Into the third day of a passing storm. It’s supposed to clear tomorrow…today the sun peeked through for several hours, but then the sky clabbered up again and more rain fell with abandon.
Think (hope!) the bronchitis may be starting to clear up. too. In the morning it feels almost like an ordinary cold. But of course, that’s after I’ve been sequestered inside a closed-up bedroom with two hot steamers running for 10 or 12 hours.
In fact, this morning it seemed improved enough to assay a doggy walk. For day after day, poor little Ruby has been trapped in the house by the rain and by the Human’s ailment. Alas, by the time we got to the outskirts of Upper Richistan, the threat of more rain had escalated to a promise. So we had to cut our expedition short and hurry home — just reached the front door when more rain began to pour down.
Thought we’d try again as the weather cleared but then decided I’d druther go back to bed. Plus as I was peering out the front door to check on the downpour status, I spotted a shady pair trotting past the house, transparently stealing and garbage scavenging, almost surely homeless (read “drug addicts” in these parts). On the way home we saw another sketchy fellow going through a garbage bin in the alley behind Josie’s house. In the rain. Uh huh: N.G.
Back at the Funny Farm: yesterday’s extra CPR Call Blocker coding seemed to have had an effect. The number of nuisance calls dropped to two. I thought I’d found the key to blocking nuisance calls from “Name Unavailable,” but another got through. Called CPR’s excellent customer service; the guy there says blocking “Name Unavailable” doesn’t block “Unavailable” calls, each of which has to be separately, manually blocked. Now I’m thinking the only way to deal with this constant harassment is to tell everyone who needs to reach me that the only way to get in touch is by email, and then unplug the phones. Or cancel the service.
As the day passes, the apparent improvement in the epizoõtic backtracks, and by mid-afternoon it again feels like I can’t draw enough air into the lungs to sustain life. So it was back to bed in the confines of the closed bedroom filled with steam.
This is the kind of sh!t that makes you doubt the entire premise of “Aging in Place.” Really? I’m on the far end of being able to drive around the city when I don’t feel well. What is gonna happen when I’m 80 and I come down with this kind of crud? Or something worse? How will I get food? How will I care for myself? Will I die on the floor with no one to notice till my skeleton has been cleaned by the ants?
I see My Beloved Employer, the Great Desert University, whose administrators are always on the lookout for a way to generate another million bucks, are building an old-folkerie for self-styled intellectuals, to house the aged on the campus. Lots of stuff to do. And you even get to go to classes on the campus!
Whoop de doo.
Well, so let’s look at that with the least jaundiced eye we can manage.
Okay. In theory it looks like a good idea. A lot of stuff is going on at the campus. You would be surrounded by young adults, and if you were ambitious enough and influential enough, you might even be able to engineer some activities that would allow you to interact with the critters. Usually a healthy enterprise, this.
However…truth to tell, Tempe is Chez Pitz. Despite the presence of the university, it’s a bedroom community that doesn’t even faintly appeal to me as a place to live. “Old” is the New N*, particularly among the Millennial set: your chance of engaging with the (mostly commuter) students on the Great Desert University campus is almost nil.
Lovely Tempe
However-ever, one would be to some degree — nay, to a large degree — insulated from the overall Southern California-style ticky-tacky of the East Valley suburban lifestyle.
But.
Yes. But. You would be housed in a multi-story apartment building: a rabbit warren. No yard. No privacy to speak of. No distance between you and your fellow inmates. And not just any apartment building, but a storage bin for old folks.
What would I do with my little dog in a place like that?
Well. You know exactly what I would have to do with my little dog: find some other home for her. And I would never be able to get a dog again.
Sorry. but a goldfish a substitute for a dog does not make. Life is not life without the companionship of a dog. That is fact.
Thus, quite possibly, a life proctored by protectors who will be there to call 911 if you fall and you can’t get up may not be a life at all.
Tomorrow the weather in lovely uptown Phoenix is expected to be “sunny along with a few clouds.” Let’s hope that’s true. And let’s hope it applies to Life, the Universe, and All That…
Slow day here in Lovely Uptown Phoenix. Three days’ worth of predicted rain are settling in, starting with a little thunderstorm that delivered enough rumbling to make it sound like Sky Harbor must have rerouted its jet approach or landing paths to send jets directly over our heads.
The Bug: By midmorning I imagined maybe I was feeling a little better, despite having awakened at 2 a.m. and not managed to get back to sleep till around 5. This provided a feel-better window in which to race out and buy some groceries, after which the window slammed shut. Miserable, coughing, gasping for air, too exhausted to move: again!
Read on Facebook: A favorite friend reports on her experience of the present contagion, saying much the same: that she thought the miasma was starting to lift, but ooohh, no! It set right back in after two or three hours. Then eight of her friends chimed in, saying much the same.
Welp…misery loves company. I guess.
I see by the abysmal quality of the most recent few posts here that…yeah: apparently I’ve been so out of it I can’t compose a rational series of thoughts. The past two or three days of ramblings are…just that. Incoherent ramblings. I probably ought to delete them but don’t have the energy to fiddle with technocrap.
No doubt this post will be no more rational, its author still being radically sick. Two hot steamers have turned the bedroom into a kind of sticky sauna, which (I suppose) sort of helps a little. But I still feel like I can’t get enough air in. Still have an overwhelming urge to yawn but still can’t force the “yawn” reflex to kick in, the result being I feel like I’m suffocating.
The Dog: Ruby is so absurdly cute it’s next to impossible to go far in her company without being stopped by one or more of her admirers. Today we did manage to get around our one-mile circuit, despite the human’s infirmity. And also today she attracted the attention of a neighbor as he cruised by in his car, thereby causing him to recognize me as the person who remarked, on the neighborhood Facebook page, that I would be willing to help out with his proposed project of a neighborhood history.
So of course he had to pull over and chat. Ruby had to love him into submission and, by the way, do the same to other passers-by and, while at it, threaten to annihilate another neighbor’s German shepherd. (What is it with corgis, anyway?)
This guy has lived in the ‘Hood upwards of 30 years, and, unlike Yrs Truly, has a gregarious personality. Thus he knows everybody in sight, can remember their names and all the details of their personal lives, and knows the history of quite a few of the local houses just about as well. So that was a hoot.
He proposes that we should collaborate on this budding history of The ‘Hood. That, I think, would be OK by me. Truth to tell, I need something new to do with myself and my time. Local history is always fun to research and to write about. And…since this place is now becoming so hot with the young folks that it’s getting difficult to buy a house here (which would explain the eye-popping price inflation), a few interviews and a couple hours in the State Archives would give me a chance to pitch a story to Arizona Highways or Phoenix Ragazine. This, of course, would help to sell the proposed book. Also, if I could get back into Highways, a full-length feature would generate a respectable fee. And…who knows? Maybe I could get back into freelancing.
Yesterday, speaking of the ‘Hood, it entered my hot little head to wonder what proportion of houses here in our garden spot are battened down with steel security doors. So as Ruby and I were strolling around, I took to counting the total number of houses we passed and, of those, the number that had security doors. We’d left the house just as rush hour was overwhelming the feeder streets, and so couldn’t get across Feeder Street NW to get into the Richistans’ sylvan groves. So, we were confined to the low-rent blocks, where we live. As we walked past the fix-and-flip that the gullible old guy was roped into buying for around 60 grand too much, it occurred to me to wonder: wouldn’t you, if you were a prospective buyer and you looked around, take a clue by spotting iron bars on about every second house in the environs?
But…are there iron bars on every second house or so?
Well, yes: as we perambulated about our part of the’ Hood, I started counting. Of the 42 houses we passed, 34 had intruder-blocking steel gates secured over the front doors. That’s 80 percent of the houses. Eighty percent of residents who are so scared they hide behind iron bars.
Huh. Imagine that…
Well. It gets a bit more interesting.
This morning we managed to get out before the real surge of traffic made Feeder Street NW impassible. Et voilá! There we were in Lower Richistan. Sooo… This morning I assayed to calculate the proportion of door barricades over there. And lo! We passed 32 houses (the lots over there are much larger than ours), of which eight were locked down behind forbidding steel doors. That’s only 25 percent!
In Upper Richistan, none of the houses had security doors. Nary a one.
There’s a phenomenon, eh? I wonder what accounts for it?
Could be a social-class thing. Middle- to lower-middle-class folk may not regard steel bars on the front door as a blot on the family escutcheon.
Or…it could be that the further away you are from Conduit of Blight Blvd., the safer you feel. But…?????? They’re NOT significantly further from CofB. The walk from my house to the western edge of Lower Richistan is one (1) block long. Lower Richistan itself is about a block and a half, two blocks wide — which would put us all of three blocks from Upper Richistan.
My guess is, it’s social. People of good breeding do not install prison doors on the fronts of their homes.
As we scribble, it’s pouring outside. We’re supposed to get about three days of weather, starting this evening.
And that is not such a good thing right this instant, because Ruby just insisted on being fed. How exactly we’re going to get her wrung out in that stuff escapes me. I’m going to have to go outside with her. Yes. And stand out there and wait for her to do her thing. Coughing, shivering, and gasping for breath.
Human: Rooobeee! C’mon! Outside!
Dog: Eh?
Human: Come ON! Hurry-up outside.
Dog: (eyeballs human): You’re sicker than you look, aren’t you…
{sigh} That didn’t work. No point in putting away the jacket and the clodhoppers, I s’ppose…
One of the excellent Chinese scholars for whom I’ve been privileged to work decided to try to pay through Western Union, which required, I expect, some extra hassle on that end. PayPal, as you may recall, dropped the ball colorfully some time back, forcing me to close my credit union account and reopen it with a different account number. The decision to quit using PayPal effectively closes down my business with clients in Asia, since there aren’t a lot of easy ways to transfer money internationally from the mainland. However, we did learn that Western Union does business there, so we decided to try it.
This experiment took place several weeks ago, right before I started to get sick with the current enervating epizoötic. When the client asked me to go over to a Western Union office to see if the money came through, I searched out a site that seemed not too alien — a Walgreen’s at Seventh Street and Camelback.
Western Union is popular here, because Latin American immigrants can use it conveniently to send remittances to family back home. It seems there’s a Western Union kiosk on every corner. So I go in there — at some risk to life and limb, since 7th and Camelback is one of the craziest intersections in a city full of crazed drivers — and am directed to a free-standing computer into which one is supposed to enter data and somehow extract money. How is unclear. I ask the clerk who supposedly knows how to work the thing: looking into her eyes is like gazing into a deep and motionless void.
Moving on, I reckon I’ll ponder through this conundrum later.
Now I come down with a bacterial infection followed by a viral bronchitis picked up from the Mayo’s ER, leading to a month of incapacitating illness. I haven’t been able to drag out of bed long enough to fix a decent meal, much less traipse around the city and do battle with a new-to-me system.
Client asks me to puhleeze find out whether payment has come through, a lot of time having passed with no word from me. I try to beg off. This whinge buys a day or two of delay. Finally I am importuned to get off my duff and go try to figure this out.
Having almost died trying to get into that Walgreen’s parking lot (and having no great craving to try again with Ms. EmptySpace), I call an office supply and FedEx store that The Copyeditor’s Desk often does business with and ask them if they by chance have Western Union.
“No,” says my guy. “But in my experience, every Fry’s grocery store in the city does.”
Oh yeah? Fry’s, you say?Well, hot damn. There’s a Fry’s supermarket right around the corner from M’hijito’s house…and just down the road from Costco, whereunto I also need to repair. Look it up online, and yep: that Fry’s does have Western Union.
Drive on down there, make my way across the rather menacing parking lot (at least this store does kindly have some fairly prominent security guards lurking around), surface at the customer service desk, and…migawd! Find a clerk with a measurable IQ! And the contraption is behind the desk, where the customers are neither expected nor allowed to put their sticky little paws on it.
This excellent young women sits down before the machine and shortly disgorges something over $400, which she forks over without even asking for a transaction fee.
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! This, I realize, is enough to pay the cleaning lady for about five visits, obviating my having to make a cash run on AJ’s or the credit union for two or three months. If I were good, I would of course stash the cash in the corporate checking account. But I’m not good, and I no longer have to be good, because WonderAccountant and I converted the S-corp to a sole proprietorship, meaning (in effect) that the money is mine, mine, ALL MINE! All I need to do is file the receipt and an explanatory note with this year’s tax papers and hide the stash in the safe, where it will await the services of the Cleaning Lady from Heaven.
And best of all, I’ve met a human being with a measurable IQ.
The journey did not start out that way. Cruising down Main Drag East, out of the ‘Hood toward the precincts occupied by the Fry’s Market in question, I pass a fool cruising up the sidewalk on roller skates, a stupid grin on his face and a dog running beside him on a leash. The dog stands knee-high to the man — who himself is a good six feet tall. They are flying along within about two feet of a five-lane thoroughfare. Most of us drive 40 to 50 mph on said road, which is heavily trafficked. As I shot past this apparition, I counted eight cars around me. Nary a one of us could have stopped to avoid hitting him if he had stumbled into the street or if the dog had decided to shoot across the road after a cat or another dog.
So. Moron #1.
Of many. Every single goddamn moron in the city has to get in front of me. Heading south, a tow-truck flatbed does a Y-turn across all the lanes of north- and south-bound traffic to deliver his load of broken-down cars to a repair shop. Northbound, a city transit shuttle hogs the fast lane, and noooo, he’s not getting ready to turn left. He’s just having fun holding up traffic.
At any rate, having found a Western Union site with an employee who evinces actual competence overrides the annoyance factor entailed in having encountered three morons between here and there.
Now it’s on to Costco.
Yesterday when I visited the Costco up north, which has a fairly safe parking lot, I picked up a bag of coffee. So sick was I that I didn’t even see the thing: just grabbed it and ran. When I went to stash the loot in the car, I finally noticed that it was a bag of Starbuck’s beans, not the San Francisco Bay brand I usually buy. Feeling slightly better today — and having to venture near the mid-town Costco anyway — I decide to brave the parking lot where the lunatic tried to kidnap my neighbor’s baby out of her car, there to return the Starbuck’s and get the preferred product. It’s early, so parking’s not a problem to speak of. And the place is not even very crowded yet.
Well, wouldn’tcha know it: As usual, Costco has ferreted out the product that I like and, naturally, gotten rid of it! No offense…you may think Starbuck’s coffee is just grand, but that, alas, would be be because as a red-blooded American you’re readily hornswaggled by advertising. It’s terrible, low-grade plonk dressed up in a corporate emperor’s new clothes. Try San Francisco Bay brand if you’d like to see what I mean. Or maybe not: if you do, you’ll never be able to swallow SB again…
Costco was charging a lot less than Amazon’s vendors demand, which made it eminently affordable. But no…I’m not paying $20 to have a bag of coffee beans dropped off at my front door for the porch pirates to steal.
So this made for yet another trip, over to AJ’s to buy a bag of their over-priced, locally roasted, just OK coffee.
By now I’m getting tired and light-headed, and again having trouble drawing enough air into the lungs to sustain life. Onward.
Into the ‘Hood, where I spot one of our pet bums plodding along the sidewalk by the park: a really filthy, scary-looking guy with his face and head shrouded under a hoodie. He approaches an athletic, sportily dressed young woman jogging toward him on the sidewalk and tries to panhandle her. I pull over, wait, and watch, figuring I may have to drive over there and pick her up. No: she repels him easily. She strides off. I wait. He does not turn to follow her. A small miracle.
Home at last. Let the dog out, start to fix lunch. A cop helicopter roars over and circles Upper Richistan a few times. Then he shoots across the street just to the north of the Funny Farm and takes off northerly along Conduit of Blight. Delightful.
Discretion being the better part, I decided to stir-fry some scallops in garlic over a stove burner rather than, as planned, grill a piece of steak outside for the mid-day feast. This made for a nice meal…and a nice mess to clean up. Ohhh well. The cleaning lady will earn her pay on Monday. 😉
Sooo…still sick but slightly better. I estimate another four weeks before the cough stops. Probably longer to get completely back to normal. Yea verily, quite possibly not until it gets hot again: that would put full recovery in May.
So I’m sitting here thinking about the ’Hood, about whether I should stay here, whether I should move. It really isn’t very safe. Over the past couple of weeks it’s been one damnfool thing after another:
Drunk driver swerves off Main Drag South up Feeder Street N/S, crashes across a resident’s front yard, and ends up rolled in the park.
Sh!theads recorded on Ring cameras serially raiding neighbors’ cars.
Sh!theads retrieve garage door opener from a car an idiot resident left parked overnight in their driveway, open garage door, rifle cars and contents of garage.
“. . .white Subaru WRX sedan with loud exhaust and no rear bumper racing up and down Neighborhoood Ln . . . . must have been going 50 mph zooming up and down the street a couple times. He nearly hit my six year old son.” (FB Nextdoor page)
“. . . 3 very loud bangs (like 5 mins ago)? Sounded like gun shots to me.” (Ibid.)
“Today a horrible thing happen to me outside of Target on 19ave and Bethanyhome a women tried to kidnap my girls! As I was walking out with Mila in the target cart and Ella in her car seat inside the target cart a women talking very loudly in the parking lot said oh she has beautiful eyes… I looked at the women about to say oh thank you but she shrugged at me and said oh I’m sorry so I assumed she was talking on her Bluetooth and not to us. as I start getting closer to the Jeep she comes up behind me and my mom and says that’s my daughter she has my eyes! In that moment I couldn’t believe what this crazy bitch was saying and she kept repeating it and getting louder and then I hear her say Travis! Hurry up the baby is right here come get the baby!!! In my mind I was freaking the duck out I grabbed Mila and told my mom stay right here with ella I’m gonna put Mila in the car. I strapped Mila in and locked the door just Incase that women tried and opened it. I came around and told my mom we need to go now! As I’m getting the car seat out the cart this crazy women is still yelling that’s my baby god is going to strike you dead! I turned to put Ella in the Jeep and she grabs me by the hair and pulled the car seat and all I remember is my mom pushed her and I frantically started hitting her in the face! This women ATTEMPTED to take my child!!!!! I was yelling at her I will KILL you!!!! As all this was happing people are coming out their cars recording me with their fuxking phone instead of helping! Like are you fuxking serious my kids are in danger and all you idiots are just there recording me!!! Only one person tried to help me and asked if I was ok! I had no problem beating that women up but the only thing I could think of was who is this Travis she’s calling for??? What if he comes and hits us and takes my girls!!!! I finally got all of us in the Jeep and god knows I could careless if I ran her over! She took off but I did call the police and they arrested this crazy bitch!!!! She will be charged with assault and attempted kidnapping! Please please don’t ever ever look away not for one second! I was gonna do everything in my power to prevent her from even touching my babies.” (Ibid) (She’s talking about the Costco shopping center that serves the North Central district…the one where we’re told the company will close the store when the lease runs out…)
“Be on the lookout for a grey car (possible Chevy Malibu) with a busted out back window. The driver stole lawn equipment about 30 minutes ago from our landscaper’s trailer. My husband opened the garage door and the guy took off, but had already loaded several things in the car. So bold in broad daylight and heavy traffic! And terribly frustrating for someone who works hard for a living.” (lbid)
” I came home from work tonight (5:15 pm) and discovered my truck had been ransacked today. Definitely today since it was fine when I left for work this morning. They stole a couple of small items, pepper spray and a multi-tool.” (lbid)
“Person walking our neighborhood checking mailboxes and then got in this vehicle. [Photo of nondescript pickup posted.] Keep an eye out! Non emergency called with description.” (lbid)
Number of drug rehab outfits in our zip code: 7. Number in next zip code directly to the east: 0 (AHCCCS, Annual Report: Substance Use Treatment Programs, State Fiscal Year 2018)
Claro que this area isn’t very safe, even though it’s hot with the young gentrifying set. If I were to unload this house and net, say, $325,000 on it, I could afford to buy in a number of much less drug-ridden, crime-ridden venues:
Sun City
Fountain Hills
Oro Valley (a Tucson suburb)
The vast tracts of elbow-to-elbow ticky-tacky north of the 101
Yarnell, by damn!
Trouble is, big-city headaches aside, I like my house. I like my yard, I like my pool, I like my neighbors. And for what I could get on a sale of the house, I could not buy anything comparable, anywhere.
Adding another layer of complexity to the issue: I’ve been here and done this before. The first house DXH and I bought was a beautiful old place in the historic Willo district of mid-town Phoenix. Like my present neighborhood, this area suddenly became a favorite of the young, the affluent, and the upwardly mobile. We all flocked in there, bought the pretty old 1920s and ’30s houses, madly fixed them up, inflated their value, and created a HOT gentrified district. To give you an idea: that house, which we bought for $33,000 and sold about 15 years later for $130,000, was recently on the market for one million dollars.
The Willo area and its adjacent, more upscale Palmcroft district were indeed dangerous, especially to a woman who didn’t happen to have a German shepherd or a man watching over her 24/7. Like the ’Hood, the area was overrun with homeless drug addicts and (in those days) alcoholics. Per capita drug use in our zip code was the highest in the city. How dangerous was it?
Well, let’s see…
In the first week we lived there, we were awakened in the wee hours by cops swarming around our yard, glaring flashlights and spotlights shining in our bedroom window.
“Should I call the cops?” I asked Hubby, reaching for the bedside phone.
“No,” said he, “I think it is the cops.”
Yea verily, they were soon at the front door, demanding to search the house. Their crew was pursuing a cat burglar/rapist who was on the run from one of the neighbors’ houses. This fella’s MO was to slip into a darkened house, make himself to home for awhile, then pounce the sleeping residents, tie up the man, and rape the woman in front of him. Poor fella had been caught in the middle of a midnight snack by an awakened occupant, and he ran off before he got to the main act.
After the excitement subsided, we went back to bed.
Right at dawn, we heard a strange noise: S-c-c-r-a-a-a-a-p-e rumble rumble rumble…THUMP whack whack whackety whack WHACK!
Yucca gloriosa ‘Variegata’ in dry garden with Euphorbia myrsinites, Lavandula and Gaillardia
Turned out the perp had indeed run into our backyard, as the cops suspected. But when he got there he found an old, rotten wooden ladder that DXH had propped up against the back side of the house (the walls were about 20 feet high) in a failed effort to figure out how to turn the rooftop heater on. He’d left it there for the service guy he planned to call the next day…and forgot about it. When the poor schmuck tried to climb down, a rung broke under his weight and he fell all the way down to the ground, narrowly missing a Spanish dagger agave.
Then there was the time I was sitting on the floor typing a seminar paper in front of the TV set, while DXH was at a firm meeting. It was well after dark — he usually didn’t get home until after 10 p.m. I keep hearing this “rustle-rustle-rustle” sound from the service porch, which I think is the cats (we had several) scratching around in their sandbox. I reach a stopping point in the research paper I’m typing and get up to see what the cats are doing out there. When I walk into the laundry room, I see the latch on the side door wiggling up and down.
Holy shit.
This was before there were wireless phone extensions, and LONG before cell phones. It was also before we inherited the neighbor’s German shepherd. I run through the house to front door, fling it open to the screened front courtyard, and scream FIRE! FIRE!FIRE! CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT! HELP!F-I-I-R-E!!!!!!
This brings out the neighbors, who no matter how reluctant they may be to rescue you from an assault will cheerfully come out to watch your house burn down. It also spooks the would-be rapist — a couple of the neighbors watch him jump on his bike and take off down the alley.
That was interesting.
And the time my friend Retha and I were hanging out at another neighbor’s house. Those folks were out of town, and they’d asked me to keep an eye on the place and said we could use their pool as desired. So Retha and I were loafing at the pool.
We heard a lot of sirens down the street, cops carrying on. But we didn’t think anything about it. Police activity was commonplace, and with a fire station around the corner, sirens roared around all the time.
Yes. We didn’t think anything of it until the evening news came on. That was when we learned that the elderly lady who lived at the end of the street had come home from the beauty parlor, parked her car in her garage, strolled inside, and encountered a hopped-up burglar. He attacked her, grabbed an axe from inside the garage, and chopped her to death!
Lovely.
Retha and her husband Ron moved out of the neighborhood shortly after that. Huh. Wonder why?
Then there was the night that DXH and I came home late one evening. He crashed in bed and fell straight to sleep, which meant I couldn’t get to sleep, because he would snore so exuberantly that if I didn’t get to sleep before him, I wasn’t going to get to sleep. Sooo…I got up and went into the living room to sleep — in the altogether — on the sofa.
By this time we had inherited the neighbors’ German shepherd, who, thank God, came to us when those two divorced and moved away.
So I’m sleeping there, not very well, when I wake up and see a flashlight flickering around in the kitchen.
Here’s what goes through a young mother’s mind when she is awakened at three in the morning:
ooooohhh! The power must have gone out and John must have gotten up to get the baby a bottle.
I hear the Greta, the German shepherd — now quite aged and half deaf — go “boof?” from outside the bedroom door, off a hall on the other side of the house from the kitchen.
Still imagining the flashlight wielder in the kitchen is my husband, I go “John?”
When Greta hears my voice, she EXPLODES! She ROARS into the kitchen and goes after the poor schmuck whose flashlight beam is now soaring around as he frantically seeks a way out. The dog is between him and the door he came in, and she is about to send him back to his Maker. Instants before this re-introduction, he finds the side door (the one the would-be rapist had tried to enter, some years previously), yanks it open, flies out through it, and slams it shut in the dog’s face.
Still completely ignorant, I walk into the kitchen and find my husband standing there.
“Who was that man?” he asked.
“What man?”
Yeah. Well. I came rather too close to finding out, hm?
Still, we persisted in living in that house, living in that highly questionable neighborhood. Like the present ’Hood, Encanto was bordered on the south by a decrepit area (since much gentrified) and by slums on the west side, extending westward ever westward. The ’Hood, today, is bounded on the north side and on the west side by meth slums. The west side of Phoenix is, shall we say, low-income all the way out to Sun City, mile on mile on mile of seedy development that was cheaply built when new and is falling apart today. Falling apart, and crime-infested.
Retha and her husband Ron moved out. The divorcing friends across the street moved out. The neighbors with the pool moved out. Property values continued to increase. So did the crime rate. It was unsafe to let our son play outside unless the neighbor’s housekeeper was there with her employer’s little boy and would stand out there watching them every instant. We could, of course, not put him in the local public school — all of the lawyers’ and doctors’ kids in the area went to expensive private schools.
Finally, we threw in the towel and moved, too. I think what persuaded us was the transient who walked into a dirty-shirt law office on McDowell, the main drag just to the south of us, and caught the office’s legal secretary in the act of fixing coffee before her employers came in. God told him she was the Devil, so he murdered her on the spot.
Not very long after we moved out one of our former neighbors called to chat and reported that something had happened at Retha and Ron’s former house — right next door to the home of one of the women who used to babysit our son. The new residents were an affluent young professional couple. He traveled for work a lot, and was often out of town.
Ron and Retha had installed an elaborate burglar alarm system in that house, which was a large and sprawling place. The only window that was not alarmed was one of those tiny little bathroom windows, the kind of thing that slides open about 18 inches, just enough to allow air to ventilate the room after a shower.
The guy had been watching the wife for months, and he’d been studying the house. He knew where all the alarmed doors and windows were, and he had observed that this window was not alarmed. He also knew when her husband was out of town.
So one evening he entered the house through this window. Surprised the woman, captured her, and spent the entire night raping and beating her. How she survived, I do not know, and nor do I know what possessed him to leave without killing her. Maybe he thought he had killed her.
I really disliked our new neighborhood. It was full of snobs who wouldn’t have anything to do with White Trash like me, and the houses were 1950s look-alike ranchers, pretty boring by and large. What friends I had were all at the university, which was even further from North Central than from Encanto. For me, it was an unhappy place to live. But at least it felt safer.
Probably because by then we not only had the German shepherd, we had another big dog, too.
But really, the question is what possessed us to stay in Encanto as long as we did? We did love the house, which was spectacularly beautiful. We did have nice neighbors, though the older ones were dying off and the ones our age were moving away. It was close to DXH’s office and relatively close to the university. But…resident drug-addicted bums sleeping in your yard and any car you forgot to lock? Rapists? Ax murderers? What WERE we thinking????
So…{sigh}. Today I find myself in the same predicament: Great neighbors. Central location. Lovely home. Beautiful yard. And…constant cop flyovers, wackshit incidents every week, none of the inner-city medical facilities are adequate to the kind of emergency I’m likely to experience, and…hey! Listen to that! Here comes a siren wailing up Conduit of Blight Blvd, even as we scribble…
Among the several discouraging issues…
First, it’s an expensive godawful hassle to move. I really don’t wanna do that again.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll live, but I figure not more than another ten to fifteen years. Do I really want to make myself crazy moving to some other house for that brief a period? Can I really not hold out, pistol in hand, for a few more years?
Newer housing is just flat not as desirable as houses built on lots with some elbow room between the neighbors and with walls made of WALLS, not plasterboard and styrofoam.
The “safer” middle-class areas, while priced about the same as this part of the ’Hood, are mile on mile on endless look-alike mile of ticky-tacky. You may want to live in a house that looks just like your neighbor’s and your next neighbor’s and your next neighbor’s, but I sure as hell don’t.
So…what am I thinking? What on earth to do?
I dunno. What we have here are a lot of small to medium-size plusses and one HUGE negative (in the form of nearby crime- and drug-ridden slums). Or, we could say, a huge negative in the form of a society that does nothing to deal with its exploding problem of mentally ill drug addicts…possibly because no one has found any consistently successful way to do that.
Far as I can see, there are two potential solutions:
One is to stay here and hope for the best. I have a noisy little dog and I am armed to the teeth. And it’s never too late, I suppose, to adopt another German shepherd.
Amazingly, despite yesterday’s miseries (and my dire expectation of three to four weeks of Fun with Influenza), today the body decided to make a little comeback. Yesterday, apparently having picked up a case of the flu at the Mayo’s ER a couple of nights earlier, I was classically miserable: fever, sore throat, splitting headache, aches & pains all over the bod’. I had to cut choir practice, and I really was thinking oohhh shit! here it comes!
Normally it takes me weeks — even months — to get over a case of the flu. One curious doctor did a series of blood tests on me some years ago, which revealed that I have some small genetic flaw in my immune system that indeed does make me more susceptible to these damn viruses than most people and makes it harder to get over them. For that reason, I try to stay out of public places when they’re really crowded (Costco at Christmastime, heaven help us!) and also do not take communion because I will not share wine out of a communal cup, and no, I don’t care that someone thinks having the cup made of gold magically disinfects the rim on which the members of the congregation have rested their lips. These strategies usually fend off disease…but not so much when you spend six hours in an emergency room while the current strain of influenza is “widespread” in your parts.
Last night I managed to steal a few hours of sleep, and this morning the fever was down to a balmy 99. Still high, considering that “normal” for me is around 98 or even lower. But a helluva lot better than 100º+. The sore throat: better (still there, but at least I can swallow now). The headache: still there, but not racking.
It’s a miracle.
Seriously: you have no idea how long these damn things can hang on with me. And to complicate matters, allergies to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen mean I can’t even wangle a little symptomatic relief. A noticeable improvement after just a couple of days is a real surprise. The only explanation I can think of is that the flu shot I had a week or ten days ago must have just started to kick in and so somehow is helping the bod’ to beat off the bug.
So now, for the first time in several days, I was hungry. And there was exactly NO food in the house. What I wanted was some of that decently prepared soup that comes in boxes, under the brand names “Pacific” and “Imagine.” These are carried at Sprouts. And conveniently, there’s a Sprouts right down the road from the Funny Farm. There’s also a Walgreen’s in that shopping center — I needed a new bottle of nose squirt, so figured to pick one up there.
Heh.
You have to understand, though…the “road” is Conduit of Blight Boulevard. And the environs that fine avenue skirts have their eccentricities.
First, into the Walgreen’s.
Oh, God! You can not go into that store without some strange new experience.
First off, I couldn’t find the damn Afrin (and associated knock-offs). Nor can I find a roaming employee except for this strange guy who is moving goods around with a freight cart and making WEIRD noises. At the top of his lungs: OH! OW! OOFFF! and on and on. He appears to be mentally challenged. Nice of Walgreen’s to give him a job, but not very helpful for the customer.
I traipse to the pharmacy counter to ask where the hell the nose squirt is. Get behind a woman who is receiving zero satisfaction and is told to come back some other time. This, it develops, is because they only have one employee back there. Guess their other staff are all out with the flu. I think fuck it! and decide I’ll have to go across the street to the Albertson’s to find the nostrum, another of the Hood’s gracious landmarks. Please, please, please waste some more of my time!
But on the way out I take another look in the stuffy-nose section and discover they’ve put the decongestant sprays all the way down on the very bottom shelf. Well, that’s good…at least I don’t have to traipse across the damn train tracks (sitting through at least one and probably two interminable red lights). Buy this and then walk over to the Sprouts.
Incredibly, the store is now not stocking even ONE actual soup by Pacific or Imagine! No joke! They have a pile of boxed chicken broth and boxed beef broth, but that is not what I want. I need a hearty soup that is going to give me some nourishment without making me sick(er).
Fu*k!!!!!!!
Defies belief.
So I get in the car and drive all the way down to the fancy new Sprouts at Osborn and Seventh Ave, now the heart of Millennial Country. Yes. There I find the actual soups for which Sprouts is famed. Grab an armload of these: potato leek, tomato (creamy!!), and butternut squash. While there I find a package of frozen warm-it-up in minutes mussels in tomato sauce. Hot damn! That, I’m going to eat whenever I finish this blog post.
So when I get up to the checkout, I ask the guy — who is, by the way a retired professor funding his cruise travels with part-time cashiering, and quite a kick — why on earth they’ve taken these soups out of the market in the ‘Hood. Poor people eat soup, too, y’know! This gets their attention.
They have to allow that they don’t know the answer to this conundrum, but yes, it probably does have to do with the demographics. (Let’s whack’em while they’re down!)
A fairly entertaining exchange with the two idle check-out clerks and a wandering manager now takes place. The professor and the other check-out clerk, a mature black woman, slender and sharp-looking, are both old-time Phoenicians. When I remark that the ex- and I were part of the first wave of gentrification in the Encanto district, a great flurry of reminiscence ensues.
“Do you remember the Basha’s that used to be in this parking lot?”
“Yes, and the Osco drugstore that went out of business and just sat there empty for years?”
“Did you ever go to the China Doll, right next door?”
The woman told me, to my astonishment, that she and her family used to live in the apartments that once were behind the present fancified shopping center. But for the longest time, she said, black people weren’t allowed to live there.
I said, “You’re kidding!” I knew there was a lot of discrimination — Arizona is fundamentally a Southern state, politically and culturally. But you can’t live in Central Phoenix? It wasn’t exactly Whiteyville at the time.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”
“When was this?”
“It was in the late 50s and early 60s.”
“Wow! That pre-dates my time. If that had been going on when all the Yuppies were moving into Encanto, there would have been riots in the streets.”
She laughed.
So now I make my way home, circumventing the accursed goddamn train tracks, backtracking to Feeder Street Northwest (which actually is a minor main drag that goes all the way down to the capitol area), then back-backtracking to the speedier 7th Avenue once I reach a road that moves smoothly east and west. Ugh.
And fall into the sack, having no energy to heat any of the fine delicacies in hand.
So when I moved into the Funny Farm, lo! these many years ago, the flowerbed under the front window hosted four strange and rather dowdy plants. These things, a variety of bamboo (we’re told), were planted by Satan and Proserpine (the previous owners) as supposedly highly xeric. The path of least resistance has long been to ignore them. They need to be hacked back every couple of years — a task honored more in the breach than in the act. By and large, they’re forgotten until it occurs to me that I can’t see out the front window.
But fall being Arizona’s answer to spring — and fall finally having arrived in the past week — I decided I would spend the day cleaning up the gardens out here. And one of the things I’d like to do, thought I, is get rid of those damn bamboo-oid things and replace them with something prettier. Such as three or four dwarf bougainvillea.
The full-size boug over by the gate has thrived for years. It’s pretty well sheltered, so even a hard frost doesn’t faze it much. And it does appear that hard frosts are, once and for all, no longer in the cards. And a bougainvillea is truly a beautiful plant. Look up dwarf bougs online and indeed do find them…to the tune of around $30 to $35 apiece. Holy mackerel.
But I remain determined: these are the perfect plants for that spot. If I’m going to get them, I’ll just have to spay some stupid amount of money.
Amazingly, just as I’m about to finish my breakfast and get down to gardening, along comes Gerardo and his crew. I ask them to pull out the bamboo-oids, which they do…with enormous difficulty. The ground is dry and hard there, and the plants are firmly anchored into the concrete-like ground. They have to take a pick-axe to the things to get them out. But get them out, the eventually do.
Exit Gerardo and friends. And over to Whitfill’s.
The place is a madhouse, fall having sprung…you never saw so many pushy rich people in your LIFE! And all of the nursery’s numerous blue-shirted staff were collared. Open your mouth to ask a question and somebody barges in and collars the buy.
I finally manage to push my way up to the cashier to ask if the have any such critter, and she says all the bougainvillea that are staked are regular size; all the ones that are not staked are dwarf size.
Ohhh-kayyyyyy… Back onto the lot to explore two or three cluttered acres again. Just about to give up when I spot a cluster of small bougs in pots, but I can’t tell what they are, except to see they have wonderful classic maroon blossoms. And along comes a blue-shirted fellow, clearly fresh from the men’s room, who is unattached. Ask: “Are these dwarf bougs?”
“They are,” says he.
Since I haven’t been able to snag a cart, either, he helps me carry them to the cashier.
“Are those $10?” she asks.
“Uhhmmmm…” Say what? “Well, they have a number marked on the pot.”
“That’s ten bucks, then.”
Seriously? They’re upwards of $30 at the other merchants that stock them. I don’t argue. Outta there with four healthy little plants, only $43 lighter.
***
Back to the house. Loaf around for awhile. Admire the sparkling clean pool, visited this morning by the brand-new pool guy. He has fixed it, and apparently it is going to stay fixed, at least for awhile. He came by at 7, chatted, cleaned the walls and steps, fooled with the chemicals, chatted some more. Played with Ruby, who thinks (like all guests) he’s some sort of god.
Get up and clean the front window, which, for the first time in several years, I can reach.
Drag an old hose long enough to reach the excavated flowerbed out to the front; unkink it, and miraculously to get to work. Pour water on the flowerbed (we might note that an hour later said water has not soaked in: a sterling bad sign).
Ruby is coming and going (mostly going) during all this.
A little later, for reasons I do not recall I happen to look out the back door…and the back gate is standing open.
WTF?????
Remember, that gate has another barrier behind it, in the form of a padlocked steel gate. And that gate? Ruby can easily slip under it. Once escaped, she’ll run off to Timbuktu.
In a moment of real panic, I call and search for the dog.
Mercifully, she’s fallen asleep in her favorite nest under the back bathroom toilet.
This would mean, you understand, that she hasn’t noticed the gate hanging open. An hour or three ago, she was soaking up the sun out by the orange tree that happens to stand right next to that gate. If it was open then she would have noticed.
You understand: Ruby can slide under that gate. I can crawl under it. And a fairly slender man could no doubt squeeze under it. Not only that, but this morning the cop helicopters were buzzing back and forth for a good hour, obviously looking for someone.
All of which that suggests strongly that somebody came into the alcove, over or under that locked steel gate, and unlocked the wooden gate into the yard. OR…more rationally, one of the lawn guys could have opened the gate, found he couldn’t get out to the trash can, and just turned around and hauled his leaves and junk out to the truck’s trailer…forgetting to close the gate.
Holy crap! The back door has been standing open most of the afternoon — the day is gorgeous and Ruby has been wandering in and out. If anyone actually got into the yard and he did it while the kitchen security door was hanging open he could’ve just walked right into the house.
Find another padlock and attach that to the latch on the wooden gate. So now we have to negotiate two goddamn locks just to take the trash out. Make that four: the deadbolt on the kitchen door and the deadbolt on the heavy-duty kitchen security door.
Well, thank God that Ruby slept through whatever happened there, or just didn’t happen to wander into the backyard while that gate was open. If she had, she’d have been long gone. Her collar has her name and phone number on it, but she doesn’t wear that thing in the house. And she is chipped. But either way, she’s quite a stealable little cherry. Chances are about 50/50 that whoever found her would never bring her back.
Into the third day of a passing storm. It’s supposed to clear tomorrow…today the sun peeked through for several hours, but then the sky clabbered up again and more rain fell with abandon.
Back at the Funny Farm: yesterday’s extra CPR Call Blocker coding seemed to have had an effect. The number of nuisance calls dropped to two. I thought I’d found the key to blocking nuisance calls from “Name Unavailable,” but another got through. Called CPR’s excellent customer service; the guy there says blocking “Name Unavailable” doesn’t block “Unavailable” calls, each of which has to be separately, manually blocked. Now I’m thinking the only way to deal with this constant harassment is to tell everyone who needs to reach me that the only way to get in touch is by email, and then unplug the phones. Or cancel the service.
