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Urban life

Pillar to Post…and Back Again!

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What a hoot! For unknown reasons, I got all revved up and launched on a Hike That Would Not Stop this afternoon.

Seriously: I’ve been walking for a good three hours. Pillar to post and back again… And highly entertained by that which is the same and that which has changed around the ‘Hood.

As a practical matter, a surprising amount of the landscape has evolved: newer, different, maybe even a little more upscale. Yet a lot remains in full plus ça change plus ça reste le même mode. It was just plain fun to walk through shopping strips and parking lots and clusters of stores that I’ve visited for years and yet hardly even noticed…so much are they part of the landscape.

Got some good exercise, and really enjoyed the long hike.

During all this, considering: DO I want to pack up and move back out to Sun City, there to join SDXB and his girlfriend? Would I feel safer a whole long way from the traffic and the homeless vagrants and the burglars and the whatnot?

Ultimately, as my feet took me back up the driveway to the front door, the thought that came to mind was Well, no! No, I do NOT want to move to Sun City. No, I wanna stay here. 

I love our neighborhood. I love our neighbors. I love the kids playing in the yards and streets. And I even love the cars and busses and trains rumbling up and down the surrounding main drags.

This is a fun, cool, down-home middle-class urban neighborhood: the sort of place where I feel right at home. And…I ain’t leavin’!

WOOT!

One of Those Days: Adumbrated

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Hallelujah, brothers & sisters!  

Dunno what brought Ruby the Corgi under the weather last night, but this morning she seems to be miraculously healed! 

Yes. She’s scarfed down the usual dose of 1/3 can of dawg food. She’s patrolled the backyard — twice, come to think of it. Now she’s standing out there waiting for a burglar to chase off.

😀  Funny little beast. 

At any rate, today she’s acting like her old, healthy self, so I assume whatever ailed her must have been something she ate or some very fast-passing bug.

Whenever the human feels like getting off its duff, we’ll go out and patrol the neighborhood. LOL! The locals must be so glad they have a 30-pound protector looking out after them.

It’s a neighborhood that has much changed over the past few years, yet remains weirdly the same. Our dearest neighbor, locally known as The Ole Guy, disappeared with his wife some time back. He had told me he thought he was going to have to lock her up in an old folks’ home. And I’ll tellya: that guy would never imprison her in a place like that and then walk off, leaving her alone. If he put her in an old-folkerie, you can be sure he put himself there, too.

Meanwhile, SDXB has moved to Sun City, where he took up with New Girlfriend. He seems happy enough, though the last I heard old age has caught up with him and he’s been pretty sick.

I’d be sick, too, if I tried to live in Sun City. My parents proudly retired and moved to Sun City when I went off to college. They thought it was just the business. I thought it was abhorrent.

Seriously: you couldn’t pay me to live there: a ghetto for old folks.

But they thought it was The Bidness. His brother, Ed, and Ed’s harridan of a wife moved there. And my parents’ best friends from Saudi Arabia — Ruth and Hollis — joined them. My mother must have been thrilled to see Ruth move in. The in-laws: not so much, though.

But for me, the place had one major trait working against it: a kind of toxic sameness. All the houses looked alike. All the yards looked alike. All the people looked alike.

The people: old, middle-class, and white. Once a black couple dasted to move in there. They literally were hounded out by the locals.

Hereabouts: I haven’t seen an African-American type move in to these parts. Well, no: one bachelor bought a house a block or two away. But he moved on. Hounded? I doubt it: probably found it costs a lot more to live here than one would expect.

Property taxes are surprisingly high in these parts — probably, I suspect, because the houses are over-valued. Truth to tell, these same models occupy a fair amount of Sun City, which was largely built out by the same developer. A few are a little bigger than SC shacks — mine has four bedrooms, which you surely wouldn’t find out there. And the yards have six-foot walls, with city-owned alleys running behind them. (No alleys in S.C.)  But otherwise, the two developments are much the same.

Except…we have kids!

How can one live without the sound of kids carrying on outside?

Seriously: I love the racket of kids playing. Sun City — devoid of anyone under the age of 50 — was silent as a tomb. Well…except for the damn fighter jets blasting over from Luke Air Force Base. That was a racket.

The Ole Guy…The Ole Neighborhood

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Took a hike up to the corner shopping center, there to pick up some not-very-necessaries and socialize with the locals. On the way home, I walked through the  northwest corner of the ‘Hood, an area that SDXB and I used to frequent when he lived here in Phoenix (before he made his escape to Sun City). At the time, I dwelt closer to noisy, crime-ridden Nineteenth Avenue. SDXB and I used to walk all around in that quarter, just about every day.

One house we passed almost every day belonged to a fella we called “The Ole Guy.” What a nice man he was. He and his wife had lived here forever, and by the time SDXB and I came on the scene, they were gettin’ on in years. She was usually indoors, but he liked to putter around in his yard and with his car, and so he would often be out in front. SDXB and I would hang out with him for awhile as we made our rounds of the’Hood.

Well, of course as you know (if you read FaM much), SDXB decamped to Sun City, chased off by the noisy new light-rail and the blossoming crime rate.

My house is far enough from the damn trains that I can’t hear their racket. And as for the murderers, rapists,, and burglars? Make. My. Day, Gentlemen! 

Plus I had lived in Sun City, hated it, and never ever wanna go back there again. Any day I’d rather have crime than stodgey. 😀

So I stayed.

So did the Ole Guy — for awhile. But soon enough, he had to deposit his wife in a nursing home, pretty much trashing his life and his joy. He disappeared from the scene — believe he moved into the same old-folkerie — and the house was sold to some anonymous suburban types. Dunno that I’ve ever even seen the present owners.

If owners they are: they could be renters, for all I know. 😀

But oh my! I do miss the Ole Guy. What a nice man he was: to my mind an emblem of the neighborhood and all that’s good about it.

And I do miss SDXB, who seems to be living happily ever after in Sun City.

Not “happily” enough to lure me back out there. For one thing, SDXB has a lovely new girlfriend, and I surely wouldn’t want to intrude on that relationship. And for another….ohhhhh boy, did I ever hate living in Sun City. And I ain’t a-goin’ back out there, no many how many old friends of mine have decamped to the place.

So…dayum! I feel like I’m the Last Vestige of the Old Neighborhood.

Which is silly, of course. There are no vestiges: just people who move in and people who move out.

But I suppose the ironic and kinda funny thing about it is that nowadays I’m the equivalent of The Ole Guy. Yeah: the ancient resident who’s lived here since the pyramids were built: that one.

Why stay?

* Too much work to pack up and decamp. (Can you spell laziness?)
* Kids. Migawd, I do love the sound of kids playing! Why would you want to live in a mausoleum where no kidlets are allowed?
* Centrality. We are smack in the middle of everything. The main reason I was trotting around on foot is that M’hijito imagines an old bat shouldn’t be bucketing around the homicidal streets of Phoenix (NEVER have a kid who’s an insurance adjuster!), and so he has protectively purloined the Dog Chariot and  locked it up in his garage. B…F…D…, say I: my house’s location is so superbly central that I don’t need a car to get to several grocery stores (one or two of them damn fancy), a doctor, a dentist, a vet a..this, a that, and another thing. A train line and two bus lines go by right up the street. And an Uber driver lives two houses down from me.
* Upper-middle-class upper-middle-itude. The place is upscale but not upscale. Handsome, cleanly cared for, moderately priced. It is, in short: just my speed, when it comes to real estate.

So…really, this is almost as good as San Francisco used to be for me and my parents, where we never moved our car out of the garage more than once or twice a month.

I figure I can live here until I drop dead, or until I simply cannot walk a block or so. Whichever comes first.

LOL!

But it does have to be said: when you’ve lived in a place for a long time, you do miss your old neighbors and you do miss the good-ole-days. Someday, no doubt, someone will miss me and my funny-looking corgis. But until then…

Well. I intend to reign supreme!

😀

 

And now it’s night-time….

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No longer colder than a by-gawd out in the back yard...but not much fun, come 10:00 p.m., as a venue to stand around waiting for the dawg to do her Thing.

And waiting…and waiting…waiting..

Aarrrrgh!!!!

Traffic is roaring back and forth to the north of us. The ridiculous light-rail train is bong-bong-bonging up and down Main Drag West. And here’s a cop copter, sailing over the house.

Looks like Ruby did her Thing just in time to get us back inside before the party begins. We’re in. The doors are locked. Let us hope that will suffice, for the human & the dog.

Pretty night, though. Would be mighty nice in the absence of a few burglars, car thieves, wannabe rapists, and whatnot.

Blech!!! Begins to make Sun City look good….

 

Key Hell

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LOL! Went to find a key to unlock one of the exterior screens and… Voilà!  a half-dozen goddam different keys!!!! 

It’s taken almost an hour to unjumble that mess, and it’s still not straightened out. Just now: counted NINE keys, a couple of which I don’t even know what they go to.

Part of the problem is, different doors bear different brands of locks. So you can’t just have one or two keys made to work all seven (!!!!) exterior doors. Plus, because these houses back onto public alleys (which call in legions of bums and burglars) which require their own deadbolts, we end up with…hmmm….let us count…

11111 11111 1

ELEVEN LOCKS! 

At one point along the line, as I recall, I did ask a locksmith to key all the locks the same. But, for reasons I do NOT recall, he couldn’t do that. He was able to key a few of the same, but not all of them.

And that leads to an even more confusing mess!!

ooooohhhhh gaawd!! i have gotta have some breakfast. where the hell is that coffee?????????

GORGEOUS Day!

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Wow! This is one of those days when you should be in Arizona. 

The fine blue sky is striated delicately with high, thin, fine white clouds. The temperature hovers between perfect and perfectly perfect. Folks are strolling around and driving around and frolicking with their kids. And…yeah: you should be here!

Walked through a couple of my favorite corner shopping centers, mostly to see if they had this piece of junk or that piece of junk that I might buy if adequately tempted. Nope.

That was good: I succeeded in not buying a piece of junk! Snabbed a couple of food items: and that was it.

GREAT exercise, though, and very pleasant. 😀  I should do this every day.

Uhm….on the other hand, the weather should be like this every day. 😀

Not. Bloody. Likely!!!

😀  Walked through the grounds of the little nondescript church to the south of  the Funny Farm. Really: I simply must go over there and ingratiate myself with those folks and try to get on their choir.

The only thing I really do miss from my defunct life is choir. And apparently that little church does have a choir.

Well…this is Sunday. That gives me a whole week to build up the nerve to barge in and introduce myself. So…we shall see what, if anything, transpires. 😀