Coffee heat rising

She Knew. Oh, Yes: She Knew.

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Dunno why, but for some reason my idle thoughts seem focused on my parents, and on their marriage.

My father was deeply, passionately in love with my mother. She was a good, obedient wife, and yes: I do believe she loved him as much as he loved her.

They met in California, where my father – a Merchant Marine officer – shipped out of Long Beach. After they married, he got a job in Saudi Arabia: a handsomely paid one. He figured the salary would allow him to retire good and early. And so off we went to the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we spent ten years in Hell.

During all this time, she smoked.

She didn’t just smoke. She smoked constantly. She smoked and she smoked and she smoked and she….on and on and fukkin’ on. You knew when she woke up in the morning, because you could smell the stink of her first cigarette of the day. She would light up before she even lifted her head from the pillow.

And all the rest of the day, anytime you were in the house, you would have the stink of her cigarettes up your nose. The AC system, the furniture, the carpets, the walls: everything stank of fukkin’ cigarettes.

He smoked, too. But nothing like she did. He might have taken in a half-dozen cancer sticks a day. She smoked constantly. She was never awake when she wasn’t puffing on a fukkin’ cigarette. Made her kid sick? Tough. Puff puff puffety. Word came down that smoking tobacco causes cancer? Nahhh: that’s just Big Brother trying to control us. Puff puff puffety. Made the walls, the AC vents, and the furniture stink to high heaven? She didn’t even notice. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff…..

I’d say it was incredibly stupid – especially after we knew  that for sure, smoking causes cancer. But no.

No worries: just Big Brother trying to control you.

Not surprisingly, the habit killed her. Hideously, we might add. The cancer those fukkin’ cigarettes induced put her in the hospital and killed her in a slow, ugly, agonizing way.

****

The frustrating thing is that she wasn’t a stupid woman. She wasn’t an educated woman, but she wasn’t at all stupid.

She had simply made up her mind that she wasn’t gonna give up her cigarette habit, and nothing anyone said was gonna change her mind. And it literally was true: she smoked constantly. Nor did the fact that I was sick all the time make the slightest bit of difference to her.. She smoked and she smoked and she smoked and then she smoked some more. The first thing she did in the morning, before she lifted her head from the pillow, was light a cigarette. The last thing she did in the evening, before she turned out the bedside lamp, was puff one last cigarette. All. The. Way. Down. To. The. Filter.

And she apparently didn’t care that her miasma of stinking smoke made me sick. I was sick all the time I was growing up, until I left the house to go off to college.

I’d like to believe she didn’t know better – that she didn’t know she was wrecking my health. But she did. You couldn’t miss it.

No: the facts were published in every magazine, every newspaper, on every TV news show. Smoking causes cancer. Smoking makes you sick. Smoking makes your kids sick.

She just didn’t care.

I’ve long thought her smoking behavior was deliberately suicidal. She might not have understood how long it would take for the habit to kill her. Or how much it would hurt to die of that tobacco-related cancer. Or just how much and what kind of Hell it would put my father through. But she certainly knew that smoking would eventually kill her. You couldn’t miss that. Not even back in the 1960s, when everybody who wasn’t a Mormon smoked as a matter of course.

She had watched her mother die of a different self-induced cancer. She knew the agony that cancer can cause, and she knew that smoking was likely to bring it on.

She knew. Of that, you can be sure.

Shocked! Back to Sobriety…

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SHOCKED, I tell you. Shocked! 

😀

This noon, I thought…gee, I’d like a bottle of beer to go with the orzo I’m planning to fix for a mid-day meal. Beer, or maybe a glass of wine.

Ohhhhhkayyyy….

Welp…I knew I was out of wine, and I feel uninclined to buy more just now. But…beer?

Yeah: beer:

There’s none left in the fridge.

DANG!

So…I figure I’ll walk down to the Albertson;’s and buy a six-pack.

Well.

In the first place, just now it’s HOTTER THAN THE HUBS OF HADES out there: A hundred degrees in the darkest shade of the north-facing back porch.

Caligula, my dear son, has my car imprisoned at his house. So to acquire this delicacy, I have to walk half an hour or forty minutes, back and forth, beneath Arizona’s finest noonday sun.

Hm.

So much for that idea.

I figure I’ll brew up some sun tea under the afternoon sun (add tea bags to a pitcher of water, cover, and set it out in the blasting heat for three or four hours). Meanwhile, I’ll be reduced to drinking (ecch!) water {shudder!!} or making hot tea and pouring it over ice for lunch.

Ech, though. Yech! is what I say to that.

So, yes! Let’s walk down to the nearby Albertson’s and buy a box of beer.

Uhm…shoofing on-line…

Just now, Albertson’s wants twenty-three bucks for 18 cans of Coors.

Got that?

Yeah: Almost $1.30 for a can of superbly mediocre beer. And you get to haul it home through the heat all by your dainty little self.

Hooooleeeee shee-ut!!!

****

Welp! One thing’s fer sher: I ain’t a-spending that kinda money on cheap beer!

Next time I’m in Costco, I’ll pick up a lifetime supply of whatever plonk they have on offer that’s not too indecent. Until then, we’ll be making do with water! If Costco’s plonk doesn’t rise to my elevated standards, we’ll be having iced tea with dinner after this.

Meanwhile — indeed, maybe henceforth, going forward — I don’t feel I should be expected to accept a bottle of plonk to go with my mid-day meal. Or my evening meal, either.

Pisseth me off! I really do resent not being able to have a modest swiggle of wine or beer with dinner. But y’know what?  Getting ripped off for the privilege pisseth me off even more!

I surely will miss my daily slurp of wine or beer with a nice meal. But y’know what? I resent getting ripped off even more than I’ll miss swiggling.

And so, dear booze manufacturers and sellers: BYE!!

 

 

And we need this…WHY?

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Herein lies the question:

My son, the redoubtable M’hijito, got mad the other day and stole my car. Just now it resides at his house, all the keys stashed inside his shack. In 110-degree heat, it’s too far and too hot for me to walk down there and steal it back. And so…just now I have an empty garage.

Heh! To tell you the truth, a lovely empty garage.

😀  😀 😀

Seriously: It’s clean, tidy, uncluttered, and un-stinky. It extends the house’s usable square footage under roof by about 560 square feet.

No kidding!! That space is 20 feet x 28 feet…yes, that’s 560 square feet!!

Yeah:  FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY square feet whose sole purpose is to keep a tin can out of the elements and out of reach of the local thieves.

And…and…we’re doing this…WHY?????

So, here’s the question of the moment:

What if I never took the car back? What if I just left it at his house? Neglected to re-up its registration and insurance. In a word or four: LET HIM HAVE IT.

Well. The what-ifs would be as follows:

  • I would never again have to cough up the insurance to cover a rolling hole in the ground into which to  pour money.
  • Nor would I have to refill the gas tank anywhere from two to four times a month.
  • Or have it serviced every three or four months.
  • Or pay to fix whatever craps out on it next.
  • My son would get a nice Toyota van that he could choose to keep or choose to sell.

Truth to tell, I don’t travel around the Valley much any more. Most of my automotive destinations are actually within walking distance…

  • The Albertson’s supermarket
  • The Sprouts hippy-dippy organic grocery store
  • The Fry’s supermarket
  • Those that aren’t…well, they ARE within easy train or bus-ride distance. Or Ubering distance…

Except for the 110-degree heat, one does have to wonder…WHY AM I DOING THIS?

And THAT question is given some heavy-duty salience by the new presence of Uber cabs run by, of all people, the neighbors. Yeah: for a fraction of what it costs to buy, insure, and run a car, I can get someone else to schlep me to stores and doctors’ offices. When I can’t, I can walk a block and a half up the road and rent a damn car.

So…hmmmmm…..  It strikes me more and more that it’s stump-dumb stupid to keep that car. If Dear Son wants to keep it and pay the taxes on it and cover the ever-more-stupefying costs of maintenance, let him have it. 

Now what?

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{sigh} Quarter to four in the afternoon, and NO WORD from the adorable Pool Dude.

This is decidedly not a good sign. It’s only 100 degrees in the shade of the back patio. But most humans — even the Arizonan variety — think of that as on the high side of cozy. So it’s real unlikely that our guy will be around this afternoon.

A fair amount of debris — mostly leaves and pieces of decrepit palm fronds — litters the pool just now. It needs to be vacuumed up, or it will stain the  plaster and get into the machinery, causing all sorts of fun chaos.

I do hope our boy isn’t back in the slam. 

Yeah: a fair number of pool dudes are criminals out on parole. One of the vocational programs the state prisons provide is training in pool cleaning and maintenance. So a lot of these guys are…questionable, one might say.

Welp. What to do now?

Hmmmm…

Give him another week to show up, and if he doesn’t appear by next weekend, lasso in another pool dude.

Should be able to find another of those over at the nearest Leslie’s Pool stores — the Funny Farm is equidistant between two of those. Most of the time you can just walk in and ask the clerk for a referral. but otherwise you can lurk around pretending to study some purchase, and when a guy surfaces, ask him if he wants a job.

And yes: they do all want a job! 😀

Arf! We say…ARF!

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{chortle!} Here we are, back home from the morning Doggy Walk, right along about 7:30 a.m. A little hot & muggy, but not too bad this morning

Yesterday: it was a swamp out there.

Still no sign of Pool Dude. Dayum! I do hope he’s not back in the slam.

I’ll try to call him on and off during they day. If he doesn’t answer…well then, time to find a new Pool Dude.

Darn it! He’s a sweetie, so I hate to lose him, Most of those guys, as it develops, are ex-convicts. Turns out that pool maintenance is one of the careers for which our wise gummint fathers train convicts. So if you hire a pool dude, chances are you’re hiring a record with him.

And chances are he won’t last long in the job.

***** Ooops! ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! *****

WTF?????? It ain’t Monday. Forcrissake, it’s SUNDAY!!!!

Jeez. Who knew?

LOL! apparently Pool Dude knew! 😀

**************

Strolling around the rather pretty ‘Hood: houses built in the 50s to the 70s take on a “historic” look in these parts. So I was reminded of our beloved 1923 house in the historic Encanto neighborhood, a home and a neighborhood I miss to this day.

Gosh, I loved that beautiful old place.

Dear Ex-Husband moved us out of there, to a large degree by telling me we would take our son out of the brain-banging expensive private school where he was going (public schools in Encanto are out of the question) and putting him in one of the perfectly acceptable public schools in North Central.

Turns out he had NO INTENTION of doing so!

And that little deception was one of several factors that led to the end of the marriage.

Truth to tell, even though I loved our gorgeous home and our beautiful historic neighborhood, I didn’t feel safe in Encanto. But frankly i don’t think there are many places where women feel safe. One of our most memorable Encanto adventures occurred when our German shepherd awoke in the middle of the night and EXPLODED into a rage. Roaring like a banshee, she shot up the hallway, where she chased a poor, hapless prowler out of the house.

Then we have the fact tat, bein’ white trash myself, I did NOT fit into tony North Central. One of the bitch neighbors there actually said to me, in casual conversation, that they thought it was such a shame we moved in there, because our presence ruined the neighborhood.

No kidding!!

At least in Encanto, the neighbors were polite to the White Trash.

Oh well. Hereabouts, the question of the day (or of the decade?) is whether I’m going to be able to stay here in my beloved little palace, or whether I’ll be forced to move into one of those dreadful old-folkeries. My son is already yammering about locking me up in one of them, an institution called the Beatitudes.

Ugh! How would I prefer to be dead? Let me count the ways.

I might manage to persuade him to lock me up in the jail of my father’s choice, a single-story spread here in North Central, called Orangewood.

It’s actually not a bad place. My father moved there after my mother died. He was spectacularly miserable there…but not because of the institution itself. What made him miserable was marrying a bi*ch named Helen, who really was…ahem…well…a hag of the first water.

If he hadn’t married Helen, he probably would have been OK there…even very fine. But he’d been married to my mother for something over 30 years. So in his mind “normal” people lived in marital bliss. For a man to live alone without a female helpmeet apparently struck him as abnormal, possibly even bizarre.

Unfortunately, what was “bizarre” was Helen. And their relationship was truly grim, at least from his point of view. He refused our suggestion that he divorce the bi*ch, moaning She’ll get all my money!!! 

The horror of it, eh!

Unfortunately, the horror was being married to Helen, who was one of the meanest human beings I’ve ever met.  He was so miserable with that hag that he used to…oh, get this! If it weren’t so grim, it would be hilarious:

He would tell her he was taking the car to be worked on at the Ford dealership. No kidding!

Then he would go outside to the parking lot, climb into the car, and sit there reading all day long!

After he realized that was a bit transparent, he would drive the car up to one of the city’s many canals, park near a hiking trail, and do the same: just sit there and read all day long!

Ohhh well.

Speaking of “all day long,” I need to quit the endless scribbling and head on over to the Sprouts.  Outta here!

Makes the Old Folkerie Look Good…

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Gawd, I never imagined I’d have any such thought!  But here it is, not even 6 in the morning, and I’m being blitzed with hassle after hassle after HASSLE.

Got to take the dog for a walk before it gets hot — which means we’ve gotta get out the door NOW.

The pool is suffocating in dead leaves. WHERE is Pool Dude????  Amazon just delivered a new net for the leaf catcher, the original having plain worn out. 

Put that out back with a note for Pool Dude. No guarantee the guy is gonna show up.

Pool cleaning is one of the “professions” for which the state prison system trains its residents. So…that means chances are good that your pool cleaner is an ex-convict: not exactly the soul of reliability. I should wait here and see if he shows up, but you KNOW that if I do that, the dog will not get out for her walk. Because…

* The guy won’t show up before 10 a.m., by which time outside temps will be pushing 108 degrees; or
* The guy won’t show up at all.

Meanwhile, to get to the grocery store on foot before it gets too hot to walk up there (my son having purloined my car), I need to get started on that errand NOW.

But I can’t do that and take the dog for a walk. And even if I leave for the store right now, by the time I get back it will be too hot to take Ruby out.

My son is probably right: the time draws nigh when I will no longer be able to stay in my home. I’ll either have to move into an apartment (and what am I gonna do with the dog?) or into an old-folks storage bin (and what am I gonna do with the dog?).

Actually, I think some of those places will let you keep your dog. Ducky: how do you keep her from yappiing at every footfall that comes up the hallway?

Speaking of footfalls: better get the dawg out for her walk before the heat comes up: i.e., NOW.