Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Time to Move Along?

by
Mogollon Rim from near Payson

HOLY mackerel! This place gets more and more crime-ridden and more and more violent with every day that passes!

Y’know…I can handle the mailbox thefts. And the burglars. And the cop helicopter flyovers every damn night. The abductions (for the purpose of rape) from the bus & train stops at Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E.W. can be dealt with simply by never riding a bus or a lightrail train. The transient drug addicts: locks on the doors and windows, plus a large, loud dog. The panhandler harassment at the corner shopping centers: drive to some other district for grocery shopping and drugstore visits. The car break-ins and thefts: close the damn garage door…oh, but first, do park your car on the inside of said garage. The mail thefts: for a mere 400 bucks, install a Fort Knox of a mailbox. The burglars: keep a fine, fully loaded .45 on hand.

But I sweartogawd, every which way you turn, here’s more gratuitous, demented, and criminal violence. And it is too…damn…close to home.

I go by this corner every time I visit the Costco north of the university.

Ruby and I could walk to this dump, if it were safe to do so. As it is, I drive by there several times a week on the way to the freeway or to points west. That’s rather closer than I’d like to get.

This fancy charter school is in the Arcadia district, not far from where my late step-sister lived.

This episode took place in an informal B&B (why are those legal???) that popped up, also in the Arcadia district — an area where the ritzy and the titzy congregate to live in what they imagine will be peace.

A moment of nuttiness took place at a park just south of the university’s west campus…another garden spot that I pass in my car with some frequency.

Central High School is the best public high school in the city (which may be telling you something). My son went to a Jesuit high school directly next door to it — they occupy, in effect, practically the same campus. Sunnyslope belies this figure, though; it also has a reputation as one of the best-performing high schools in the country.

Yet… the violence and the vagrancy and the craziness go on and on and on and on, every damn day! And it seems to get more frantic as the weeks pass.

And y’know what?

I’m tired of living in the middle of a war zone. Once again I’m brought back to the feeling that as much as I love my home and my neighbors and my neighborhood, as much as I like being 8 minutes from the church and 10 minutes from my son’s house (he also lives in a war zone…), it’s past time to move along.

The violence, the crime, and the Loony Toons spread pretty homogeneously across the Valley. Of course, there’s more low-end craziness in garden spots like the apartments that flank the ‘Hood on the west side of Conduit of Blight Blvd and the dank slum directly to the north. But as that cop said after the Adventure of the Home Invasion: “It’s everywhere.”

[Yeah? Well…whaddaya bet some parts of Everywhere have less of it than our part does?]

So…if one were gonna move, where would one go?

Well, if I stayed in the Valley, the two choices would be Fountain Hills or the Cave Creek/Carefree area. I don’t consider the Sun Cities a choice: just not innarested in living in a ghetto for old tolks.

Both these venues are expensive. Fountain Hills has the added attribute of late-model cheesy construction: structures that were built to fall apart. The Funny Farm is probably in the last generation of solidly built affordable residential structures, and even it has a failing in the insulation department. Those houses out east are simply junk: Southern California-style built-to-fall-apart junk. Expensive junk.

Anything that is newer construction shares that fine attribute, and most of the stuff in Cave Creek and Carefree falls under the rubric of “newer.” Ticky-tacky is the name of the Development Game here in Arizona, price range notwithstanding.

That leaves as options some of the outlying towns, or Tucson.

  • Tucson, also plagued by gimme-a-buck developments, has two big draws: the best hospital/medical center in the state (something that looks Bigger the Older you get), and the vibrant cultural center that is the University of Arizona. A lot is going on in Tucson, the weather is far more pleasant than Phoenix’s, and with a fine mountain range behind the city, just about anyplace you can live is fairly scenic.
  • Prescott, a large small town/small city up the I-17 between Phoenix and Flagstaff, is a pleasant little burg. HOWEVER…it’s been discovered. From what I’m told, mobs of Baby Boomers and younger people are moving up there, turning it into yet another Southern California East. The weather’s a little cooler (though what you save in air-conditioning you’ll probably spend on heating); it has a supposedly excellent medical center (people who work there beg to differ, interestingly enough); and it’s a straight shot down the freeway to the urban marvels of Phoenix. I’m not at all sure it has enough more to offer, when compared to Fountain Hills, to make it worth a major move and a long drive into town.
  • Payson: Mr. and Mrs. Fireman moved up there, on the edge of the Mogollon Rim. They bought an extremely cool house in the forest, and, given Mr. Fireman’s outstanding handyman skills, have turned it into a to-die-for little palace. Problem with Payson? Rudimentary services and facilities. They had to drive their dog into Phoenix to be tended to by a veterinarian after the poor pooch was attacked by a neighbor’s dog. No Costco: only one Safeway, a store that I would call…well, pretty blah. No first-rate doctors or dentists — they drive into town for those services, too. Doctors? Doctors? We don’t need no steeeenking doctors!
  • Uh huh. Well…if you have to schlep all the way down the mountain — about a two-hour drive — for basic shopping and services, you’d be far better off to live in Fountain Hills.  Not only do they have a couple of supermarkets within the development, there’s a Costco down the road and all the upscale shopping of lovely Scottsdale just a few miles to the west. Plus you could walk to the Mayo Clinic from Fountain Hills!
  • Chandler: Nope. Ticky-tacky suburb Hell.
  • Florence: Nope. No better than Payson, but not as pretty.
  • Ahwatukee: Blech. If I’m gonna live in ticky-tacky mass construction, I’ll take Fountain Hills any day.
  • Tempe: Gawd help us!
  • Sun City/Youngtown: Horrible ghettos for old folks, garnished by cheaply built ticky-tacky.

Really, in a lot of ways, the ‘Hood IS the best of all possible worlds, at least for someone who’s not swimming in money. It’s an established neighborhood. Because the upscale section has irrigation, we have mature and very beautiful green landscaping. Even over here in the po’ folks quarters, the trees and shrubbery are mature, shady, and lovely. It’s close-in — shopping, schools, entertainment, doctors & hospitals, all right around the corner. We have a park in the middle of the neighborhood. We’re served by a decent public grade school and one of the nation’s top public high schools, plus an array of private and religious K-12 schools. Young upwardly mobile types have discovered it and are madly gentrifying, so there’s nowhere for property values to go but up. Plus: what could be better than young families with young kids playing around the neighborhood?

So…i dunno. It’s a toss-up. So it seems to me…

Brave New World…redux

by

God’lmighty!!!!! It’s 11:30 in the morning; I’ve been on the road since 9, burned a third of a tank of ga$, and so far have gotten exactly nowhere.

In the Getting Nowhere Department, for the life of me I cannot enter edits to clean up the formatting mess that is yesterday’s post. NOOO clue what’s the matter with it. Grayson the Web Guru doesn’t seem to know, either. Because, he offers, I copied and pasted it in from a different program?

Well, OK, could be: he’s got somethin’ there. I pasted much of it from MacMail, reproducing a narrative of adventures I’ve shared with friends. But I do that all the time!!!!!! If copying a passage from an email bollixes up the formatting so spectacularly that it can’t be fixed, then 2/3 OF THE POSTS I’VE INSTALLED HERE FOR LO! THESE MANY YEARS would be similarly up-gefucked.

It won’t let me fix the formatting. So I give up. The copy is not unreadable — just a bit funny-looking. The latest effort fixed all but about the first third of the post. Sooooo…fugeddaboudit… Let’s pretend it’s just ducky and move on.

What. A. Day!

It’s 102 out there, with 15% humidity. And not even noon.

Day from Hell started with a simple goal: trot out this morning to visit the nearest hardware store and pick up a battery-operated doorbell. One with two bing-bong buttons. This to replace the one that was disassembled by a thief.

No kidding. I’m sitting in my office and see a pickup pull up to the front of the house. Looks like a yard dude: he’s got a trailer full of yard debris in tow. Guy hops out of the passenger seat. I figure he’s gonna come up to the door and ask if I’d like to hire them to clean out the weeds that have sprouted (in gay abandon!!) since Gerardo and the boys were here.

He walks up to the front gate; pauses there; then turns around and RUNS back to the truck.

Turns out he’s ripped off the doorbell button from the gate!

Backstory:

This house has been owned by a succession of eccentrics. Before Satan and Proserpine (my immediate predecessors) bought the place, some chucklehead who lived here got the bright idea of RIPPING OUT THE WALL BETWEEN THE LIVING ROOM AND THE FRONT BEDROOM. No kidding. This clever strategy turned the front room into a cavern, and reduced the number of bedrooms from four to three. Thereby also reducing the value of the house by about 20 grand.

In the process he also ripped out…yes…the doorbell installed by the developer. Like most sane doorbells, this thing operated on electricity, and so it had wiring that ran through the very walls that Previous Moron Owner had declared redundant. So when S&P moved in, the house had no doorbell.

And when they moved out, the house had no doorbell.

BUT…you can buy handy-dandy battery-operated doorbells at the Depot. Most of these devices have (or used to have…) two buttons: one for the front door and one for the back door.

Since my backyard is secured like Leavenworth, this gave us a redundant button.

But it was rendered UNredundant when Richard the Incredible Landscaping and Construction Dude built a marvelous enclosed front courtyard for me. He installed wrought-iron gates in the wall around this thing. A-n-n-d…conveniently enough, most battery-operated doorbells come with two doorbell buttons. We put one next to the driveway gate (where most people enter the courtyard) and one in the customary spot beside the front door.

This has worked well.

Until that a$$hole stole the doorbell button by the gate.

Ohhkay…i figure i’ll go out and buy another doorbell and set of bing-bong buttons, just like the one I installed a few years ago when I moved into this place.

Well.

No.

Of course not.

They apparently don’t make the damn things anymore. You cannot find them for love nor money.

Beloved Ace Hardware store up by the QT doesn’t have them.

Similarly beloved Ace Hardware Store in the Basha’s strip mall doesn’t have them.

Today we learned that Home Depot doesn’t have them. Lowe’s doesn’t have them. The hardware store just off the I-17 that might have had them (because they had everything) no longer exists: closed, lost, and gone forever.

Any surviving unsold specimens (if they actually do exist) are available only on Amazon.

So. I spent the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING driving from pillar to post through the heat and humidity, banging around amongst the homicidal morons, and accomplished exactly NOTHING.

Well. Except for witnessing some fine examples of humanity’s nuttiness.

Jayzuz!

Here we are in the Home Depot parking lot, having dodged oblivion twice on the way there. Cruising up to where the reasonably located parking spaces reside, I see a young HD employee collecting empty shopping carts.

Because, after all, no self-respecting HD customer would have the common decency to put the damn things in the li’l stables where you’re supposed to park them after unloading your junk, right?

The kid is heaving a long line of carts across the lot — he must be pushing 15 or 20 heavy metal carts over the tarmac.

Along comes a moron in a beautiful new pickup — all red and shiny and magnificent. He cruises past the kid and the kid’s choo-choo train of carts, then CUTS IN FRONT OF HIM and swerves into a parking space directly in the path of where the kid has launched the carts!

Hooleeee shee-ut!

I think omigod that whole train of metal shopping carts is gonna crash into the truck’s shiny new rear fender!!!!

Incredibly, the kid manages to stop the caravan just before it collides with the truck.

Trudge into the Depot. Ask around. Find a guy who knows about battery-operated doorbells. Nope, they don’t have any with two ringy-dingy buttons.

I know these still exist, because I’ve seen them on Amazon. Say g’bye. Trudge back out through the soggy heat to the car. Resume driving driving driving.

Cruise across the city, under the freeway, through the ever-present road construction, and over to the Lowe’s. First try to visit the Best Buy next door to the Lowe’s, because as we know Best Buy carries everything, no matter how eccentric. Forget that: they don’t open until an incredible 11 a.m.!!! It’s about 9:30 or quarter to ten by now, since I wanted to get an early start to beat the most crushing of the heat.

Lowe’s of course has battery-operated doorbells…but none of them have two doorbell buttons.

Sumbiche.

Drive home, ready to bite somebody.

Dodge a huge truck that tries to change lanes into the driver’s side of my car. Incredibly, escape unharmed.

Get home, mad as a cat.

SDXB on the phone. Tell him this sad story. He starts to lecture me about how to get the desired doorbell, unknowingly reiterating Every. Goddamn. Thing. I. Just. Told. Him. I’d. Done. This, evidently, because he suffers from male pattern selective deafness: this is a guy who literally cannot hear the female voice. And so it doesn’t register with him that he’s advising me do do all the things I’d just told him I tried to do.

Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Finally get off the phone, more or less politely.

Get online. Call up Amazon. And yup: there’s the very doorbell.

Order it up. It’s supposed to be delivered by 10 p.m. tomorrow.

That’s assuming, of course, that none of the ‘Hood’s ubiquitous porch pirates steal it before I notice it’s been delivered.

Life in the ‘Hood: Stay or Flee?

by

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!

The View from the Steam Cooker

by

Incredibly humid. Not all that hot at 5:40 a.m., objectively speaking, but so wet you’re dripping with sweat after you’ve walked the dog half a block.

That does nothing to put a leash on the morning Doggy Jamboree, though. Ruby wants to go to the park, which for the human entails a PITA of the first water: a mile of being yanked and pulled and jerked around, hauling the pooch away from dog fights and idiots simpering “ohhh don’t worry, they jes’ wanna plaaayyyy.”

And yes, I do know: Ruby behaves like that because she’s not adequately leash-trained. Those who’ve been around FaM for awhile will recall that I got her just as I was being wheeled away to have both boobs chopped off. Convalescing from that adventure a) took awhile and b) did not leave me much in the mood for wrestling with a dog. Consequently, she has grown up sweet, charming, cute, adorable, and utterly devoid of leash manners. And now that I’m old, I feel no more inclined to wrestle with leash-training than I did when I was enjoying invalidism.

Decide instead to roam north and west, staying in the low-rent section of the ‘Hood. And alas, “low-rent” is how it’s beginning to look: yard after yard smothered in weeds, some of the crops knee-high. The house owned (still owned?) by the jerk who used to try to pick fist-fights with the mentally challenged guy across the street apparently had an attic fire. Unclear whether anyone is living there, but nothing has been done to repair the holes in the charred roof and attic walls.

Huge thunderheads have built up in the northwest: they look like they’re over Yarnell or maybe over Wickenberg. That’s weird: usually those kinds of storms come in from the southeast, blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Wunderground reports major flooding in Las Vegas, which is sorta vaguely in the Yarnellish direction…but it seems unlikely that we could see clouds over Vegas from this far away. Just now, sez Wunderground, it’s 94 here with a predicted high of 104; 38% chance of rain.

Our neighbor’s pipe-installing dudes are lumbering back and forth out there in their truck, apparently lost. Must be a new driver or crew…they were down the street the other day heaving around in the heat. Nothing like a little plumbing crisis under a 105-degree sun, eh?

Stagger home. Tumble into pond. Dog has a frenzy.

Ruby hates, hates, HATES it when the Human gets into the pool. She barks and screams and yells and charges back and forth outside the gate, totally frantic. Guess having fallen in the drink a couple of times herself, she thinks I need to be rescued. ASAP. So…if I’m in a hurry and don’t feel like cornering the dog and locking her up, that kinda puts the eefus on the morning dip.

***

And now the dog is fed, the human is fed, the dishes are washed, the garbage is hauled out, the random trash is picked up out of the alley, the email is read and answered, the sheets are dried and folded, another load of laundry is in the washer, the yard dude is summoned to clean up the weeds and trim the tree limb off the neighbor’s roof, and the human…is going back to bed.

Another Fine Day in Crime Central..

by

The thermometer in the shade of the back porch actually DOES read 110 degrees. And clouds are building up all around us.

Truth to tell, 110 would be tolerable if it were really “a dry heat.” But with monsoon storms rearing up 360 degrees around the horizon, “dry heat” it ain’t.

***

Heh! Probably the sobriquet “Crime Central” overstates conditions here in the ‘Hood. But it appears I’m not the only resident in the habit of looking at things that way.

When I bop on down to the ultra-local Sprouts, on the northeast corner of Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South, I spot a Police Situation in progress: four cop cars out in front of the Walgreen’s on the corner, lights flashing frantically. It’s a couple hundred yards across the shopping center’s parking lot, though, and…and…well…i want that damn ice cream!

So, screw it: I park the car and dart into the Sprouts. Grab the ice cream and shoot back out through the checkout line. Staff there had not yet heard news of the present drama. Which, once I get situated in the Dog Chariot, I see is still fully under way. Half a dozen officers are swarming. None of the cop cars’ lights have been shut off.

Circle back north over the parking lot — in the opposite direction from the Scene of the Whatever-it-is. Slide south on Blight (the only way you can go because of the effing light-rail tracks, which are fortified with concrete borders), slither past the Walgreen’s Theater, hang a U-ie to bolt up toward the ‘Hood. Proceed north, surprisingly enough, without interference.

Now fully infected with curiosity, minutes after walking in the door, I get on the Web in search of a report as to what is going on.

  • No clue on the police dispatch site.
  • No clue on the local gnus sites.

Post a query on the neighborhood Facebook page, which is haunted by locals with powerful radars.

Got a clue what was going on at the 19th & Northern Walgreen’s this afternoon, along about 3;30 or so? At least 4 police cars were standing near the door, lights flashing.

Forthwith, get an answer:

Probably just because it’s a day that ends in “y”… in that area it’s such a common event. I’m frustrated that we have to think about a “safe” way to enter/exit our neighborhood anymore… which usually means East or south, but rarely north, and almost never west.

Heh! Well…yep!

The Automotive Jamboree

by

Dawn cracks (barely), and here we are down at Camelback Toyota, summoned hither by a recall involving nonfunctional airbags.

How could I do without this? Let me count the endless number of ways….

Appointment is 7 a.m. I pulled up to the driveway at about 6:50. There are 16 cars ahead of me – four in each lane – and I expect to be sitting here until the cows come home. And then to sit in the dealership’s waiting room until the cows go back out to pasture.

Sometimes Toyota has drivers who will take you back home. But it’s hard to see how they could manage that, with this mob in the pipeline.

This pisseth me off. The REASON you buy a Toyota instead of a Ford is not to have to deal with the recalls for shoddy construction.

When DXH and I were first married, I had a Ford FairLemon that my father had given me as a graduation gift. We lived in the apartments just to the north of this dealership, which at the time belonged to Ford. Our car was parked at this place more than it was parked in our carport space! So it was convenient that I could walk over here, since I was walking over here all the time.

* * *

And here I yam, already, waiting for a red Hyundai to come pick me up at the side door. Better than sitting in their waiting room for hours and hours, but…I sure as hell could do without it. The wait will be ample anyway, since it’s 7:30…though it must be said that the traffic is minimal for this time of day. I expect the plague is keeping people working at home.

Think o’that: coming up on high rush hour., Friday morning and there’s hardly any traffic on 16th Avenue, a main drag from north Phoenix to the central and southerly business districts. Looks like businesses are not reopening anytime soon…

Matter of fact, my son’s company announced they were not reopening their (expensive!) offices, but that henceforth employees will work from home. He’s not happy, because he would rather be in a more social setting. If it were me, I’d be beside myself with joy: work-from-home is exactly what I wangled for myself by founding ASU’s online courses in English & American Studies. Once I had all my courses online, I rarely had to trudge in to the campus. Which was just fine with me.

* * * *

And NOW here I am, ten minutes to 8:00, and parked – by golly! – in the living room. That Toyota dealership is INCREDIBLY efficient. Rolled in, handed the key over, got picked up by an uber-type jalopy, and delivered back to the house in 20 minutes.

Think o’that.

When we drove up, the garage door was hanging open. Alarming, because I don’t habitually go off and leave the door open. Nor would I have done so: there would have been no reason to walk out into the front yard through the garage as dawn cracked. So either I dorked up and left the door open all night(don’t think so! I’ve been doing laundry in the garage this a.m. and would’ve noticed if the door was hanging open) or someone has a door opener button that works on my garage opener.

So, dammit, I guess I’ll have to call the garage door guys and have them recode that thing.

Jayzus. Never a dull moment.

Well, I expected to spend the whole day sitting in Toyota’s waiting room, so…if you have to be carless in Gaza, better to be carless in your own precinct of Gaza.

{chortle!}

My father used to use “car tune-ups” to get away from his obnoxious wife. He would tell her he was taking his aging Ford down to the dealership to be worked on – and at Ford, an all-day wait was not only likely but inevitable. But what he was doing was sitting in the parking lot smoking. And stinking up the car.

One day she remarked to me, laughing, “He thinks I don’t know he’s smoking in the car.”

I refrained from replying, “He doesn’t give a damn whether you know he’s smoking in the car.”

But the poor woman was so stupid that it was unreasonable to expect that she would figure it out.

Gawdlmighty… Other people’s lives!

Mine, too, I suppose. They certainly made their exploits part of my life.

As soon as my mother died – practically instantaneously – my father packed up the house, donated everything he didn’t absolutely need, and moved himself to what was then called Orangewood, one of the first “life-care communities” to hit Arizona. Dreary place, IMHO…but then I never cared for institutional living – three years in the dorm (plus 11 years in public schools) was as much of that as I ever want to endure . He, having gone to sea all his adult life, was well adapted to communal life. He not only didn’t seem to dislike it; if anything, he enjoyed it. Or he would’ve, if he hadn’t been snabbed by Helen.

All the widows (which meant almost all the women inmates) at Orangewood were on the hunt for men. The instant my father walked in the door, Helen went in for the kill. She grabbed that guy before he could sit down.

Within a few months, she wrangled him into proposing to her, a huge mistake on his part.  She was SUCH a nitwit. And though my father pretended to be stupid – it was part of his working-class macho pose – he was anything but.

However, whatever smarts he had went out the door after my mother died, and so he allowed himself to be maneuvered into marrying her. This was such a disaster that at one point he took to renting a room at another old-folkerie. He would tell her – yep! – that he was taking the car to be serviced, and then repair to his secret flophouse and spend the day watching TV from a Levitz recliner.

What a witch that woman was! But he refused to divorce her because…uh huh…what would everyone think?

Life: William Shakespeare couldn’t come anywhere close to making it up!

Speaking of servicing the car, I let myself be persuaded to have Camelback Toyota change the oil and rotate the tires. That was redundant, since Chuck’s successors recently did that. But offhand I couldn’t remember how long ago that was…and frankly, I wasn’t especially impressed the last couple of times I took the car to Chuck’s.

Pete took over the business, as Chuck had been grooming him to do for years. Very good. But…now that the place is his, there’ve been some changes made….

Chuck ran that shop like a small-town garage. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. If you brought your car in to be serviced early in the morning, Chuck or one of the underlings would drive you home. Later in the day, they’d come pick you up. Now you sit an hour or three in their run-down waiting room listening to the traffic roar by on 7th Street.

Also, that time a tire got a nail in it and I was running nearly flat, Chuck would NEVER have said “we don’t do tires…take it up on Camelback to Discount Tires.” They would have taken the nail out and fixed the flickin’ tire! If a new tire needed to be purchased and they didn’t have one on hand, he would have had one of the underlings go pick one up. Basically Pete just tossed me out.

Sooo….I had already pretty much decided to look elsewhere for routine car service. And this morning I believe I found the “elsewhere.”

Good old Chuck. To my mind, he defined the term “good man” — possibly even “great man.” His wife had debilitating health problems for some years toward the end of her life. He stuck with her and took care of her himself, every inch of the way. Meanwhile, hanging onto the business — kept it thriving.

At any rate… Pete lost a customer over a rusty nail. And Camelback Toyota gained a customer over a recall, a short wait and a ride home.

* * * *

A-a-n- the postscript:

The hour coming on to 3 p.m., I call Camelback Toyota to find out how (or if) they’re doing on the Venza’s airbag issue. They claim it takes 8 hours to replace the side airbags.

Uh huh. Well…izzat so?

Look up the problem on the Great Treasure Chest of Knowledge: the Internet. hmmm…

Quite possibly not so…

It appears that what’s needed is to check the wiring, which may or may not need work. This, we’re told, takes about an hour. And….yeah…judging by this PDF, replacing the side airbags (if it’s necessary, which it isn’t necessarily) could be a time suck.

Hmmm. Looks like you have to be sure they put the thing back together right…

• Confirm window, mirror, speaker, and door lock operation
• Confirm interior door handle opens.
• Confirm initializations have been performed

Better write this stuff down and remember to check those things BEFORE leaving their lot.

It’s 3;30 in the afternoon. The car has been there since 7:30. Yep: that’s 8 hours. Sooo…where is it, fellas?