Speaking of (more or less) resting in peace, as we were the other day…. HOLY mackerel, I just missed the off-ramp to the other world yesterday afternoon.
Went up to the Home Depot north of the Phoenix Mountain Park, in search of a timer for the backyard hose. The old one has conkered out, after years of service. And I really do need a timer on that specific hose, because it’s used to keep the swimming pool filled to the required level.
Driving north on the seven-lane road that leads to the Depot, I approached the east/west main drag that forms a major intersection in front of the store. The light was green in my direction…
And KERZAAAZZZZZZ! Some clown flying low, west-bound, shot through the intersection against the light.
He arrived seconds before I reached the intersection and blasted into two cars that were passing through with the green light. I managed to dodge into a Circle K parking lot, just barely getting out of the way.
Mercifully, I was not called upon to deliver any witness statements — possibly the cops didn’t realize that people in that gas station would have seen the event.
***
Nor, we might add, does the Depot have a hose timer of the (apparently outdated) variety I favor. So it was off to the Ace Hardware store, where they also do not burden their shelves with hose timers.
Welp, just this minute I’m sitting here waiting for a couple of lawyers to show up.
To be more specific; the discussion will concern the mortuary in Sun City where my parents were laid to rest…without my advice, without my specific knowledge.
Not to sound altogether too goddamn embittered, I have to allow that my parents had made arrangements for themselves years before my mother died. And she died years before my father’s unhappy demise. But…
Yeah. But….
Backstory: My mother dies, having smoked herself into eternity. She and my father are living in Sun City by then, and had been there for some time. Among the many wise-old-age things they did while they were dwelling there: they arranged to be cremated and then stored in the local mortuary.
Except…. I don’t know that they both did so that at the time. My mother was stashed in the place. But then my father went off and married the Dragon Lady, about whom (I s’ppose) the less said the better.
When my father died, he was reduced to ashes, dumped into an urn, and set on a shelf next to my mother, as per his wishes. Presumably.
But then…
David Smaug: Dragon
Oh, yes: but then…. when the Dragon Lady died, her relatives arranged to have her cremated and stashed in the same mortuary, on the same shelf with my father and my mother.
It would be hard to describe — certainly not in polite terms — how much I reviled the Dragon Lady. She surely ranked among the meanest human beings you could hope not to meet. She reveled in her cruelty.
My father, after she had thoroughly alienated me from him, came to detest her. He was afraid to divorce her, because — as he put it — “she’ll get all my money!”
This was the great terror of his life: someone getting all his money.
Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to accrue enough to retire on. Given that he didn’t even have a high-school diploma, this was quite a challenge and quite an accomplishment.
I wish I’d been savvy enough to have said to him, “Daddy! Your daughter is married to one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. That woman is NOT gonna get all your money.”
But I didn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do that. Plus interfering in his affairs was not my style. So…stupidly, I let this just float along, as it would.
The relatives had not bothered to tell me when dear Dragon Lady died, nor indeed did they condescend to tell me that they had arranged to have her interred next to him and my mother in the Sun City mausoleum. In fact, it was just recently that I found this out.
*****
Lawyers in, discussion had, lawyers out the door.
It’s going to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to pull this off. My will is going to have to be rewritten. Extracting my parents “cremains” from their prison in Sun City will cost a bundle. And buying space in the church’s graveyard will cost even more.
Maybe it’s not worth the headaches and the dollars. I dunno.
I must say…this makes me mad.
I am angry about it. What excuse did those people have to sneak around and deposit the Dragon Lady next to my father: the Dragon lady who made my father’s last years even more miserable than they needed to be?
Today’s discussion with the lawyers (speaking of “get all my money!”) will set me back $400. They estimate the entire maneuver will run about $4,000.
****
And…the more I think about this, the more I think it’s probably not worth doing. Who cares where their remains are stashed? They’re not alive to know about it. All their other relatives are dead: I’m the only immediate relative who survives either one of them.
And why do I care where their ashes are tucked away? Dead is dead is dead. A few ounces of whatever remains of them won’t bring them back, won’t make them any less dead. They’re not here to appreciate (or not appreciate) taking up residence in the green and quiet church close.
Huh.
Maybe I should just save my money, donate it to the church when the time comes, and let them arrange to celebrate whatever has passed for my life.
So Charley was despatched to his maker this afternoon, a very old and very sick dog.
As it developed, Charley didn’t pass a year ago, when we were told he was dying of megaesophagus. He doddered along, mellow and slow-moving, until today, when M’jihito had to call a vet to come put him to sleep. The dog was fourteen years old, a ripe old age indeed for an overbred beast of 90 pounds.
My son is extremely upset, as you can imagine. Because he works from home — has been doing so since the plague descended on us and his employer, a huge insurance company, realized there’s little or no reason to rent expensive office space for crews of insurance adjusters who do most of their work on the phone or online — he’s had Charley at his side just about 24/7. For years.
Anyway, Son was horribly upset this afternoon, when I last saw him. Don’t know how long — if ever — it will take for him to get over this trauma.
***
We came rather closer than one would like to losing Ruby the Corgi this afternoon, too. Somehow she managed to get inside the closed (I thought!!) pool gate. When I noticed she wasn’t underfoot and went outside to call her, there she was, prancing along the edge of the pool!
HOLY mackerel!
Fortunately, she didn’t fall in. She came a-running when she heard me hollering for her.
Whew! That was close!
***
Beyond close for the beloved Charley, though.
{sigh}
Dunno if my son will get another dog or not. Or if so, when. People respond to the loss of a beloved side-kick in different ways. Some of us run right out and get another pet. Others wait — maybe wait a long time — before taking on a new pal.
M’jihito is fond of pure-bred dogs, and so I imagine that sooner or later he’ll seek out a breeder. He may even have the contact information for the couple who produced Charley. We shall see, in due course
Me: after this, it’s the Humane Society or the pound. I stumbled upon Cassie the Corgi at the Humane Society, where some gracious couple had dumped her by way of punishing their teenaged daughter (can you imagine? they admitted to that in their reason for placing the poor little dog there).
The Humane Society has moved, though. The last time we tried to visit, we couldn’t find it. They’ve shifted it way north, according to their online map. And I’ll be darned if I can see where it is in real life.
No, the world is not coming to an end… Unless someone that you love is coming to an end. Unless that which you know has dissolved into that which you wish you did not know. Unless you miss by-gone friends. Unless…unless…unless…
{sigh}
Just now it feels like all those “unlesses” apply.
Charley in the car
My son’s beautiful dog, Charley the Golden Retriever, has been sliding into superannuated illness for weeks. We’ve expected him to pass, but he has held on. And held on. And held on… Until today he fell and hurt himself, apparently pretty seriously.
Dayum! It looks ominously like he’s on his last paws. My son is beside himself. I don’t know what to say or do to help. Terrible. So very terrible.
Meanwhile…I hurt. And hurt. And hurt. And hurt. Peripheral neuropathy. Cause unclear. Will it go away on its own? Unknown. Will it hang on till I croak over? Unknown. Will it make me want to exit this sylvan vale ASAP? Not so unknown.
So here we are…not exactly ALL Hell breaking loose…but it feels like a significant portion thereof.
I wrote this in response to a question at Quora: “Can you write 100 things about yourself?” Having completed that little challenge, lo! I find Quora won’t let it go online. So…Here ’tis:
*********
Sher.
Just now, my head hurts.
Think that’s prob’ly because of allergies. Everything in sight is blooming just now.
Can’t take an aspirin because when I was a toddler I got into a medicine cabinet and ate a whole bottle of aspirin.
When my mother realized what I’d gotten up to, she rushed me to an ER, where a doctor told her I would be dead by morning.
Strangely, I’m not dead yet, even though several thousand mornings have passed.
The docs told my mother I must never swallow another aspirin pill as long as I live, because it would kill me. They were wrong, oddly enough.
I need another cuppa coffee…hold the phone…
This morning I’ve got to call a lawyer to help me deal with a relative who’s trying to glom possession of my house.
That makes me nervous, because I don’t know the woman lawyer, who was a partner of my dear long-time lawyer. He dropped dead a week or ten days ago.
If I can’t get this woman to work with me, then I will pack up a bunch of belongings, toss them and my dog in the car, and leave the state permanently.
To “lose” any followers, the dog and I will camp for several weeks in the deserts and forests of the Four Corners area.
Where we’ll end up, I have no clue. And really: don’t much care just now.
Now that I’ve managed to regrow my hair to the length where I like(d) it, I’ve decided I don’t much care for it long.
This could be convenient: I could get my hair cut real short on the way out of town, so when the relative in question describes me to the cops and anyone else he tries to set on my trail, he would be describing someone who doesn’t look like me anymore.
There’s a thought: change your hair! OK, why not change the dog’s hair, too? I could either have a groomer shave her fur off short, or I could dye her (very distinctive-looking) fur.
We live in a nice, thirty-year-old tract house on the fringe of an upscale district.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
I grew up hating school, because the brats there thought it was hilarious to tease and torment me for wanting a career as an astronomer.
Back in the Dark Ages when I grew up, girls absolutely positively did NOT get to grow up to be scientists.
As a kid, standardized tests indicated that I was reading at the genius level.
Back in the Dark Ages when I grew up, girls absolutely positively did NOT get to be geniuses of any kind. Well, unless they were geniuses at baking cakes and sewing clothes.
I was pretty good at baking cakes.
But I hated sewing clothes.
My father never knew I found out where he hid his revolver.
Back in those same Dark Ages, I had an elaborate, highly specific plan to run away: tie together a raft of palm spines (used to build fencing in our camp), add a home-made sail, launch it from the beach (about two blocks from our company house), and sail away into the distance. Follow the edge of the continent to where I could cross over and land on the shore of Alaska; continue south into California. Get a dog. Live my life as Little Orphan Annie.
Just now, my hip hurts. Probably osteoporosis. More than probably…
The ongoing headache: probably allergies.
If I weren’t so lazy, I’d get off my duff and take the dog for two-mile walk through the nearby desert preserve.
But I ain’t a-gonna, because the last time I went hiking up there, some S.H. (not realizing I was old enough to be his grandmother) followed me through the desert. When I ducked down into an arroyo before he rounded a hill that briefly blocked his view of me, he stood for a good 15 minutes on that trail, obviously searching for me.
I’m a talented writer, widely published in consumer and trade periodicals, with three books in print.
But I can’t do math to save my life.
I never carry cash with me.
Consequently, I never dispense hand-outs to the legions of panhandlers who pester us whenever we walk across a grocery-store parking lot.
The top of the block wall between my place and the neighbors is lined with carpet tack strips, to keep out the neighboring Cat Lady’s little furry friends, which otherwise would use my vegetable garden as their latrine and kill all the birds that visit my yard.
The neighbor between my house and the Cat Lady’s house hates wild birds almost as much as she hates Cat Lady’s furry pals.
I don’t much like the skylights in this house: They’re classy and stylish and they light up the kitchen, dining-room, and family room very nicely, but they also let in heat.
If I have to run away to keep from being consigned to an old-folks’ home, I definitely will pass through the Navajo Reservation and, while there, buy another beautiful Navajo weaving.
As you might guess by that, I do love the Navajo rugs I bought there some years ago. They now grace walls in the family room and my office.
I refuse to pay for television. Period.
When our Honored Leaders took free TV away from us (nowadays you have to subscribe to cable in order to get a signal here), I just stopped watching television.
Well. Except for the TV I could download into my computer.
Having realized how b-o-o-o-o-ring most on-air TV is, I totally lost my taste for the “entertainment” that used to fill my every evening. Now I watch PBS News on my desktop, and…well…that’s about it. Even Masterpiece Theater isn’t worth sitting in front of a computer to watch.
But gosh, I do miss Dragnet. Strangely, after all these years I now think that was my all-time hands-down favorite TV show.
My favorite magazine is The Economist.
The magazines where I used to work as a staff editor — Phoenix Magazine and Arizona Highways — bore me stupid. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why anyone would pay to subscribe to those things.
Actually, Highways is probably tolerable because of its superb photography. The copy? hmmmm….
And speaking of for-the-life-of-me mysteries, I can not understand why on earth anyone would want to lay down wall-to-wall carpets throughout a house. Tile flooring is sooooo much easier to keep clean! And if your feet are cold? Hey: ever heard something called “slippers”? 😀
My mother believed her mother died in early middle-age, supposedly of a uterine cancer. But I discovered — another miracle of the Internet — that she did NOT die in the late 1920s or early ’30’s , but in fact was still living when my son (her grandson) was born in 1979.
Astonished by this little revelation, I continued poking around in historic documents and discovered that she married a prominent San Francisco businessman.
Two streets converge in downtown San Francisco: one bears her first name and the other bears her and her husband’s last name.
They meet in front of the bank where my highly independent great-aunt spent most of her adult life working as the bank president’s executive secretary.
That aunt’s brother — my great-uncle — designed the Morrison Planetarium.
I have always wished I could live in the beautiful house he and his wife built in the Sausalito hills.
I’d ‘druther live with my dawg than another human, any day.
Helle’s Belles! Here comes another cop helicopter. He’s about a block away…and here we go again.
Glad the dawg and I went outside to do her business 15 minutes or so ago. Otherwise a plugged-up pooch and I could be stuck inside the house for quite awhile.
Verging on Old As the Hills, I still have brown hair with blonde highlights. Gosh! My mother had gone completely gray by the time she reached my age.
Well. Before she reached my age. She died nine years before she got that far.
I find it hard to forgive her for smoking herself to death. She died nine years before her only grandchild was born. That doesn’t make any difference to the kid, though. But her peculiarly baroque style of suicide put my father through the tortures of the damned. And that is, yes: hard to forgive.
I have yet to figure out how to get rid of the resident roof rats, some of whom have taken up residence in the attic. The exterminator I hired couldn’t do it, either.
Corgis love to chase rats. A delighted corgi does a surprisingly good job at reducing the ratty population. Ergo: I love my corgi even more now than I did before our ratties came along.
My brilliant cleaning lady is absolutely positively a gift from heaven.
I need to track down a mortician or three and make pre-arrangements for my eventual exit from this earthly plane.
Though I’d love to have my ashes interred in the church close, they charge FIFTEEN HUNDRED BUCKS for the privilege. So…I reckon my cremains will be flying off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, there to join the ashes of my former mother-in-law, who was similarly disposed of.
I sure do miss singing on the church choir. Had to quit when the plague came up, though. It turns out choral singing is one of the most dangerous things you can do during time of contagion. And I’m highly susceptible to respiratory infections. (See above: parental smoking habit.)
Speaking of the which, I’m still enjoying the aftereffects of the Covid infection I caught way back last autumn. Ugh!
I had perfect teeth until was in my 30s.
Now that I’m old, my teeth hurt.
So does just about everything else, come to think of it. 😀
Tomorrow — today, actually, it now being 4:19 a.m. as I continue to scribble this — I need to call a mortician (where? who??) and make arrangements to have my remains disposed of.
I do not want to be laid to “rest” (does an urnful of ashes rest??) in Sun City, where my parents are at the Sunland Mortuary.
Because I hated living in Sun City, the prospect of spending eternity in Whiteyville, where the residents went to hide from anyone and everyone who was at all different from them, makes me cringe.
Plus I discovered that my father’s third wife’s idiot relatives have deposited her urn-full of ashes next to him, out there in Sun City.
She was meaner than Pussley and made the last years of his life miserable. And now she’s out there with him and with my mother????? Holeee shee-ut!
I’d like to be laid to rest in my church’s close, but recently learned the privilege costs fifteen hundred dollars. That’s fifteen hundred bucks that could and should go to my son.
So tomorrow — well, today, after the sun comes up — I need to start calling around to find out about disposing of my earthly remains with the least amount of cost and headache for my son.
Peripheral neuropathy hurts, hurts, and then hurts some more.
I’m getting exceptionally tired of hurting.
This makes the approaching end of my story look a lot less daunting than it would if life didn’t hurt all the time.
I waste WAY too much time writing Quora posts!
It occurs to me that I should paste this post into my blog, Funny about Money. Probably more folks would read it there than will read it on Quora.
Not that it matters much, in the large scheme of things.
That said, let us emphasize: this post is copyrighted by ME, not by Quora, and may be reproduced only with my permission.
Have you noticed that a standard typewriter/computer keyboard doesn’t include a copyright symbol? It has an “at” symbol (which Quora won’t let me type here without dorking up and snafuing the formatting!), but it does not have a copyright symbol.
I’m going to be peculiarly pissed if I discover that $1500 is cheap for getting rid of one’s earthly remains.
Do you ever wonder why humans have to use EVERY opportunity, no matter how crass, to make money?
I wonder what it would cost — if it could be done at all — to move my parents’ remains from the Sun City mortuary over to the church’s close?
But on second and third thoughts, that wouldn’t be very respectful. My father loathed organized religion, his mother having been relieved of a substantial fortune by scammers who made her believe they could talk to the dead.
No kidding. He described their pretending to levitate the dining-room table.
She was a half-Indian woman — Choctaw, far as I can tell — and apparently quite vulnerable to woo-woo dispensed by white scammers.
Her father’s family was named Donner. This is a weird coincidence, since my mother had ancestors who were in the ill-fated Donner party that got lost in the Sierra Nevadas and ate each other by way of trying to survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
The sky is lightening up. The birds are starting to sing. Morning is dawning, like the first day…
Today is Tuesday. It will be largely consumed by the search for a new lawyer to replace my beloved lawyer, who dropped dead a few weeks ago.
I need a lawyer to be sure the changes we made to my will actually DID get filed with the state.
Have you noticed that whatever you have to do, it ALWAYS ends up having to be done the hard way?
And can you believe that once it was safe enough here to leave the backyard gate unlocked?
Now the alleys are infested with homeless transients and burglars. No one in their right mind would leave the gates to their backyard without padlocks.
Yes. When you’ve lived in a neighborhood long enough to become a historic fixture, your brain is filled with layer on layer on layer of memories.
Just now the adorable young father of the incredibly adorable young kids in the house behind us, spouse of the spectacularly adorable young mother, is out in the backyard mowing grass. The kids are giggling and hollering and carrying on. The sun is setting and the evening is turning to dusk.
Oh, my,… HOW Sally, the former resident of that house, would be delighted to have that lovely young family in there. She and her room-mate: oh indeed, they would be thrilled.
The two women were grade-school teachers. Old Maids. Having never married, when they met each other on the job and figured they could tolerate each others’ company, they decided to go in together to buy a house in a lower-middle-income neighborhood of lovely (ahem: terrifying) Sunnyslope.
As it developed, SDXB moved in right straight across the street after I booted him out of my house, a block to the north and a block to the west.
So it was that we became friends with the Old Maids. And what fine neighbors they were.
Sally’s companion eventually passed away. Sally, seeing the end in sight herself, sold the place and moved into an old-folkerie. Time passed. SDXB, in terror of Tony the Romanian Landlord (he who threatened the judge in the lawsuit we won), moved to Sun City. I, having lived in Sun City once and decided that was quite enough, refused to go. Instead, I got out a number of…uhm, toys…armed myself to the teeth, scared the sh!t out of my lawyers, and cooed, Tony, make my day!
One of Tony’s sterling characteristics — he has several — is that he is no fool. Yea verily: he is very, very smart. That being the case, he proved it by refraining to commit any new criminal frolics.
The dust has now settled. Tony and his lovely Pretty Daughter are deeply engaged in building their rental empire, and I’m still here. And…no one has had to make my day. ;-D
Because — of course — Tony is no fool.
Tony’s sweet and intelligent and horribly beaten-down Other Daughter lives two doors up the street from the Funny Farm. She is an excellent human being, IMHO. If I dared…if she dared…we would make good friends.
Oh, well.
The upshot is, she and I are not enemies. 😀
***
I don’t know if Tony is a good man. But I believe he is more than that: he is a great man.
Yes. In his context, he is a great man. He has accomplished feats that you and I could only fantasize about….partly because we couldn’t conceive of them and then, even if we did, couldn’t figure out how to pull them off, and partly — mostly — because none of us would be willing to work that hard.
Seriously: the things he has accomplished have simply defied belief. And if you stood back and watched him, the sheer amount of hard work he poured into those feats would boggle your little Yankee mind. He is, truly, an incredible man.
****
Is that why I’m not afraid of him?
Possibly. I’d like to say I’m not afraid of him much. I’d like to say I respect his intelligence and his ambition enough to know he’s not doing to fuck himself up.
But then there’s my Daddy. Yeah. The Daddy who taught me not to to be afraid of a helluva lot.
Who knows?
The truth is, Tony is dangerous. The truth is, Tony is too smart to engage that quality. The truth is, Tony is not gonna put all that he’s worked so hard for at risk. The truth is, my Daddy was right: stand your ground. The truth is, because Tony is no fool, he’s not very dangerous.
Bless’im.
Ohhh those beautful playing children. How I wish Sally could be here to be the melody of their laughing!
