reassuring for the rich and the tasteless?

Fountain Hills is probably quieter, but it’s as far east as you can get in the Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson. Personally, I don’t find it inviting. Most of the houses are cheaply built — stick and styrofoam, tracty-looking. The place is lily-white and IMHO devoid of character. It’s a long way from shopping and even further from the folks I know.

Sun City is calm: haunted by the peace of the mortuary. It’s not entirely free of crime — some fairly eye-popping shockers have occurred out there. And those houses, too, are cheaply built tract numbers: better construction than Fountain Hills (most of the S.C. homes are built of block) but devoid of insulation. People who choose to stay there over the summer will fir out the exterior walls, lay on insulation, and then plaster over the top of it. So you get the effect of a typical stick-and-styrofoam tract house, only the structure has in effect two walls: one of cinderbock and one of styrofoam-backed plaster. To my mind, it’s a depressing place to live, made even more so by the fact that my poor mother died there after my father retired and dragged her out to the Arizona desert.

I’m fairly sure she expected to retire to Southern California — Long Beach or points south. She wanted to be in the Bay Area, but the cost of living there was well out of the question. Betcha she about fainted when my father stumbled upon Del Webb’s ghetto for old folks. 😀

Actually, I believe she liked Sun City. One time she remarked to me how much she loved the screened back patio where she could sit all morning over coffee and listen to the doves and quail hooting. It really was very, very quiet out there.

Heh. While yeah, I could do without the helicopter, siren, and lightrail serenade from Conduit of Blight Blvd and Gangbanger’s Way, I’m afraid I like the sound of children playing and teenagers carrying on.

Truth to tell, if my son were not here, I very likely would be long gone.

But..where?

Well, some friends have moved to Utah, the Provo area. But I feel no desire to live there. Another friend: gone to Portland. Brrrrrr!

Santa Fe is extremely cool (culturally, that is), but from what others have told me, its ambience isn’t a helluva lot safer than the Hood’s. Don’t know anyone there. Can’t work up a lot of enthusiasm for decamping to someplace where I’d have to build a whole new life.

Prescott is nice. I do like Prescott. But…. It snows in the winter. Gets hot enough to need air-conditioning in the summer. And the gringos have discovered it, big time: hordes of immigrants from the Valley and from California have flooded into the place. Hence: out of the frying pan…

View from the Mogollon Rim near Payson

Mr. & Mrs. Fireman sold their manse in the West Valley and moved up to Payson, where they bought a truly beautiful home on a nice expanse of forested land. They seem to like it there very much. Main problem: not enough infrastructure. They have to drive into town for shopping, and even to take the dog to a vet.

In Tucson, there’s an area called Oro Valley, spreading northward along the west flank of the Catalina Mountains. It’s very pleasant. And it has the advantage of being close to a major medical center, to a fairly arty city with a large, established university (cultural life!!!), to shopping, and to a major regional airport. I suppose if I were going to decamp to someplace where I don’t know anybody and where I’d have to build a whole new lifestyle, that would be the foremost candidate.

Ohhh well…. Long as I’m livin’ in a freestanding house on a quarter-acre of land with a pool, I reckon I might as well be swimming in that pool. And so, awayyy!

Dental Insurance in Retirement…or No?

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Since retiring from my job at Arizona State University, I’ve gone bare when it comes to dental insurance. It’s a risk, obviously: betting on the “not come” rather than the “come.” My teeth have always been excellent. My mother died in her 60s; her mother died in her 40s, and her grandmother also died fairly young: hence, one could lay a bet that I will outlive my teeth.

I retired at about the same time a dear friend did. She and her husband chose not to enroll in the state’s plan for dental insurance. Why? Well….

The Arizona state dental plan doesn’t cover everything. For $8.52 a month, Cigna tells you you’re insured but actually covers very little; at $35 a month, the “premium” plan it actually covers things. Their fee schedule is so complicated that She Who Is Not an Accountant can’t even begin to figure it out, but it would appear the coverage doesn’t apply to everything. But following my friends’ logic, I chose not to sign up for Arizona’s retiree dental plan because my friends — one of whom was the head of the Arizona Department of Gaming, fairly large in the Bigwig Club — calculated that over a predictable lifetime, most of us would end up paying the same or more in insurance premiums than we would pay out of pocket for typical old-folks’ dental and orthodontic care (including extractions and all the other fun and games that come with decreptitude).

I’ve been retired since December 2009. So let’s start at January 2010… This is August 2022: about 12.6  years, hm?

At $8.52 a month, one year on Cigna’s low-rent plan would cost you $102.24. By now, I would have paid out around $1,288 for retiree dental insurance, on the cheap. But of course, you KNOW that if you really need dental insurance, that amount of coverage will be a drop in the bucket; so if you’re gonna buy the coverage, you’d better buy the top of the line. And that, by now, would have cost me $5,292.

AND not all dentists will accept the state’s insurance plan. Nor do those figures take into account services that would not be covered under the state’s plans. Also it’s worth noting that some of the stuff I’ve needed has been covered, to a degree, by Medicare and Medigap.

At this point, I’ve probably spent somewhere around a thousand bucks on the Adventures in Dental Science. So compared to the price of retiree insurance, probably the cost is six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. But I haven’t had to bicker with any providers. AND…it must be remembered that many providers will not accept the low-rent coverage one gets from the State of Arizona. So for the amount I’ve paid, I’ve retained my choice of providers. And that, it develops, is big.

Very big.

Also very big is the fact that not everything appears to be covered on the State’s plan, meaning that a fair amount of one’s Adventures in Dental Science are likely to be paid for out of pocket. How much might that be? Difficult to calculate. But even a small figure would cut in to the value of the premium-supported insurance scheme.

***

By now, I’d guess that over the past couple of years I’ve spent about the same as or a little more than I would have shelled out to Cigna for dental, what with the present Adventures in Medical Science. However, that may change as things get worse.

Or as they get better…

Our extended amalgamated family’s beloved dentist, Dr. D. was forced to retire for medical reasons. He sold his practice to a guy who moved here from Baltimore.

This fella has taken over and, as of course he should, is now doing things his way. Not Dr. D’s way. He’s canned all of Dr. D’s excellent dental assistants and office staff (or maybe they all fled?). And I see he’s building an empire of low-rent offices over on the West Side: exploiting the impoverished set.

I’ve now seen the guy several times. And truth to tell, I don’t like him. Nor do I trust him.

Evidently for good reason, come to find out.

He told me the stake another practitioner — an orthodontist specializing in rather eccentric restorative work — had installed in my upper jaw was infected. He would like to take that thing out and…what? Rebuild it? Put in a fake tooth? A bridge?? Argha!

Not to say…innaresting.

So…couple weeks ago I got a referral from another medical doctor to an orthodontist, who herself specializes in these sorts of shenanigans. Today, I finally got in to see her — coincidentally, on the first day the damn tooth hasn’t either hurt like hell or ached vaguely.

She shot a set of X-rays. Inspected them. Let her assistant inspect them, apparently by way of pedagogy but in fact putting another set of eyes on the scene.

Then she showed the X-rays to me and said, “Look. There’s no infection around this thing at all.”

“Why,” quoth I, “does it hurt?”

“Because,” quoth she, “the implant is too long. It’s grinding against your lower teeth. Especially when (as indeed is my habit) you clench your teeth.”

She picks up a handy-dandy little whizzer and, zzziiip! Drills off the upper surface of the crown.

And…

By damn! Now my jaws fit together straight! The teeth do not whack each other when I close my mouth. And the implant does NOT hurt.

So…uhm…howcum the Philadelphia Wonder didn’t notice that?

***

She fixed the damn thing in under ten minutes! Probably under five, actually: all she had to do was polish the excess porcelain off so that the fake tooth FIT, same as all all the other teeth in that part of the upper jaw.

The bill was a couple hundred bucks. A far cry from what I would have spent on Cigna’s dental insurance over the past twelve and a half years.

Unfortunately, she’s a specialist and so doesn’t do routine dental maintenance. But she gave me the name of a colleague, whom I intend to track down next week.

 

 

 

Moving for Olde Age?

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So my friends J & L(x2, of the male variety) invited me and a bunch of co-religionists to view the valley fireworks from their high-rise apartment on Central. This has become an annual tradition, which is really cool. This year they wanted party-goers to donate a chunk of dough to the church for the privilege, a chunk which, alas, I don’t happen to have laying around on the living-room floor. So…the human will be home listening to the local bang-bang nuts playing with their explosives and trying to calm the poor little dog’s nerves. (When I’ve gone to J & L’s for the Fourth, I’ve left Ruby with M’hijito, where the unruffleable Charlie the Golden Retriever keeps her pretty calm.)

That high-rise strikes me as a potential alternative to an old-folkerie, for when I get too old to handle the hassles of living in a house on a quarter-acre of land. Though a two-bedroom there is just an apartment and so is a lot smaller and more economically appointed than the four-bedroom Funny Farm, for an old buzzard it has a lot of advantages…

  • Less space to have to keep clean
  • Much better security
  • Someone else takes care of the exterior.
  • It’s within walking distance of AJ’s.
  • It’s close to two excellent hospitals (my house is close to a large urban hospital, too, but that place is not what you’d call “great” in terms of quality and safety).
  • Incredible views!
  • The lightrail goes right by the front door — you could ride it to the museums, the library, the baseball games, AJ’s, the Episcopal cathedral downtown, and even out to Tempe (if events at the university beckoned).

On the other hand…

Moving to J&L’s tower would mean sacrificing manysmall pleasures and would make parts of my present life so difficult I might have to make major changes…like find a new home for Ruby.

In a two-bedroom apartment, there would be no space for both a guest bedroom and my office. And the whole extra bedroom and closet that I use for storage would go away!

Then we have the pool issue. Despite the latest spate of grousing, I like my private pool that resides behind 8-foot walls and piled-up vines. I love skinny-dipping whenever I feel a whim to cool off. And I’m not going to strap myself into an elastic strait-jacket for a five-minute dip in a public pool. Here, when it’s miserably hot I can step out the back door and hop in the drink. There I’d have to change clothes, ride an elevator downstairs, traipse to a pool, then climb back out, ride back up, and hang up a suit in the bathroom.

Living on top of the neighbors is not my idea of a gracious lifestyle, no matter how fancy the apartments are.

AJ’s would be within walking distance, at least as long as I can still walk that far. But how long would that be? If I’m not walking the dog a mile or two a day (which surely would not happen in that hard-edged part of town), before long I won’t be walking much at all…won’t be able to.

Despite the crime in the neighboring slums (which does spill over into the ‘Hood) and the soaring property taxes and the endless wrangling of workmen, I’m inclined to think that living in my own little cottage with my own yard and my own garage and my own swimming pool mightily beats living in a box in the sky.

Would a high-rise apartment beat self-imprisonment in an old-folkerie? Probably. But can I provide all the services for myself here that I’d have to provide if I were living in an apartment? No doubt.

Think I’d druther have those services here than there…