7:45 a.m. Ninety degrees in the shade. 41% humidity.
I’m so parboiled I can’t think: don’t know why WordPress is letting me write in this post, since apparently I’m not actually logged in. Or something.
But lo! It let me out AND let me back in. Weird!
Just back from a truly unpleasant doggy-walk. The heat and the sogginess would be quite enough, without the fellow moron dog-walkers. Where does it say that stupidity is part of the job description of “human being”?
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Never did get around to posting this.
ohhhh well…
Now it’s a few days later. The weather has attenuated some. Actually pretty pleasant out there this morning: much drier than it was when this post started. Just finished wrestling with the pool, to little avail. Hope Pool Dude shows up shortly to get it set up properly.
Where were we?
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Ah yes: the junket with VC. My friend VC and I went over to a classic old Phoenix shopping mall (believe it or not, we were around when it was NEW!!). Roamed through a couple of tony upscale department stores; then roamed up and down the mall and peered at the tony individual stores. That was fun.
Who has the money to shop in those places? More to the point: these days who has the TIME to do so?
Our stroll brought back memories of my mother, who dearly loved to putter around a shopping center that contained a couple of big department stores and a slew of expensive little stores. In Long Beach (where I went to high school), we lived within walking distance of a sprawling mall. She was a bit too crippled up (from the malnutrition she suffered as a child) to walk from our apartment to that mall, so of course she would drive us there. Occasionally, though, I would walk over there by my li’l teenaged self and roam around the place.
One of the large department stores there — I believe it was a Broadway — had a classic department-store coffee shop/restaurant, up on the third floor. She dearly LOVED coffee shops! So, not surprisingly, we ate there fairly often…maybe once a month or so.
Yesterday, after I dropped VC off at her house — she lives in a historic downtown neighborhood — I drove back up to my parts through the Central Avenue corridor.
Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve cruised around those parts! I used to live in the historic mid-town district. We had a beautiful old house west of Central Avenue and south of Thomas Road, one that I miss to this day. It was so pretty, and the neighbors were so nice!
Unfortunately, we moved out. I stupidly thought we would send our son, who was coming onto grade-school age, to the well respected public schools in the Madison District, up on North Central Avenue.
Yes. Central Snobsville…
Unbeknownst to me, my husband had NO INTENTION of sending our son to a public school, no matter how well rated it was. If I’d had any idea that he would flat-out refuse to put the kid in a Madison school, I would never, ever have lobbied to move out of that lovely house.
The mid-town Encanto area, though, really wasn’t very safe. We had several hair-raising incidents while we lived there, as did some of our neighbors. The most unnerving adventure, though, really was our fault: Having come home late from a Bar Association shindig, very tired and pretty drunk, we left the back door open so our German shepherd could go out and get herself back in, allowing us to go to bed without waiting for her to do Her Thing.
Mistake!
Shortly, DH started to snore: a roar like an 18-wheeler’s. I got up to sleep on the living-room sofa, since sleeping next to him in the bedroom was out of the question.
Sometime after I dozed off, we were awakened by an ENRAGED ROAR from Greta the German Shepherd. She exploded like a cannon, taking off from her snoozing site outside our bedroom door.
A local sh!thead, exploring for places to burgle, had hopped over the six-foot backyard fence and lo! Found that back door open!
YaHOO!
So he walked right in and made himself to home.
He got well inside the house before he woke up the German shepherd and she registered that whoever was in the kitchen was not DH and not me.
She ROARED after the poor son-of-a-bitch, getting between him and the door he came in. By the time DH woke up and came out to see WTF was going on, the chucklehead had found the side door. DH got there just in time to see him dart out the door and slam it in the dog’s face.
When I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen to see what was going on, DH said, sounding outraged and suspicious, “Who was that man?”
Welp. That was the beginning of the end. Who was that man, indeed.
This episode accelerated our desire to move uptown, and within a year we were outta there.
Mistake, IMHO. No place in the Valley is safe — as one of the cops who rescued me from the home invader in my present house remarked. You can not get away from it, no matter where you are. Hence: the proliferation of walled, gated “communities” hereabouts.
So, would I move back down there?
Hmmm…. Probably not.
Yes, I do love those beautiful old custom homes and the park and all. But… The crime and the transient issues are still there. And it’s noisy. Very noisy.
The lovely Encanto district is trisected by a one-way road leading downtown, a one-way road leading uptown, and Seventh Avenue, a main drag that runs from points WAY north to points WAY south. So the traffic is pretty much constant, and so is the noise.
Add to that two major hospitals: one up on Thomas road (north border) and one down on McDowell (south border). The one on McDowell is east of Central, so ambulances headed there rarely cut through Encanto. But the one on Thomas is right on the north border, and it’s HUGE. Ambulances and fire trucks race up and down those two one-way “neighborhood” streets all hours of the day and night, all the time. Plus shortly before we moved, the idiot city bought a private home on the street just north of us and about two lots to the west, and they turned it into a fire station!
Yes! Fire trucks and ambulances roaring back and forth, 24 hours a day! Not to mention the helicopters.
So…that, along with my hallucination about the school, was why we moved out.
To this day, I miss it. We no doubt would still be married if we’d stayed there, because I would never have become quite so discontent if we still lived in a beautiful house with beautiful neighbors.
Not that the house we bought up on North Central wasn’t beautiful enough. But the neighbors? Not so much.
North Central truly would be better named Snobsville. With one (count her: one) exception, our new neighbors were roaring snobs. And they knew a blue-collar girl when they saw her. They treated me like white trash…which, I guess, is not far off the mark. But my mother taught me to be polite to everyone, not only to the wealthy and the fancy. Those people around us were just horrid. Nouveau riche parvenus…
Cruising through the beloved old neighborhood, I thought maybe I should sell my house, here on the fringe of Sunnyslope, and move back into Encanto. We certainly have our share of crime and cop copter fly-overs and roaring ambulances. They seem to have moved the Fire Department out of that house around the corner from the old place, so that problem presumably is resolved.
But…truth to tell, those old houses entail even more work and more expense than this place. So that would be ill-advised, as moves go.
Really, the only practical moves at this point would be either to move into a high-rise on North Central or to a patio home in the Biltmore area. And neither of those appeals very much. I don’t want to live in a hive.
Besides, my son wants this house. He doesn’t understand about the longevity issue on my side of the family: women who had reasonably quiet lives lived into their 90s. With no medical care! They were Christian Scientists!
My mother died in her mid-60s…but she smoked herself to death.
Literally: the woman was never conscious without a cigarette in her hand — not even in the shower! So, no surprise, she died of a fine visceral cancer. That and the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Saudi Arabia picked her off relatively young.
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For me, sometimes I do wonder…what next?
If there is a next, that is.
There may not be: it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion.
Truth to tell, I surely would not mind moving out of this neighborhood. The presence of the Romanian Landlord represents, IMHO, an ongoing threat, even though he’s presently quiescent and has been for quite some time. He’s closed the juvenile delinquent home across the street and turned it into a rental. Just now the tenants are quiet and the yard is well kept up. But…yeah: what next?
Just to the north of the hood, a dangerous slum spreads up to the foot of the North Mountains. To the west: banks of deteriorating apartments, running down as fast as they can run. To the east, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city.
It’s not the worst place in the city. But there are better places — at comparable prices.
It was so beautiful. 
Out the door at the crack of dawn: