Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Arf! We say…ARF!

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Back again from traipsing around the neighborhood: pillar to post to pillar. Dawg and I marched from here to the shops east of Main Drag Central; then home and into the Shack.

Dawg takes up her post on the doggy bed, in the lovely air-conditioning. Human goes back out to hit the Sprouts and waypoints.

Human has gotten surprisingly skilled at repelling panhandlers. Hot diggety!

Sprouts: amply supplied with nummies, and — more importantly — with beer. So now we’re handsomely armed for dinner.

***

Ahhh, Little Dog! What a lovely little dog. 

In hideous Saudi Arabia — where the Human grew up — we weren’t allowed to have dogs. Rabies, y’know.

Actually, the jackals (which invaded the camp after dark every night) carried the rabies. But if your dog got into a squabble with one of those canine intruders, your dog was gonna be exposed to rabies, and that was gonna be the end of your dog. And you were going to enjoy THE most gawdawful round of anti-rabies shots you can imagine.

Pain, pain, and more pain: from every direction.

So we didn’t have dogs out there.

And therein lies one of the chief of the many reasons you couldn’t pay me to go back to that place. 😮

***

So here we are, loafing in the living room…again. Ruby and I have become quite expert at loafing!

It’s a warm but not a hot day. Tolerable enough for traipsing. School has come and gone, so kids are outside playing: more than tolerable enough.

Sometimes I think I would like to move…

But where to?

Well: first choice would be to a neighborhood closer to M’Hijito’s house.

Heeeeee!  Wouldn’t he be pleased?

Well, before I chase him off to Payson, we’d need to rethink that idea.

Another possibility would be into the residential area adjacent to the area occupied by the Beloved AJ’s Fancy-Dan Grocery Store. Just imagine being able to walk to the best grocery store in the city! Whenever you feel like it!!

That also would be, in theory, within walking distance of M’Hijito’s house.

The location, though, is near one of the busiest intersections in the city, and right up the street from a complex of not one, not two, but three high schools. So…well…you can imagine the noise level!!

Don’t think I wanna move there.

So…ya look around and ya look around and ya look around…and eventually you think I don’t wanna move anywhere away from here! 

Yea verily: by sheer, raw luck, you happened to buy a house in THE ideal corner of the city. Truth to tell, there is no “where to” to move to.

What luck, eh!?

Wow! AWESOME!

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Which is to say: AWESOME afternoon!  What a beautiful day!

When my Realtor friend John Shackelford brought me to the ‘Hood, lo! these many years ago, he could not have done me a bigger favor. This middle-aged North Phoenix tract really is a beautiful little mid/middle-class neighborhood, perfect in every way.

Seriously! It IS in the middle of everything: you don’t have to walk far to get to any store, any professional’s office, any car shop, any ANYTHING you like. Drop the jalopy off wherever you please, wander away, and come toddling back…yes…whenever you please.

The ambience is safe. Thugs do not holler at you as they barrel past on a main drag. Every corner has a tidy little shopping center. There’s a church across the street. And a school across the street. And a car repair shop up the street. And….and…and on and on.

Seriously, indeed: I do feel like I just fell into it when I bought into this neighborhood.

This afternoon, it was over to my favorite little booze shop, thereinat to buy a six-pack of Kilt-Lifters. Then homeward, ever homeward…hereinat to love up the dog and fork over a couple of fistfuls of kibble as a treat for her. Then pour a beer, sit down, and put up the feet.

Gosh! What a day, eh?

We live in such a pretty little neighborhood! I’m SOOOOO glad I didn’t follow SDXB to dreary Sun City when he decided to escape Tony the Romanian Landlord by moving out to Old Folks’ Land. Gaaaahhhh!  When I lived out there with my parents, I learned to hate…

  • …the sound of F-16s roaring overhead all day
  • …the hatred of young people, creatures the locals moved out there to escape
  • …the ticky-tacky architecture
  • …the third-rate grocery stores (do old people not eat, not cook???)
  • …the endless, endless, FUKKIN’ ENDLESS drive into town, whereinat to buy a decent steak…

LOL! If you’re gonna live in a city, forgodsake LIVE IN A CITY. 😀

“The Sound of Freedom”!!!

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Weather conditions are right this morning to waft the breathtaking “Sound of Freedom” 25 miles across the Valley from Luke Air Force Base into our yards here in North Central Phoenix.

My parents’ little house in Sun City was just a few miles up the road from Luke. So there was no escape from that fine melody, no matter what time of day or which way the wind blew.

R-R-R-R-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R!!!!

Jet warplanes ripping their way through the atmosphere.

My mother loved to take her morning coffee on our screened back porch, out there in Sun City. Right about the time the boys climbed into their fighter jets and took off….

“Ohhhh,” she would coo. “It’s the sound of freedom!”

Today I listen to that terrifying racket and wonder, Did she REALLY believe that “Sound of Freedom” b.s.? 

She wasn’t a stupid woman. So when you think about it, it is puzzling that she would fall for that line.

Maybe, I thought then and sometimes think now, maybe it was a way to justify staying in Sun City, where she and my father retired after his 30 years of crushing work overseas and on oil tankers.

If she pretended to like that gawdawful racket, then of course she couldn’t bellyache about it to my father: he who labored like an animal to get them to the bourgeois little house in Sun City.

How would he have felt, one wonders, if she had turned to him, after 30 years of hard labor, and said I don’t like it here! Let’s move someplace else!

You don’t even wanna know. Truth to tell, an admission like that might very well have ended the marriage.

I suppose “oooh, it’s the sound of freedom” was at base a way to smother the terror we all felt, knowing at any time a nuclear war could break out…and we could be in the middle of it.

In San Francisco, where I went to junior high school, the screaming air raid sirens were terrifying. The “duck-and-cover” drills in the classroom: terrifying. The instruction to “get home as fast as you can!” — on foot, a good two or three miles: terrifying. The ridiculous air-raid shelter in the basement of our apartment building — all too obviously about as efficacious as a styrofoam cup: terrifying. The bomb shelter that doubled as a garage for all the apartment dwellers, each automobile filled with gasoline a potential little bomb of its own: terrifying. The beeee-EEEEE-eee alert on the radio: terrifying. The blasting air-raid siren on the tower’s roof: terrifying.

Few if any places to get away from the racket: terrifying. The apartment building’s useless basement where we were to take cover: terrifying. Day by day: terrifying.

Really, looking back on those days, that’s how I recall it: as a time of terror.

What kind of morons were we: we and the Russians and the Chinese and all the rest of the worldwide chuckleheads who bought into nuclear armaments? Peculiarly stupid ones, apparently.

And we’re b-a-a-c-k!

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Yep: the Hound and the Human are back from another park circumnavigating junket.

WHAT a beautiful night! Perfect temperature. Velvety dark evening. Kids playing. Kids playing. Kids playing. Teenagers batting baseballs and batting baseballs and batting baseballs. A brilliant full moon pouring light down through the darkening sky.

Just freakin’ gorgeous.

Walking through the dusk, I’m reminded of what an evening at sea must have been like for my father. He was a seaman: a merchant mariner, mostly shipping on oil tankers. This vocation got him a very fine, handsomely paid job in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia: one that included housing for his family and a short leave with a two-week trip to venues like Beirut and Delhi and a long leave with a trip back to New York, whence we would launch our biennial automobile trip across the United States.

Start in New York City.

Cruise southerly and westerly, down through Maryland and waypoints. Eventually arrive in Dallas.

Camp there with his brother for two or three weeks. Then get back on the road.

Westerly, westerly, through Colorado and across the Rockies, through Nevada, Arizona, and them-such waypoints. Arrive at the home of my mother’s best friend, in Long Beach, California.

Hang out with her for a week or two.

Then northerly, northerly, up the coast to the Bay Area. Hang out with my relatives in Berkeley for a month or so.

And back, like a rocket, across the continent to New York City, there to turn in the car, hop on a plane, and head back to Dhahran.

Some vacation, eh?

Well. I guess it would have been cool…once. But we did it every time we came back to the States. That was every two years. 😀

So that is what I’m reminded of by a brilliant azure night with Venus hanging over us and warm air circulating around us. What a life!

Doggy-Walk from Heaven

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INCREDIBLY gorgeous morning! Cool but not cold. Clear skies. Lovely, low morning sun. Neighbors out walking their dogs and taking the early air…  What a fantastic neighborhood we live in.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the park. Said “hello” to half-a-dozen other dawg walkers. Soaked in the gorgeous morning air.

Walked past the house where the family’s son f*cked some teenaged girl and got arrested for the favor. He went to jail. They lost their home. It’s been a wreck for awhile.

But now someone has bought it and fixed it up. Looks like about all that’s left to do is to repair (rebuild??) the swimming pool.

We hang a left onto that neighborhood street: a lovely upper-middle-class neighborhood of handsome, big houses, irrigated lots, and general toniness. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Shortly, we bear north, ever north…again past the lovely park with its expanses of green grass (!!!) and its handsome, mature trees, and its 87 gerjillion other dawg-walkers. 😀

What a place to live!

I hope I can hang onto my home until I croak over. Partly because I do want to live here for literally the rest of my life. And partly because I want to leave it to my son, so he can either move into this beautiful little house or sell it for enough to decamp to Tahiti.

No kidding: this place is Yup Central, the younger generation of the upwardly mobile having discovered it. So by the time I pass on to my furry fathers, the house should be worth a ridiculous amount of money. He’ll be able to sell his house and bank the cash income, or sell both places and move to Upper Richistan.

If things work out the way I hope, it will be a lovely gift to leave him, and something that has the potential to profit him seven ways from Sunday.

Yea verily: the thoughts that preoccupy you as you and the Killer Corgi stroll past a fine green park and piles of fancy houses and little patches of local history. Onward!

Glorioski! Glorious Day, Glorious Future

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Wow! What a gorgeous morning. Intermittent overcast with big, fluffy, cottony clouds. Cool but not cold. The sky wants to rain, but can’t work itself up to that much effort.

Ruby and I frolicked through Upper Richistan, as usual admiring the big ole’ expensive houses and their big, expensive irrigated lawns. Gorgeous neighborhood.

Ours isn’t “gorgeous,” but it’s adequately pleasant. Mid-middle class homes on lots that put enough space between neighbors.

Ruby loved up some workmen…cuteness is like some kind of joy drug for most people. We went on our way eventually. Now we’re back at the house.

And the Human finds itself wondering what next? 

Despite the family track record for longevity, we can pretty safely bet that I don’t have all that much longer to go. Relatives who have lived into their dotage have uniformly been Christian Scientists…tee-totalers, that is.

I ain’t no tee-totaler and never have been. My first boyfriend introduced me to wine when I was about 17, and I’ve been lapping up the stuff ever since. As we know, anything alcoholic is a handy device for shortening your life span. So I think it’s safe to figure I’ve got maybe about 10 years left — at most. Probably a little less than that.

The best I can hope for, I think, is to drop dead…and thereby avoid ending up in some nursing home or prison for old folks. That’s not outside the realm of possibility — as I say, the forebears who dropped dead in their late 90s didn’t drink. I do (with élan!), and so it’s safe to assume I’ve probably cut a good 10 years off the inherited lifespan. But that still would leave me another 10 years. Ten years that I do NOT want to spend in an old-folkerie!!!!

And therein lies the challenge: How to stay out of one of those horrible places. 

They soak up your life savings…and I want my savings to go to my son. Not to a holding pen for old bats. But….

But I have yet to figure out how to protect those savings for him, especially if I live much longer. Even more especially if I live much longer and get sick. How to evade those eventualities, though, does escape me.

If I manage to stay healthy into my dotage, though, M’hijito should inherit enough to retire in comfort…forthwith. By then, it’ll be time for him to figure out how to evade life in the old-folkerie…  😀