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Urban life

Moving: A Bad Idea

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So here I am: coveting the Old Neighborhood. Thinking how much I’d love to move back down into the historic mid-town Encanto neighborhood, where DXH and I spent the first 15 years or so of our marriage. Where M’ijito grew old enough to pass through the first several years of the tony private grade school where we sent him. Where I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation, got it accepted by a prestigious publisher, finished the degree, and thereby made myself unemployable.

Ahhhh, the good ole days!

Ruby and I traipsed all over the place this afternoon, from our old part of the district through the expensively tony Palmcroft neighborhood, into the park…round and round.

I loved our time in the Encanto/Palmcroft district, and greatly regretted feeling we needed to move out. Before we sold our beautiful historic home and moved up to the North Central area, DXH had told me we would put our son in the highly respected Madison schools, the best public school district in the state. I figured Cool! He could get a first-rate K-8 experience, meet and make friends with offspring of the prominent North Central set, and from there proceed with the other Richistani kids to attend the weighty and prestigious Brophy Catholic High School. Or, failing that, go through Central High School, without doubt the state’s best public high school.

Well. Uh…no.

Once we got moved, DXH refused to switch the kid into a public school. So there we were in Snobsville North, where I knew no one and no one felt any craving to make friends with white trash of my ilk.

(No, in case you haven’t figured it out: My parents were not professionals, they were not even college graduates, and they knew nothing about how to function as socialites…)

The marriage didn’t survive that fun period. I ended up  back south where the WT live, and then eventually skipped around to the far side of the tony North Central district, landed in some apartments on the north side, and extracted a full-time teaching job from Arizona State University.

At any rate, leaving the Encanto District to move up to North Central meant leaving behind beloved neighbors, beautiful historic houses, and a wonderful central location close to cultural and entertainment amenities. Eventually it also meant me leaving behind the marriage, the lawyer, and the trying social life…and the beloved neighbors, the beautiful historic houses, and the central city location with its proximity to cultural and entertainment amenities.

Ohhh well…

Since then, a lot of things have changed. A full-time job at the Great Desert University meant I could support myself. My parents’ dying, one at a time, meant I had no one to nag me to stay in the (highly advantageous) marriage. But their demise also left me with enough money to support me for the rest of my life. I bought into a decent neighborhood on the fringe of North Central, and here we are.

But I still miss the lovely Encanto district. Cruising the area, I wondered: would I like to sell my house here on the fringe of Sunnyslope and move back downtown?

The answer is mixed. A lot of things are improved up here on the north end of North Central, as compared to the picturesque historic Encanto district. But a lot of things are de-proved, as it were…

Why move?

  • Sunnyslope is kind of menacing. It is, after all, a high-crime area.
  • We therefore have lots of noise from cop helicopters.
  • Then there’s the noise from the annoying lightrail train.
  • The noise from  traffic and sirens on Conduit of Blight Blvd amplify the racket.
  • And we do have some interestingly sh!t-headed neighbors.

Why NOT move?

  • I could in theory walk to two markets & a drugstore from here. My spectacularly superannuated great-grandmother used to walk that far several times a week in Berkeley: straight uphill. Here, though, to get through the heat and dodge the panhandlers and thieves, you have to drive to the stores or use Uber.
  • M’hijito wants this house.
  • I don’t know anybody downtown anymore.
  • Young people who don’t like older people infest that place — Encanto is Encanto because of the young people who covet the beautiful historic homes. Discrimination against elders is a real thing, and it’s likely to be far worse there in Yuppieville than it is up here in a more diverse neighborhood.
  • It’s even noisier there than it is here (she says,. as a plane buzzes overhead…).
  • One wonders: why spend that kinda money for not much improvement in lifestyle?
  • The pool here is an expensive nuisance, but it could be drained and decked.
  • The Romanian Landlord’s tribe are shitheads, but WGAS? And what guarantees that you won’t have shitheads there?

Many more nuances come into play:

  • Care of elders: soon enough, I may have to hire someone to come in to care for me, or else move into a long-term care facility.
  • This house is paid for and in good condition. If I pass it to M’jito he could move in here and have a palatial little shack with a pool and about four times more space than he needs.
  • On the other hand, who wants to pay for and ride herd on four times more space than you need?
  • Unloading this place and moving into a care facility might greatly reduce my taxes.
  • This area is really not very safe.
  • But then, neither is the area where M’jito lives. Toss-up!

The truth is, I don’t know which way to jump because it probably doesn’t matter which way one jumps. Either way presents a set of pro’s and a set of con’s.

So…we’re cast back on that reliable old adage:

When in doubt, don ‘t.

Lovely Uptown Phoenix…

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Ah, yes. Three-thirty in the morning and another gunshot rings out.

Sounded like it came from Main Drag North. However, it could’ve been a neighbor taking a pot-shot at another prowler. The other night, one of the locals found some sh!thead standing in his teenaged daughter’s bedroom, gazing fondly at the sleeping kid.

What. A. Place!

If my son were not living in central Phoenix, I would be sooooo long gone!

Where to?

Well, really: no place in the Phoenix area is safe. The entire city is awash in crime. And nut cases. If I had my choice and wanted to stay in this area, I’d probably be…where?…. Hmmm…. Parts of Paradise Valley, especially gated communities. Sun City, if brain-banging boredom and freedom from competent doctors are your thing.

Weird noise hums out. What?

Get up to go check on that. It’s not my pool motor (that’s something, anyway). Can’t hear it out the back door. Probably some car or AC motor reverberating down from the north.

Garden spot.

Lost Times, Lost Friends, Lost Family…

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Phoenix…ugh! The place gets more and more like L.A. as the days pass!

I was reminded of this, fairly vividly, when I drove through a tract just to the south of the ‘Hood, probably built out in the late 1950s or the 1960s. The houses there remind me so much of my mother’s best friend, Anna. The Long Beach, California, neighborhood where Anna lived could have been built by same developer — the houses practically clone Anna’s little place.

It was a nice little place. Her husband, Capt. Fred Ellison, was a sea captain just like my father, and he made a pretty good living, for a blue-collar guy.

And their house was nice enough: a sweet little place in a blah, faceless Southern California tract. Every shack looked the same as the next one, really. If you didn’t know Anna’s address and didn’t know where you were going, you’d never find her place.

The two men were coming on to the end of their careers, along about 1960 or ’62. They both planned to retire soon.

Capt. Ellison was on the last inbound leg of his last sea voyage. We were all looking forward to the great retirement and all the fun the friends would have and maybe talking Anna and Capt. Ellison into moving to Sun City, where my parents had already decided to retreat.

And damned if he didn’t drop dead on the ship’s deck.

No exaggeration: he had a heart attack and literally fell down dead. As the ship was heading in to harbor.

Well, the Ellisons’ house in Long Beach, a pleasant little place, was paid for. Their only child, a daughter who had some mental problems that seemed to entail a shortage of IQ points, was married and had two kids. And she had an appropriately mindless job on a factory assembly line, also in Long Beach. The son-in-law was a decent man who had reached the apogee of his career in a similar job.

That, of course, was the end of any inchoate schemes to inveigle Anna into moving to Arizona.

So there was something kind of heart-rending about driving through a neighborhood that looked so much like the one where Anna and Fred had lived. Absurdly, I wondered if my parents would have moved into town if Anna and Fred had bought a place over here, in that tract.

They might have. But probably not. My father, who was not fond of kids, thought Sun City was the greatest innovation since gin & tonic. The child-free appeal of Sun City, for him, was just huge. One rather doubts that Anna and Fred, who had grandchildren, would have thought the same way.

Also, Anna was massively overweight: so much that a good-quality bathroom scale could not measure how much she weighed. The ensuing health problems would have made it difficult for them to move. Plus their daughter, who was not overly endowed in the compos mentis department, was happily ensconced in that assembly-line job and a stable marriage. And Anna’s grand-daughter, who seemed to have developed a normal contingent of IQ points, was in high school and no doubt needed her grandmother to keep her more or less on track.

So…it’s reasonable to doubt that Anna and Fred could ever have been talked into coming over here, even after Fred retired.

Too bad. They’ve been missed over the years.

High Noon at the Hubs of Hades…

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Good GAWD, but it’s hot out there! Hot and humid!

Just back from a brief perambulation with the dog: over to the park, tromp down to the playground, then trudge on back via Feeder Street E/W. Our honored civic leaders have got the streets plowed up all around the place, so there’s relatively little traffic over there. Bums? Only a couple: it’s hotter than the Hubs just now, so I expect the vagrants are taking in the slack at the nearby bum hostleries, provided courtesy of our taxpayer dollars.

This, after a fast, very hot trip to AJ’s, there to pick up enough groceries and dawg food to last a day or two. Not too annoying: the usual party of transients and sight-seers was absent, so one could walk across the store’s front porch without having to dodge the weird, the wonderful, and the nuisancey.

Even with the AC blasting away in the car though, the trip was hot, blinding, and bloody uncomfortable. Can’t walk across the street without risk of burning the doggy feet on the asphalt…so it was a brief junket.

Boyoboy, do I miss San Francisco! Sure do wish I could afford to live there!

 

Urk! Southern California Redux…

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At 3:25 in the afternoon here in lovely uptown Phoenix, it is SO SMOGGY out there that the sunLIGHT shining (or attempting to shine) in through the front windows is ORANGE.

No kidding. I’ve seem some dim days here, but this one takes the sunny cake.

It’s very much like a smoggy day in (un)lovely Long Beach, California. Wunderground tells us it’s 106 out there, with air quality at “moderate.”

LOL! If this is “moderate,” you surely don’t wanna see “gawdawful”! 😀

Y’know, this is why my parents moved here from Long Beach. The smog there kept getting worse and worse. When they learned about Sun City, then a suburb of Phoenix, they thought they’d found Heaven.

And by comparison, it was — at the time. There was hardly ever a smoggy day, and even then, the haze was light and the stink undistinguished.

Today’s haze hereabouts, we’re told, is from the wildfires in California. Truth to tell, though, it’s probably from fires on the outskirts of Maricopa County: one about 5 miles north has taken out some 300 acres (so far). And fires in nearby southern California are supposedly visible from space.

Welp, I need to try to figure out how to get into my bank account online. The credit union declines to let me have access.

Boyoboy, am I tired of all these fine modern conveniences….

Soggy Doggy Glorious Day…

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WHAT a spectacular morning!

High clouds make for a glorious sunrise as Ruby the Corgi sets out to drag the Hu-mann around the neighborhood. Oh, my: it’s just gorgeous out there.

And damp. And sticky… Very humid: 31%.

What really, dear Wunderground, does that mean? Are you saying that 31% of the atmosphere we’re trudging through is water?

😀

Could be, I reckon. But Ruby doesn’t mind. She charges ahead, a little furry brown rocket. We fly through the ‘Hood, around Upper Richistan, up toward Gangbanger’s Way. Past Marge’s house, apparently unoccupied (????) but not for sale yet.

Marge was (is?) well into her 80s. She wishes, more than anything, to evade being stuck into the Beatitudes or Orangewood or any other such holding pen for the elderly. But there’s no sign she’s living in the house. So…I fear the worst.

She said she had willed the place to her son — meaning she willed him about half a million bucks worth of real estate. He doesn’t live here, so…as soon as title to the house passes to him, he presumably will put it on the market.

It’s a pleasant old 1970s ranch-style house. Not to my taste, and now needing a bunch of repairs and upgrades. But still…lots of people would fall all over themselves to get it.

I actually might be among them, if it weren’t so nerve-gratingly close to Gangbanger’s Way. The traffic racket there would be just unholy! It’s a drag strip for the local delinquents, so all night you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the brats. And it’s a main drag into town from the west side, so every rush hour you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the unholy mobs of commuters trudging to work. And let’s not forget the hospital up the road on Gangbanger’s, bringing you WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO from the ambulances racing toward the emergency room.

{sigh} I do miss Marge, who had become my morning walking buddy. I’m afraid she probably fell — or else had a heart attack or stroke — and ended up in one of those horrible prisons for old folks. She dreaded that fate even more than I do. Truly: I would so rather be dead. If she had passed on, surely her son would have sold her house by now (he lives in some other part of the country). She probably landed in an old folks’ slam and asked him to hang on to it lest she somehow manage to escape.

Oh well.

The spectacularity of the sunrise has now passed, and what we have are high, pale gray clouds. Not the rainy type…just the humid type.

What do I hafta do today?

* Pick up the office.

* Call Cox. Demand that they send paper bills. (They’re shifting to “paperless bills.” No, thank you!!)

*Figure out, come to think of it, whether Cox is auto-paid now, or whether I have to send the ba*tards an e-payment or check every month. I think the latter, because I don’t trust Cox.

* Make a grocery store run.

* Argue with my son over medical bullsh!t.

Hmm…. Actually, I could physically go to the credit union and have one of their staff check on the autopays for me. This, while it entails an annoying drive, would take me past THE best Sprouts store in the Valley. And that would allow me to stock up on a pile of outstanding foodoids.

***

Cleaning out the e-mail in-box. OVER 500 NUISANCE E-MAILS, just in August!

Can you imagine? Hope I’m not deleting anything important. I just don’t have the patience to check every goddamn one of those things — not even looking at the email but just checking the subject or sender line. So WHAM! They all get deleted.

But even that is a nuisance. After hitting mass-delete after mass-delete, there are still A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX junk-mail messages sitting there waiting to be sent to trash. And that doesn’t count all the real messages from outfits like Amazon and from my client whose work I’m not in the mood to do…

Crazy-making!