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Urban life

Grumpy Old Lady’s Jaundiced View of Fools

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Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.

Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?

We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.

Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?

LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed  he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.

I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.

What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?

When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding  blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.

Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?

Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.

I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?

At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.

So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.

What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?

 

Urban Hallowe’en Tales: The Night of the Screaming

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Okay, so Stephen says he’ll kick in the price of a cup of coffee if I’ll tell the stories of the Night of the Screaming and the Burglar Who Is Still Running. You know, Stephen, the price of one fancy Starbucks concoction will keep the old lady in premium espresso coffee beans for almost a month…

Ah, yes. The Night of the Screaming.

There was a reason I was a trophy wife. When I was young and nubile, I was…well…damned spectacular. Men would stop their cars in the street to watch me walk by. The occasional lively young gent, emboldened by a rush of testosterone, would even try to get me into his car. It was like that.

On this particular evening, I was still young and lush. My then-husband was a partner in one of the two top law firms in the American Southwest. This august institution had regularly recurring firm meetings, at which all the partners and associates were required to show up. Poor fellows (and in those days, that’s what they were: fellows) forced themselves to gag down a filet mignon with béarnaise sauce and several glasses of wine, preceded by a bit of whiskey, down at the Arizona Club. Afterward, they talked business into the night. He usually got home between 11:00 p.m. and midnight.

I’d fed our three cats, fixed and consumed my dinner, done a set of tummy-tightening and boob-lifting exercises in the living room, and started the dishwasher. Then I set the hated Smith-Corona portable typewriter on the floor in front of the television (this was before the days of the PC) and got to work writing a graduate-school seminar paper that was due the following morning.

So there I am, typing away.

The old Kitchenaid works wonderfully but it’s no Bosch: silence is not its thing. It’s plinking and plonking busily in the background, and I’m mostly ignoring it.

I hear a rustling sound in the service porch between the TV room and the kitchen. Two catboxes are in there, serving as a latrine for the feline livestock. This noise, I register as the cats scratching in litter. It stops, confirming my impression.

I type. I throw out another sheet of paper when the hated Smith-Corona lets it slip loose from the platen on the last line of the page, causing that last lightning-typed line to skew down through the bottom margin and off the page. Pick up another sheet, roll it into the platen, hear more scritching in the service porch.

Insistent scritching.

What ARE those cats doing in there? think I.

I get up off the floor to go see what the hell the cats are doing in the service porch and find…no cats.

No cats anywhere around. Puzzled, I take a closer look and find…

The latch on the door handle wiggling up and down.

Door handle latches do not wiggle themselves. Even I am bright enough to figure that one out.

I run to the front of the house, look out through the French doors into the screened entry atrium, determine no one is out there, throw open the front door, and holler, at the top of my lungs,

F-I-R-E!!

F-I-R-E!!!!

HELP! MY HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!

FIRE!!!!!!!!

CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT!!!!!

Well, naturally, all the neighbors come trotting out of their houses, cocktails in hand, to watch my house burn down.

I’d always been told that you should never yell HELP! RAPE! BURGLAR! Because no one wants to get mixed up with a rapist or a burglar. What I didn’t know was

how freakin’ LOUD a woman really can yell.

I had no idea I could make a noise like that.

It worked. Some of the neighbors saw the perp. He’d parked his bike next to the side entry to our service porch, and when the circus began, he jumped aboard and shot off down the alley.

The guy had almost managed to jiggle the dead-bolt open—it was about 1/4 of the way thrown. Another few minutes and he would have been in the house, helping himself to the lawyer’s dish.

So there it is: the moral of the story is “never yell ‘help.’ Always yell FIRE!” No matter what, no matter where. Oh. And never do your exercises in the living room, where anyone loitering in your side yard can see in through the windows that open only to the oleanders.

Tune in on October 31 for The Burglar Who Is Still Running

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?

Is She Gone?

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OMG! I think the German shepherd lady just moved out!

Not for certain yet… It was on the late side of mid-afternoon when I drove into the neighborhood and spotted a BIG-a$$ Bekins truck parked out in front of the house where the late, great crime occurred. Whichever way the movers were going, they were about done, and so there was no action. So I couldn’t see whether they were carrying things in or out. But because several brand-new, unused boxes were leaning against the front of the house, my guess is she’s moving out and those were boxes she was returning to Bekins. Or boxes the movers were going to use to pack up her stuff.

A bright red FOR RENT sign was stuck in the front yard. Why would the landlord have a for-rent notice out there if the tenants were moving in?

Cruised by the house a couple of times, as unobtrusively as possible, which wasn’t very. Came home, put the groceries away, let the dog out, changed my clothes, idled a few minutes away. Then I rode my bike down there, through the 109-degree heat, to see if a slower, closer look would resolve the question.

By then, the truck had left. It looked like the house was vacant! Of course, I was afraid to charge right up to the front windows and peer in. But I do think SHE’S GONE!!!!!!!

I’ll drive by there tonight after dark. If there’s no light in there, then maybe I’ll be emboldened to barge up and look in the windows tomorrow.

Wow! How awesome would that be, if she really were gone?

Cassie and I would get our favorite evening walk route back. It’s the best after-dark doggie-walk trail through the neighborhood, because it doesn’t go near the park, which isn’t very safe at night, and because it doesn’t cross the main north-south feeder street, taking us further afield than one would like to be on foot at 10 or 11 p.m. This route passes several really beautiful homes, borders a horse property where the burros come up and kiss Cassie on the nose, and goes through a lush, quiet neighborhood full of mature trees and cool, irrigated lawns. All these things make it the closest desirable place to walk, day or night.

I haven’t taken Cassie back there, of course, and was resolved never to walk anywhere near that house again. That meant we couldn’t go into that part of the neighborhood at all, since we have to pass that house to get into the enclave to the south of it.

LOL! She must have called the landlord, told him there was a crazy woman in the area, and demanded to be let out of the lease. Heeeeeee!

Whatever: good riddance. Now we’re free to walk anywhere in the neighborhood we please.

Update

Bicycling past the house early Sunday morning, I saw a vehicle parked in the driveway. Damn! She must have been moving in, not out. Doesn’t matter, I guess…Cassie now refuses to walk in a southerly direction from our house, anyway.

Images:

German shepherd dog. Ameliorate! at en.wikipedia. Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Pembroke Welsh Corgi. Pmuths1956. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Dog Attack: Trounced Pooch

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DogAttackUSAF-300x282Horrible evening and night. Along about 10 pm as we were walking in the neighborhood, some idiot’s out-of-control German shepherd dog charged across our main feeder street and down the side road where we were standing and attacked Cassie.

The shepherd belonged to the guests of some renters in a house on Feeder Street. This bunch were out in front of the house, apparently taking their leave of their hosts as they loaded stuff into the back of a small SUV. As we approached on Side Road, I could see they had a couple of dogs out there, one of them a shepherd, and that the shepherd was squirreling around their truck. I stopped to watch for a moment, but then decided we could get by since we were all the way on the other side of a wide road.

About the time we stepped forward from this pause—well before we reached the corner—this dog spotted us and shot across Feeder Street like a rocket. It grabbed Cassie by the nape of the neck and started shaking her, trying to kill her.

Wouldn’t you know, I’d decided to carry along a glass of tea instead of my coyote shilelagh, and I was wearing sandals, so couldn’t even kick the damn dog in the ribs.

I grabbed the shepherd but couldn’t force it to release her—she was shrieking and the shepherd was shaking her like a rag and I couldn’t stop it. Finally the moron owners came shuffling up, and the two of them were able to disconnect their fucking dog.

Effing morons! They claimed they had the dog on a leash. Yeah…they had a leash on the dog, all right: they just weren’t holding onto it! The animal was frolicking around the vehicle because they’d dropped the leash. I flew into such a high rage I turned the night air Day-Glo blue yelling at them for their stupidity.

Fortunately it was a fairly young dog, inexperienced, and it grabbed her not by the neck but over the shoulders. Her hair is extremely thick in that area and so the bite didn’t break the skin. By the time we got her free, she was ambulatory, and in fact did not want me to carry her far. She seemed to be able to walk OK, once I hauled her away from the scene.

The emergency vets tried to scare me, over the phone, into hurrying in for some expensive x-rays and tests, telling me she might have internal injuries. But I’m $450 in the hole as we scribble, no sign of my Social Security check, probably not going to get one next month, and after two weeks of entertaining freshmen four uninterrupted hours a day, tomorrow’s “lagging” paycheck from PeopleSoft will cover three, count’em (3) days. Since Cassie sleeps on the bed with me, I decided I could keep an eye on her until morning and then, assuming I didn’t have to rush her to the emergency animal clinic during the night, foist her onto La Maya to schlep to the vet while I was in class.

This morning she seemed sore but OK. So La Maya and I decided to opt the relay race to the vet’s, no doubt much to La M’s relief. Not as though she had nothing else to do… 🙄

From the campus, I made an appointment for 2:00 p.m. with the regular vet—fifty bucks just to walk in the door—but after arriving home from class I decided to cancel, because by the time I got home from class she was standing by the door and looking hale and hearty. Now she seems pretty well…bright-eyed and lobbying to chase her ball around. So I think she’s probably OK.

My throat is sore from all the screaming I did last night. Got to sleep around 3; had to get up at 5. I’ve been a zombie all day.

You know, if you own a big powerful dog that could pose a danger to you, to other people, or to other people’s pets, you have only two choices: either you have it so exquisitely, perfectly trained that it WILL stop what it’s doing under all conditions and come when called (few people know how or have the patience to train a dog like that), or you keep it on a lead at all times whenever it’s outside a fenced area.

Stupid, stupid, stupid people.