Not even 7:30 a.m. by the time the Ruby and I stumble back to the house. We left at dawn.
The SMOG! My gawd, the SMOG!
At first I thought it was fog. Seriously: it looks like a San Francisco morning out there. Doesn’t feel like it. It’s 95 in the shade of the back porch. The sky: yellow with crap floating in the air.
Horrid, horrid place.
If my son weren’t here, I’d be soooo gone!
Where would I go?
Berkeley, where my relatives lived for decades. Gawdlmighty, I do miss Berkeley.
The foothills of Tucson. Clean air, relative quiet, fairly upscale.
San Diego, in its more upper-middle-class incarnations.
Paris…parts of it.
San Francisco, where I belong…
oh, Hell: ANYWHERE! Anywhere but here!
Wunderground, that eminent weather-reporting site, predicts 112 degrees with a 6% chance of rain. Hm…observant of them.
Local weather reporters claim yesterday was Phoenix’s hottest July 30 on record.
Uhhh…sure. Yeah. Must be mighty boring to be a weather reporter. 😀
Walking home, Ruby and I passed a house on the little pass-through street bordering our slab of the ‘Hood. And by golly, out in front watering his yard was one of the handsomest Black men I’ve ever met. Quite possibly one of the handsomest of all possible men.
Not only that, but he was friendly. And he had a big ole’ black lab named Olive.
Hilariously, Olive was my maternal grandmother’s name.
Must be Fate, eh?
Olive. She died horribly: uterine cancer as a result of her lively sex life. My poor mother had to take care of the woman on her deathbed (Olive’s, that is…not my mother’s… 😀 )
Seriously: imagine inflicting the care of a wild-assed chippie on a teenaged girl, as said chippie lay dying. What a horror show!!
And what the HELL possesses people?
There’s some question about that episode, though. Years later, I found evidence that Olive had not died when my mother was 16 years old, but in fact was living in the Santa Barbara area at the time my own son was born. Never tried to track it down, though: pisseth me off too much.
Still. Sometimes I do wonder if my mother knew her mother was still living. Or if the crackpot family told her she’d died, either by way of freeing Olive from responsibility for her illegitmate daughter or by way of freeing my mother of having to interact with her…uhh…”racey” mother.
What a bunch!