Coffee heat rising

Retirement

Free!! (??) I hope….

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Woo HOOO! It looks suspiciously like this is NOT cleaning-lady day!

The wonderful Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) is not parked in front of my neighbor’s house (she visits those neighbors before descending on me). It’s almost noon!  So…unless that dear woman picked up another client and has enjoyed scrubbing yet another shack before coming here, I’m FREEEEEE from having to pick up the pig-pen.

Mwa ha hah! Sure do hope so…

Isn’t that awful?  SOOOO lazy that I don’t want to be bothered to shovel aside the litter so she can get at a surface or three to clean!

The other day some obnoxious and nosy financial dudes visited the Funny Farm. This, supposedly for a bland chat…and…yeah. Transparently to nose around in my house and see how I live and probably to see if they can get me committed to an old-folkerie if I dwell in stacks of litter.

Fortunately, because the ineffable Luz was slated to come by in the near future, I had picked up the place and put all the dishes in the washer and stuffed the dirty clothes in the laundry and…voilà! It looked almost like someone civilized lived here.

That was lucky!

{whew!}

If I’m going to be spied upon like that, presumably by my son’s hired help, after this I’m gonna have to make the bed and pick up the clutter the minute I roll out of the sack.

Not that it’s a bad thing to tidy up the place the minute your feet hit the bedroom floor. But that it’s a damn nuisance…and an invasion of one’s privacy.

And it makes me wonder, seriously, if I should pack up and move out of the city.

But….where? 

That mystifies me 

First, because this neighborhood is about as ideal a neighborhood as I can imagine. The house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, but THREE major (gourmet-style!!) grocery stores, a veterinary, a computer store, a hair stylist, and a Target.

Seriously: I don’t have to travel more than about five or six blocks to get everything needed for day-to-day living here. Truth to tell, I don’t even need to own a car to live here comfortably and conveniently.

Second, because the neighbors are very nice, very friendly. Even Tony the Romanian Landlord has mellowed out! This makes it a pleasant place to live.

Third, because a major regional hospital is about a four-minute ambulance ride from here. Dial 911, and the rescue guys (and gals) show up forthwith.

Fourth: because the crime level — not nil, of course — is surprisingly low for an urban neighborhood. Yes, of course I have fierce burglar-resistant screen doors on all the entrances, and of course they’re kept locked. But I don’t feel especially at risk, sitting here in the Funny Farm. In another neighborhood where we lived, I surely did.

Hmmmm……

Having those two clowns show up here and nose around was…disturbing, to say the least. I may have to hire the cleaning lady to come by once a week. Right now, I surely don’t do that…can’t afford it.

But…let’s think about that: I can afford weekly cleaning help one whole helluva lot better than I can afford to be locked up in a prison for old folks. That would make it easier for Luz to keep the place spotless, and also I could probably put her up to driving me to various retail stores.

So….

I think I should make a few minor changes to my routine: ones that would create the effect of major changes in my day-to-day lazy lifestyle:

  • Forgodsake MAKE THE GODDAM BED the minute Ruby and I roll out of the sack. Be sure the bedroom and bathroom are all tidied up.
  • Pick up the kitchen and stash the dirty dishes in the washer the minute I finish breakfast. Never leave stuff laying around the kitchen or dining room. {How lazy am I? Let us count the ways…}
  • Get in the habit of picking up the house before going to bed, rather than in the morning.

Hm. That probably would do the job, since I do not habitually lay around like a total slob. If some namby-pamby showed up here, assigned with the task of inspecting my living arrangements, they’d think I live like a cleaning lady. 😀  😀  😀

Seriously: pick up the clutter first thing in the morning, and no one who shows up later in the day will get any ideas about senility affecting my lifestyle.

Is it an invasion of my privacy?

Damn right! But nothing like the invasion of (nonexistent!) privacy that would be inflicted on me in one of those prisons for old folks.

My Father’s Little Orphan Annie

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In effect, my mother was my father’s Little Orphan Annie: an abandoned child with no resources and no future.

A large part of my mother’s life, certainly during her upbringing, was fukkin’ gawdawful. My father came along and rescued her from fukkin’ gawdawful.

His answer to fukkin’ gawdawful was marriage and an escape overseas, to a drudging life in Saudi Arabia’s American oil port, Ras Tanura.

After ten years in that hellish place, they decamped to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my father, an oil tanker captain and navigator, shipped out of the East Bay and my mother and I occupied a series of (quite nice!) apartments in the City and then in Long Beach, in Southern California. Eventually he retired and they decamped again, this time to Arizona.

They sent me to college here. My father worked until he could finally see his way clear to retiring, and the two of them figured to spend the rest of their lives in Sun City, an exceptionally bland retirement community on the west side of Phoenix.

That lasted a couple of years, until a major recession struck and my father had to go back to sea.

Horrible! I can’t even imagine how depressing that must have been — for both of them, but certainly for him. Poor man!

Another few years passed and he contrived to quit the hated job, once and for all. By then I was about through college; moving on to a job in a law firm, and very happy to no longer be living in dreary Sun City.

I went on to marry one of the lawyers (that’s what young women were supposed to do, right? Land someone to support them for the rest of their lives…)

Meanwhile, my mother sat crocheting in front of the TV set and smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And eventually succeeded in bringing on a cancer that, predictably enough, killed her.

***

Honest to gawd!  Both of them — my father and my mother — were right-wing crazies, the sort who thought anything they disagreed with that appeared in the news was just bat-brained propaganda from Big Brother.

Yes, that really WAS what they thought.

Unfortunately, Big Brother had the story right this time. And so, not surprisingly, this time my mother puffed herself into the grave.

Okay: so he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere, on the west side of the Valley. She’s done; he’s bereft.

Now he sells the Sun City house and buys into an old-folkerie, a place called Orangewood. Having lived in institutional settings all his adult life, he thought it was just grand. My mother had refused to go there, and so he’d had to wait until she died to get rid of the shack and install himself in the landlocked version of a ship.

Ugh! I’d have died if I’d had to live there. He liked it, though. I guess to him it must have felt like home. Because, after all, he had lived on ships — institutions — since he was 17 years old.

And I do wonder: did he like it? Was it life on the Bounding Main reincarnated? Or was it what he had envisioned as the ideal retirement?

The latter is my guess — never having been able to read his mind.

He was a handsome man, by any measure. And so the minute he moved into the old-folkerie and walked into the dining hall, a feeding frenzy ensued.

Since he was, as far as I can tell, a staidly loyal married man, it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he was the Catch of a Lifetime…or so it would seem to all the agèd ladies at the old folks’ home.

Within weeks he was snared.

So — again, as far as I can tell — he must have felt he’d hit the jackpot. Not only a dwelling in a hotel-like affair designed to cater to the elderly where someone else would buy the groceries, cook the meals, clean  the apartment, and take out the trash, but now a New Woman! 

He seems not to have thought through that bounty very thoroughly: within a few weeks he had proposed to said New Woman.

Mistake. As you can imagine:

* He was accustomed to living with my mother, who after some 30 years together knew him well and knew how to make him happy.

* He did not recognize the Wicked Witch of the West for what she was. Yes: a wicked witch.

Oh, my. You wanna talk horror show? Lemme tellya horror show! 

At one point I urged him to divorce the bit¢h. But he was having none o’ that: “She’ll get all my MONEY,” wailed he.

I was neither wise enough nor brave enough to say, in reply, “Daddy: some things are more important than money.” Wouldn’t have mattered: he would have ignored that bit of advice.

So he spent the rest of his life in misery, until he had a stroke that carried him away.

What a way to wrap up your life, eh?

Brrrrrrr! …I think….

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Colder ‘n’ a by-gawd out there on the back porch. But…but…the thermometer reads 48 degrees….which just ain’t THAT cold.

Need to take the Savage Beast (all 30 pounds of her) for a walk. Now, not later. But my enthusiasm for that project is about nil.

And speaking of dawgs and jobs you’d druther not do: Ruby’s beloved Pool Dude was just here and gone. LORDIE, there’s a real you’d-druther-not!! Slopping around in cold water and chemicals when the air is so cold it makes your hands ache.

Ohhh well. Thanks to that lovely fella, the pool is sparkling clean (and it stays so!), and I do not have to lift one limp little paw to make it that way. Basically, he makes it possible for me to stay in this house.

Well. No: that’s not exactly so. True: I did used to clean the pool myself, which (as you may have surmised) didn’t kill me. My neighbor just to the west has drained her pool. And she leaves it sitting there empty. Actually, during the rainy season she leaves enough of a puddle in the bottom to breed hordes of mosquitoes, which fly in her other next-door neighbor’s windows and bite bite bite bite bite. They put that poor woman (known in her family as Other Daughter, she being the youngest of two) in the hospital. (Mosquitoes carry all sorts of diseases, not just malaria).

I taught Other Daughter’s dad to throw mosquito repellent and insecticide over the wall into the puddle, which seems to have helped some. Hard to tell, though: it’s too cold for skeeters just now.

Why on EARTH would you buy a house with a hole in the ground in which to breed bugs unless you were gonna use the hole in the ground???

Contemplating the neighborhood bullsh!t returns me, irresistibly and unpleasantly, to contemplating the possibility of moving back to Sun City, where people don’t indulge this kind of bat-brained behavior. (Out there, they have other kinds of BS to play with.)

My parents dragged me to Sun City when my father made his first pass at retiring from his job as a sea-going tanker pilot. Even though young people are not allowed in that garden spot, my parents claimed (correctly) that I had weaseled my way into the University of Arizona at the age of 16, and so would be living in dorms in Tucson. But in fact, I spent all the university’s “vacation” time in un-lovely Sun city: winter break, spring break, and three months’ worth of summer break.

Just hated living there! 

Oh, well. Life ain’t what you pay for, is it?

Speaking of (un)lovely Sun City, I haven’t heard from SDXB (“Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend”) in ages. Called out there a few times: no answer. I hope he and New Girlfriend are OK.

Unless medical care in that place has changed a lot since my parents lived there, Sun City is no place to get sick. The horrific excuse for “care” my mother got during her last months is one of several reasons I refused to move westerly, ever westerly when SDXB sold his house here in the ‘Hood and moved out there. That and the gawdawful racket from Luke Air Force Base. And the hate.

Those people hate everyone and everything in any way different from them. Foremost, of course, is skin color. Then affluence: better not be busted & disgusted and try to live out there… Then politics: if you’re a damnfool liberal, you’d better keep your mouth shut. Then religion: Judaism is not high on the list of preferred systems of worship…though my parents regarded Judaism more as a racial category than as a way of thinking.

What an awful place! Even if my son hadn’t been living in central Phoenix, NO WAY would I have followed SDXB out there when he took off for the West Side.

****

But…but…but…

***

It is indeed much cheaper to live out there than it is to live in town.

So occasionally I do think...maybe I should sell the Funny Farm and move out to dreary…uhm…lovely Sun City.

But really…why? 

Unless you hate kids, there’s really no good reason to move out there.

My parents did, effectively. Hate kids, that is. My father was regularly and utterly infuriated when a neighbor’s brats went out in their backyard and hollered and carried on as they played. But…he had good reason: he worked the swing shift, and he often truly needed to sleep all afternoon.

But whereas he could (and did!) beat the bejayzuz out of me for waking him up in mid-afternoon, there was nothing he could do to shut up the neighbors’ li’l darlin’s. If there had been a place to live where kids were not allowed, back in the day, he’d have been living there! 😀

What he would have done with me escapes me. Boarding school, prob’ly.

Anyway, he thought he’d died & gone to hevvin when he learned about child-free Sun City. And that is why and how we got to Arizona.

Heh! What an outcome, eh?  I believe my mother thought they would retire down the West Coast, to a small town between L.A. and San Diego.

It was very pretty down there. But he decided it cost too much. (Life cost too much for my father’s taste, come to think of it…) So when they found Del Webb’s Sun City projects, they thought they’d discovered Nirvana.

And I imagine they selected the one in Arizona because Arizona was SO much cheaper to live in than was anyplace in California.

Infuriating…retrospectively speaking. I had figured I would go to UC Berkeley. With that goal in mind, I’d worked my a$$ off in high school, weaseling my way into the National Honor Society and racking up absurd grade-point averages taking 5 solids every semester. Instead, I ended up in Tucson.

Shee-ut! Why would you do that to your kid?

Oh: because you matter so much more than your kid, right?

😀  😀  😀

Five Days Later!!!

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SURPRISE!!!! The ole  bat actually survived any number of days after the last time I was posting in Full Glum Mode. 😀

Can you imagine? Who’d’ve thunk it??

I sure wouldn’t’ve, a week ago.

Welp. The teeth still ache. The gums still burn, The fingers and the feet still tingle. But just now they ache, they burn, and they tingle one HELLUVA lot less than they did when last we visited here. So…maybe, just mayyebeeee whatever the hell this ailment is will go away.

One can always hope, eh?

This evening, the Human was feeling well enough to dodder around the neighborhood with the energy-laden corgi. 😀

What a pretty little neighborhood it is! Truly, I lucked MASSIVELY into it to have found this place and bought a house here.

Amazingly, it has NOT gone downhill in the decade or so since SDXB and I bought in here. If anything, many of the houses have been much upgraded, and their fancification has spiffed up the ‘Hood.

The outrageous lightrail, roaring up and down Main Drag West, has not, after all, emitted so much noise and hauled in so much trash as to downgrade the living conditions. If anything, it has fancified the place even more: Californicating it to the taste of  younger adults.

Affluent younger adults…

This place is getting fancier and pricier by the day.

When I croak over, so it appears, M’hijito will inherit a house worth a chunk of dough in a centrally located urban neighborhood, one that may even be a place where he will want to live himself. Whether he does or not, he surely is gonna come out on top of the deal.

😀

Boyoboy, am I glad  didn’t move out to Sun City with SDXB, who fled the oncoming stampede of upgrades as soon as he saw it coming. I might’ve gone with him, if I hadn’t been there and done that, thanks to my parents. They were among the original buyers out there. And…as a younger, pretty much unwelcome resident at the time, I learned to un-appreciate the place.

More recently — just over the past few weeks — my feeble li’l mind has turned back to the possibility of decamping back to Sun City. But…y’know…don’t think so! 

  • Don’t wanna live in a mausoleum for old folks, not ever again.
  • Don’t wanna be serenaded all day from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. by the roar of fighter jets out of Luke AFB.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where Black and Brown folk are uniformly hated and reviled.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where you can’t buy fancy gourmet foods because vendors assume old people mostly want to eat frozen dinners they can microwave.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a decent department store.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a Mayo hospital.
  • Don’t wanna live a million and a half miles from M’hijito’s house.
  • Don’t wanna live where you never hear the sound of little kids playing in the street near your house.

Don’t wanna…don’t wanna…don’t wanna! Just wanna live here in my drab li’l middle-class tract house, smack in the middle of the Big City. 😀

And…whaaa? UNdone for????

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WTF?????  After this morning’s whiney whinge, now — come 3:34 in the afternoon — suddenly I’m a whole new person!!! 

Why?????  What on earth would cause a gigantic slug of misery to suddenly evaporate? To be replaced by a calm, almost complacent mood tending (even!) toward the cheerful?????

Seriously: I cannot imagine.

This morning I was truly miserable. Now: back to normal; indeed, even fairly cheerful.  Why?????

Well….I can’t imagine. Unless it was a nice sunny day and a long walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd and through the neighboring shopping centers.

Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood, through three neighboring shopping centers and all around a part of the tract where SDXB and I used to walk almost every day, back when he lived here.

He has moved to Sun City, and so is long gone. Me: I wouldn’t go back there if ya paid me.

But he likes that kind of fustian fuddy-duddery, so he’s very happy there. He and New Girlfriend seem to be doing well enough, though it sounds like he’s pretty damn sick. With my mother (oh, lemme tellya horror show!!), we found the medical care in Sun City was even more substandard than you get in the typical American living space. Just. Gawd. Awful.

Would she have died if she’d had decent care?

Well, yes.

But she sure as Hell wouldn’t have suffered the way she did. And that little Life Passage is one of several reasons you couldn’t get me back in Sun City: not on a bet.

At any rate: free of that place, Ruby and I put some serious mileage under our paws and had a lovely time hiking around the ‘Hood and through the neighboring shopping centers.

What exactly I’m gonna do to get through the upcoming end-of-life years, I dunno. Have to confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.

Seriously: over the next few months and year or so, I do need to make some plans. Maybe confer with M’Hijito about what he wants me to do … yeah, I know: check my idiot self into the Beatitudes, a venerable old-folkerie.

Thanks. I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim…  So we do need to confer and think carefully about how to deal with the upcoming (potentially hideous) years. But just now…I get to enjoy life for a few weeks or months!

 

Surely the End Is in Sight

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So, so sick. One can only hope this comes to an end fairly soon.

Not that I’m in any hurry to shuffle off this infamous mortal coil…but…dayum this old-age stuff hurts!

Need to find a way to get down to the nursing home/old-age factory, there to talk with the operators and figure out how to arrange to get myself in there when the time comes (which, I fear, is nigh…) and how to pay for it.

Horrors.

First horror: I truly detest institutional living. Hated every goddam minute of living in the college dorms. And now it looks like I’m going to have to end my life in exactly that kind of setting.

Yeah: hating every goddam minute of every goddam day.

Next horror: those places take everything you have in exchange for baby-sitting you into the Next World. And I do NOT want to have to fork over all the money my father left me and all of my own savings plus the value of this house for the privilege of being baby-sat into the Next World. I want that inheritance to go to my son, not to some baby-sitting factory.

As I mentioned a few posts back, Wonder Cleaning-Lady apparently spent some time coming into infirm people’s homes and baby-sitting them. Next time I see her, I’ll have to ask her about that, and where she worked.

It would be ideal if I could hire someone to come in and baby-sit me, at least during the day and at least until I’m a lot closer to the finish line. But it’s unclear to me whether that’s possible and, if so, how much it would cost.

Everything you have: that’s how much it’ll cost. Dontcha just  know?

And no, my son is in no position to chauffeur me into the Next World. He has a JOB. Can you imagine???

And it’s a pretty demanding job: his nose is on the proverbial grindstone all day, every day…and then some. So…somehow I’ve got to find some way get cared for without wrecking his life. And preferably without making me any more miserable than absolutely necessary.

So…I have no idea how to handle this. Asked down at the church, figuring social service work is a large part of a cleric’s job. They didn’t have a clue.

What would help a lot would be if I would just keel over dead, with a minimum of hassle and pain. Flop down on the living-room floor and be done with it.

BUT…we have this little problem of the dog. If I fell off the cliff into the Next World, she would be left here alone, with no one to feed her and care for her. And since nobody gives a damn whether I live or die, she might not survive until someone noticed.

I guess I could find a new home for her now. But gosh, I don’t wanna do it. Just now she’s my only companion and, frankly, about my only friend. If I give her to someone else, I really will be all alone.

All alone in an institutional setting. Doesn’t that sound jolly?