LOL! The elder generation in my family is now long “late.” But I can remember when our best friends Barbara and Larry used to get together with us in the days after the official holiday for a “Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over” celebration.
Barbara and I could cook — and I mean really cook. We were part of the generation of young professionals who became entranced by Julia Child and friends. Both of our mothers, the distaff side of a working-class generation, could put out a tasty and workpersonlike meal in the Joy of Cooking tradition. Barbara and I stood on their shoulders and engaged Julia Child.
So needless to say, the bland, sawdust-flavored turkey, the predictable mashed potatoes and beans, the gooey-sugary punkin pie were less than perfectly thrilling for us. By the same token, a swell-elegant Julia Child spread was equally lost on our relatives.
Nevertheless, we and our husbands would dutifully go to the November 25 family shindigs. And then as soon as the obsequies were done, it was THANK GOD THANKSGIVING IS OVER time. TGTGIO!
The following weekend, we would spend half the day in her kitchen or mine, cooking up some fantastic creation that actually had…you know…flavor.
Alas, those days are past. Our parents are dead and gone, as are mine and my father’s third wife and her daughter and grandson and son-in-law. (Those were folks who thought a saline-saturated Butterball turkey steamed half the day in a hot pot and served up with a Jell-O salad was delicious!) Barbara got mad at me for reasons I never have understood, and to this day refuses to speak to me. Besides, in the absence of Thanksgiving, of course, there can be no TGTGIO.
Of late, though, my son’s friends have developed a kind of substitute. The young people put on a big feast at one couple’s home, out in a North Phoenix suburb. It’s quite lovely! They invite all the aged relatives and a bunch of family friends. The kids are milling around merrily — by now, alas, they’re teenagers, but presumably in a few years they’ll be having their own TG dinners with their own little kids milling around. People bring stuff, creating a kind of potluck to complement the extraordinary turkey the young father cooks up in the brick oven he built in the backyard.
The company is good. The food is excellent. And unlike the traditional build-up to TGTGIO, it’s something to look forward to.
I sent the same message, by email, to District 3 and District 5 councilindividuals, since Gangbanger’s Way runs east/west through both of those sylvan neighborhoods.
From one of these worthies, I heard nothing.
From the other, I heard a whinge to the effect that the city just doesn’t have enough funding to pay the cops to ride herd on drag racing. Or much of anything else.
Yeah. She actually said that.
In writing.
Apparently, the one who had nothing to say was the one who realized actions speak louder than words.
Along about 10:30 or 11 p.m. last night, once again up rose the ROOOOAAAAAR from the impromptu race track. I was reading. Figure that eventually I would have to cover my head with a pillow in an effort to get to sleep…which would as usual be a forlorn effort.
I continued to fiddle with whatever was amusing me…and…
About 15 or 20 minutes later, all of a sudden the race-track roar STOPPED!
Hey!
Is it possible that the one who didn’t bother to respond to my grutch instead used his energy to browbeat the policia?
I waited for the festivities to resume.
Minutes passed.
A quarter-hour passed.
Forty-five minutes passed.
Silence!
A miracle of silence!
Sooo…apparently that Dear-Sir [or Madame]-You-Cur letter WORKED! We’ll see tonight, if the racket resumes.
But if the racket does resume, the correspondence from the ‘Hood will resume.
The’Hood extends across two Phoenix City Council Districts: District 3 and District 5. So if we have something to grouse about, we have to rattle the cages of not one but two elected representatives. As you can imagine, this tends to discourage the locals from grousing.
But my gawd! There IS a limit.
Of late, a merrie band of drag-racers has taken up the habit of nightly hot-rod races, down Conduit of Blight and across Gangbanger’s way. They start at sundown and roar back and forth well into the night. Apparently the cops do nothing to discourage this party.
The reason, one surmises, is that the wonderful drag-race track that once stood out in a cornfield over on the west side was torn down to make way for tracts of stick-and-styrofoam houses. The voices of developers, in these parts, speak far louder than the voice of an unmuffled hot rod engine.
Hence, the latest missal to our elected representatives, Betty Guardado and Debra Stark:
Dear Ms. (Fill in the Blank):
Why exactly is nothing being done about the nightly drag races along Gangbanger’s Way west of Central and and along Conduit of Blight from Gangbanger’s to points south?
I live a good mile from Gangbanger’s and at least a half-mile from Conduit of Blight, and EVERY EVENING that racket keeps me awake into the middle of the night. The horrific uproar penetrates through solid block walls, double-paned windows, and a heavily insulated attic.
Conduit of Blight is lined with apartment buildings, mostly inhabited by working folks. Because there’s a school right next to those apartments, many of the residents there have children. How would YOU like to have to wrestle your kids out of bed at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning after they’ve been kept awake half the night by screaming hot-rods?
Is the refusal to patrol and limit those drag races a class thing, a malicious thing, or just an ignorance thing on the part of our fine city leaders?
Now, I enjoy watching drag races myself, and if it were safe for a single woman to be out and about at 10, 11, or midnight in this corner of North Central, I probably would get up, get dressed, and trek down there to watch the show. But OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IS NOT A RACE TRACK.
Why exactly was the wonderful race track over on the far west side shut down? That was a perfect answer to the problem: hot-rod lovers got to show off their toys and race them, it was one heckuva lot of fun, and the show did not have to go on under anyone’s bedroom windows.
And what excuse IS there for not having the police keep this illegal use of the city streets under control?
If the city has an excuse to offer, please explain it.
This, of course, will elicit no response, or at least none with any teeth in it. Elected reps here in lovely Arizona — especially city council members — tend to rest cozily in the pockets of amply moneyed interests. They do not CARE that the children of the hoi and the polloi are kept up until midnight. Even the moderately affluent voters of the outer reaches of ritzy North Central don’t have much heft with these people. If you’re not a developer, you really don’t count.
But I suppose it’s worth occupying 30 seconds of their time — or their secretary’s time — to pester them with a letter.
Walking the dog this morning, I fell into a reverie about my father and his life’s ambitions…this, stemming from the realization that my house, all by its little self, is worth FIVE AND A HALF TIMES the amount he had set himself as a goal to accumulate so that he could retire.
And “retire” was his life’s goal: he just wanted to quit working.
Quite reasonably: his job was hard (most of us would find it grinding), it kept him at sea most of his life, and at heart the man was a homebody.
He had dropped out of high school and lied about his age to get into the Navy by way of running away from home. So as you can imagine, he was not a real sophisticated guy when it came to things that you and I might have learned in high school and college, or in the sort of jobs we would have had as adults. He didn’t understand, for example, about inflation. For him, a dollar was a dollar and always would be a dollar.
He figured that if he could accumulate, in savings, $100,000, he would have it made. Whenever he reached that goal, at whatever age it happened, he would quit his job and retire to Possum Kingdom. 😀
Once $8,000 would buy you this house…
Well, Sun City came along at just about the time he was approaching his goal. He thought that was a grand idea: cheap houses and no damn kids barreling around outside squealing and laughing.
When he retired, he did have that hundred grand — and then some. As I recall, it was about a hundred & ten.
He worked SO hard. A ship’s deck officer worked 24/7, with crushing responsibility for a multi-miillion-dollar vessel filled with enough oil to destroy a hundred miles of coastline.
This line of thought arose when, God only knows why, I recalled how angry my mother used to make him when she would go out and diddle away some phenomenal amount of money on make-up or clothes. She loved make-up, probably because her endlessly toxic smoking habit had wrecked her complexion and traced a road map of wrinkles over her face. I can remember one time, when we were living in Southern California and I was in high school, we went into a department store and she spent two hundred dollars on makeup.
$8,000 wouldn’t buy you the front porch at this place…not today!
How much was that, really? Well… Two hundred bucks in 19 and aught 60 was worth $1,853.45 in 2021 dollars.
Holeeeee crap!!! Can you imagine? It’s a wonder she survived…clearly the man was a marvel of self-restraint.
Redfin thinks my little house is now worth $579,225. Well over FIVE TIMES the net worth he figured would sustain him from the age of about 55 through his dotage until he toppled over into the grave.
It didn’t, of course. He ended up having to go back to work, not so much because of inflation but because — another outcome of his financial naiveté — he had almost all his savings invested in insurance securities, which tanked shortly after he quit.
Never put all your eggs in one basket…
Wow. It’s hard to believe I am SO OLD that as I was entering adulthood a grown man could, quite reasonably, figure he could retire on a fraction of what my house alone is worth. A tract house that is most certainly not Mrs. Gotrocks’ dream home!
Their little house cost $8,000 when it was new. Redfin thinks it’s worth $274,000 now. That’s pretty cheap for middle-class housing hereabouts. Cheap because…well…Sun City. 😉
SDXB wants me to move out there, partly to get away from Tony the Romanian Landlord (who busies himself just now with installing a nursing home two houses up the street) and partly, o’course, because you can’t beat the price of the real estate there. But oh, my…Sun City.
I just do NOT want to live in a ghetto for old folks. This morning as Ruby and I were strolling around, we passed pretty houses with irrigated lawns, and xeric yards with lush trees and shrubbery. (Yards in Sun City are “desert landscaped” with gray gravel. Or gravel dyed green, presumably to ape the look of a lawn.) Stopped to chat with a neighbor who was having her kitchen cabinets refinished — woo HOO! Gossiped while we watched the carpenter work. Watched a nitwit roar up Feeder Street N/S on an unmuffled motorcycle. Frolicked around a grassy public park (there is no grass in Sun City, except on the private golf courses where no, your dog is not allowed). We admired a gaggle of little kids playing on the swings and slide (no, your kids are not allowed in SC, either). Roamed into the Richistans where we assessed the progress of a spectacular renovation job (no, there are no Richistans in Sun City: the houses are all of a kind). Hopped in the car and darted down to AJ’s (no, there are no AJ’s grocers in Sun City or anywhere near it) and bought a roll of spectacularly expensive dog food for the Queen of the Universe.
Yes. I could bank about $275,000 if I sold the Funny Farm and moved to Sun City.
But between you’n’me, I don’t think it’s worth the cost.
I do NOT know what, if anything, can be done about Tony’s empire-building at the expense of all the other neighbors’ property value … or even if it will come at our expense. But I do know I don’t wanna live in Sun City, no matter how much cash I can pocket by selling this place and moving out there.
But still, the thought lingers:I am SOOO OLD I can remember when a brand-new middle-class house cost eight grand, and when a house just like mine (same model, same size, same tract) cost a mere one hundred grand. And when a bag of make-up worth $200 would have bought you a freakin’ trip to Switzerland.
Every now and again, I think about my mother. And I wonder.
Did she kill herself on purpose?
Like today’s political conservatives who disbelieve and reject what the CDC says about covid-19, she and her cohort disregarded what a government agency said about tobacco smoking. Stupidity, ignorance, cant…whatever you want to call it…the effect was the same. Science meant nothing to her. Facts meant nothing to her. The obvious meant nothing to her. She would do as she pleased and would hear not a word to the contrary from Big Brother.
***
My father, who went to sea until a few years before she developed the cancer that would kill her, apparently wasn’t paying attention. Evidently it never registered: the only conscious moments she spent without a cigarette in her hand were when she was in the shower and when she was stuffing food into her face.
Otherwise…first thing in the morning she lit up a cigarette, before she lifted her head from the pillow, and the last thing she did before she turned off the nightstand light was to smash out the cigarette she was smoking to see off the day. She puffed away until food was on the table, and the instant she put her fork down after a meal, she lit up another cigarette. Once she was at my house for 40 minutes…by the time she left, the seven-inch-wide ashtray on the coffee table was full to overflowing with butts smoked all the way down to the filter.
Even though he smoked, too, how could he not have noticed how extreme her habit was?
But he didn’t. Oddly enough.
🙁
You only just now noticed? How could you have missed it? Did you, seriously, never pay any attention to her? Maybe that’s why she spent most of her adult life committing slow-motion suicide?
One of the disturbing things that happens to you as you enter your dotage is that everyday tools, objects you use in your plain old domestic life, disappear from the market. Case in point: the ordinary, boring, indispensable wet mop.
Last time the Luz the Wondrous Cleaning Lady visited, she remarked that our mop is…well, a “late” mop.
Shot.
Kaput.
Done for.
Suspecting that a Walmart in a working-class neighborhood would be likely to carry the sturdiest and the worthiest of mops on the market, I dropped by our nearby Walmart supermarket and picked up a new mop head. Proudly presented that to her.
Wrong!
It had a round fitting. Ours has a long flat fitting.
Mops come in two designs. Who knew?
So this morning I went in search of a correctly designed mop head.
Started at the Lazy Broad’s Supermarket: Amazon.
Mop heads? We ain’t got no steenkin’ mop heads!
Well, they do. But none of them were in the desired style to fit our existing mop handle thingie.
Uhmmm… Ohhhkayyyy…none o’ that, then. How about a whole new mop in the desired style?
Noooooo…. Not so much. Look up “wet mop” and you get a plethora (ain’t that a grand word?) of round things that look like dustmops.
AMAZON doesn’t have ordinary boring kitchen floor MOPS???????
Well, evidently not. Not so’s I could find, anyhow.
Finally I stumbled upon one (count it: 1) classic janitor’s-style wet mop. Hang onto your hat, now…
The price was FIFTY BUCKS!
For a frikkin’ MOP!
I personally don’t care for machines. They’re heavy, they’re a nuisance with their damn cords trailing around under your feet and their pesty water vats, and they’re pointlessly expensive. Okay, not as pointlessly expensive as fifty dollah for a wet mop. But still…
Now, I could get down on hands and knees and scrub the damn kitchen floor with microfiber rags and Simple Green. But there’s not a chance in Hell that I’m gonna ask the Cleaning Lady from Heaven to do any such thing!
Off to the Target on 19th Avenue, in the moribund Chris-Town shopping center at 19th and Camelback.
The beloved Costco and the Penney’s in that historic shopping center closed their doors some months ago. Result: the whole damn place has withered. It appears that the Target is about the only establishment still open there. That and a spectacularly tacky Walmart. And it is not what you would call “heavily trafficked.”
Finally I locate the cleaning gear, and in amongst it find the mops: $22 for a stick with a wad of strings on the end.
Holy shee-ut.
Twenty.
Two.
Bucks.
FOR A MOP!
Think of that.
The mop is now acquired. However, it does appear that this is the last mop we’re gonna own. Next floor-cleaning device, I guess, is going to have to be something that plugs into an electric socket.
Lhudly sing good grief!
