Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.
UGH! Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.
This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.
Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…
Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.
Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.
Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona! She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.
My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!
LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.
But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.
Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.
She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.
No kidding.
Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .
Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.
And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.
All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.
When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her West-Coast grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.
In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.
Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.
Oh well.
My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.
Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.
And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.
Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.