Coffee heat rising

Où sont les amours de lointain?

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“Where are the loves of yesteryear”… Ever amuse yourself on the Internet for an hour or two looking up old lovers — les amours de lointain? What a bizarre experience.

Every time. Some would say that’s because my amours of yesteryear were themselves bizarre. Which would, one might admit, be to a degree true.

Today I took it into my bored little head to look up a man I dated throughout my junior and senior years at the august University of Arizona. Let’s just call him “Bob.”

I met Bob at the campus swimming pool, where I spent a fair amount of the summer session between my sophomore and junior years hanging out. He was older than me, handsome, and ever on the make. I had pretensions of smartness, was moderately cute, and had a 20-inch waist and big boobs. An affaire de coeur quickly coalesced. We became a Thing, and we remained Thingly for most of my undergraduate career.

My parents hated Bob. They had, we might quietly remark, no clue how much better he was than Jim, the sh!thead who was my sophomore-year heart-throb. At least Bob didn’t end up in the slam…look at it that way. My mother adored Jim. Handsome, charming, rugged, sleazy Jim. She never heard about his rather spectacular experience with the Highway Patrol. Historic, some might say…

Think of that. She lived the rest of her life without ever knowing him well. 😀 Thank God!

But back to Bob. My parents intuited, on sight, that this guy was a low-key scoundrel. That, I thought — and to this day feel — was an over-reaction. He was a jerk. But as scoundrels go, he really would have had to work to rise to the level of some of the charmers that inhabited the landscape of my life.

At the time I met Bob, he was in his junior or senior year at the University of Arizona. I was a preternaturally advanced student in French, a language that I spoke fluently, and was headed for a richly funded three-year Ph.D. program. I doubt if he really understood what that meant, because in those days women were not expected to have careers — certainly not as university professors — except that it kept me hanging around lovely Tucson all year. Bob was not the kind of guy who came from a background where women did anything other than clean house, f*ck, and raise children. But then, that was about all my parents really expected of me. Far as they were concerned, I was at the UofA to find a man, not to get some exotic graduate degree that would prepare me to do…what? Teach high-school French?

To give you the same introduction to Bob’s character that I had: Bob paid his way through the University — covering out-of-state tuition, which was as stiff in those days as it is now — by stealing hub caps.

Yes. That was his job at the time: hub-cap thief. So successful was he that at one point along the line the Tucson newspaper ran a story about the shocking rash of hub-cap thefts in the city. Bob knew a fence who would buy as many hub-caps as he could steal…and he stole a lot of them, obviously.

He was pretty good at stealing. Once I was in the university bookstore with him. He picked up some book off a rack — as I recall, it looked like an expensive textbook — and slipped it under the letter-jacket that he always wore. Zipped up the jacket three-quarters of the way and coolly stood in line with me at the cashier’s counter as I paid for the stack of textbooks I was buying. Not a blink. He did the same at the library, except that we didn’t have to go past a cashier.

So it was that Bob was single-handedly responsible for all those annoying exit-door alarms in every bookstore and library across the country…

Bob being my first real boyfriend, I was hopelessly enamored of him. And one must say, he was one studly fella.

Yet as time passed, I began to see him in a less and less Valentine-pink light. Stealing from the bookstore? Stealing hubcaps? Okay, that was interesting, kind of picaresque.

But then came the time that I was offered an opportunity to spend my junior year in France. This was outside the usual university-sponsored junior-year-in-Wherever program. One of my friends, who was French, had come to the UofA the year before. Her parents, out of…je ne sais quoi — gratitude? ignorance? some sort of scam? offered to let me spend the year in their apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a rather fancy neighborhood. We might say.

Not being the adventurous type and having seen the world several times around, thankyouverymuch, I failed to see the amazingness of this opportunity. But Bob sure did. And he wanted to go along.

So, he proposed a strategy: I would get a grant or scholarship to support me in France for a semester or (preferably) a year, I would stay in this place in Neuilly for free, and he would come along with me. We would live together in Paris for a year…on the money I would collect from the proposed scholarship.

Got it? This dude proposed to sponge off his girlfriend for a year in France.

I declined the opportunity.

But I did not decline to continue the love affair.

This amour continued through my junior year. Bob was a year ahead of me. He lived with two other guys in a shabby apartment off-campus — standard shabby student housing — and I lived in the dorm, as all unmarried female students were required to do at the time.

The first time I began to have really serious doubts about the guy — can you imagine not having such doubts after it became obvious that if I married him I would never see my parents again, or that he was a professional thief, or that he figured it was OK to sponge off an 18-year-old girl? — came when he delivered an admiring report about an escapade on the part of his best buddy. Said buddy had married a young woman and they were living happily ever after in lovely Tucson. After they were wed, she became pregnant — as young wives were expected to do, back in the mid-1960s. She grew quite large with this pregnancy, so that toward the end she was not able to accommodate his persistent desires for sex. So, buddy had bragged to Bob, he betook himself to a bar, picked up a chippy, and got it off with her. Bob thought that was brilliant!

He went on and on about what a brave, fine, and righteous thing it had been for this guy to relieve himself in the vagina of some chickadee he’d picked up at a bar, while his wife was left at home — presumably cleaning house or washing the dinner dishes and lugging her vast belly around.

That was the point where I first thought, seriously, “hmmm…maybe Daddy is right about this clown.”

Then we had the draft issue.

The Vietnam War was still in progress, and young men were being drafted and sent off to be sacrificed in the meat grinder of Southeast Asia. Bob had no moral qualms about the war — he did not oppose it on ethical grounds. He probably didn’t oppose it at all. But he absolutely positively had no intention of going to Vietnam.

By then, I had realized that I was not going to marry the guy — men could still avoid the draft if they were married. Luckily, the government changed that rule right about then, so getting me to marry him would not have kept him out of the army. But…being enrolled as a student would still protect you from the draft.

So, Bob came up with another plan: graduate school.

A student, Bob was not. I was attending lectures for about half his classes, taking notes, and writing his papers. He was barely managing to pass the mid-terms and finals. But because I could generate passing grades for his courses while I was asleep, he did finish a bachelor’s degree in business management — the standard rubber-stamp degree for young males at the time. The second-to-last thing on this earth Bob wanted to do was take more coursework. The last was to fight in Vietnam.

So, he decided, he would enroll in a master’s degree in the dumbedest-down, most Mickey-Mouse graduate program he could think of: elementary education. This would protect him for at least another two years. Assuming he could avoid the draft at that time, he would then take a job at some school with the goal of parlaying his B.S. in business into a principal’s job within a few years. Principals, he reasoned, earned a living wage, unlike teachers. He was accustomed to living on next to nothing, and so he would put up with the low pay until he could get into an administrative position: that would be far better than a tour of Vietnam.

Dumbed-down and Mickey-Mouse were les mots justes for a course of graduate studies in elementary ed at the UofA’s College of Education. Incredibly, the guy earned three units of graduate-level credit for a course in bulletin-board making!

No joke: graduate credit for sticking little cut-out felt figures on a corkboard!

That academic year ended. I took one summer session in Tucson but then had to go home to lovely Sun City for the remainder of the summer break. This gave my parents a chance to have at me. By the time we returned to class in the fall, the scales had fallen (or been ripped) from my eyes, and I told Bob to get lost. He was shattered. I was sad, but convinced my parents were right: l-o-o-o-s-e-r.

A lifetime has passed. Occasionally I wonder what happened to him. At one point while I was working at the Great Desert University in lovely Tempe, I looked him up and discovered, to my amazement, that he, too, was on that campus. He had some kind of nondescript administrative job.

Today I decide, out of (altogether-too-) idle curiosity, to look up old Bob and see what became of him. And lo! where should I find him (where else) but on LinkedIn.

Just now? He’s an associate vice-chancellor at the University of California campus where my cousin and her mother went to school. Before that: same position, only at Santa Cruz, where he spent four years in a job with the same title. He only lasted one year at Oregon State, doing something unmentioned for some foundation. Three years as associate vice president of a Florida university. And three years in that assistant vice-dean position at the Great Desert University.

Sure am glad I didn’t have to follow that character all over the country, these past few decades. Santa Cruz might have been nice. But Davis…not so much, probably. Certainly not in his company. 😀

As for the drug dealer? What happened to him?

That guy was a Republican Party operative during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. He and his associates were responsible for a variety of “dirty tricks” (yes, they called it that even then) employed to get Goldwater nominated over the rival candidate. His mentor was a member of the Arizona House of Representatives, who was a first-class sleaze. One of this boyfriend’s jobs was to scout up prostitutes and other willing adventuresses to serve as escorts for visiting Republican bigwigs, to keep the guests entertained while they were in Arizona.

A few months after I married my husband, the friend who had introduced me to that Republican worthy called on the phone with news.

“Did you read the story in the paper about Jimmy?” All excited…

“Uhm…no…”

“He was just arrested driving across the California desert with the largest haul of cocaine that has ever been nabbed!”

Yep. That was Jim. Never did things small.

Last time (and the first time, come to think of it) I looked him up online, which was a couple years ago, he had turned to charitable works after he got out of the slam. He was somewhere in New Mexico, serving as an executive director for some nonprofit working on one of the Indian reservations. What exactly this outfit did was unclear.

Today? No sign of him, that I can find. Or care to spend enough time trying to find.

You thought YESTERDAY was another lovely day in Arizona?

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Hah! Every day is lovelier than the next. Check out this little fella..

….and tell me if you don’t think our sweet pet Rattie isn’t one helluva lot cuter than that rat…

Which is cuter? Rat 1 or Rat 2?

Rat 1’s handsome profile was captured early of a fine Arizona day on a neighbor’s security camera.

See that thing in his hand? That’s not a Budweiser…that’s a pistol, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.

The gate he’s coming out of? That’s an alleyway entry to a neighbor’s backyard. The photo was caught yesterday by someone’s security camera and posted to the neighborhood Facebook page. Said the proprietor: “This individual was spotted at approximately 7:25 this morning exiting our backyard at our home on El Caminito Dr. I did not see any evidence on any of our security cameras of this gentleman entering our backyard.”

At first I thought it was our boy, the one the cops were chasing around yesterday. But now I think this fella is a little older than that kid, healthier-looking, somewhat better built. So we have not one but two of ‘em frolicking around the alleys.

Meanwhile…the evening sun is sinking like a red-rubber pie tin. The air is still thick and brown from the smoke drifting across from the West Coast, the sun so dim you can stare right straight at it. Though one (who does not suffer from asthma) has no problem breathing it, the stuff out there can’t be very good for you.

My plan is to catch Rat 2 and stick her in a cage with a big bowl of bird seed (she loves bird seed) and a bag of oranges (she adores oranges), toss her and the dog in the car, and start driving driving driving. Patagonia, here we come!

Hummer heaven: Patagonia

Another lovely day in Arizona…

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So along about 3 or 4 a.m. I happened to remark to a correspondent that the day was shaping up to be a Day from Hell…

Chortle! One should never say things like that. God finds those one-liners too, too funny.

Well, wait though: Her practical jokesterism at least did not extend to conkering out the car. That’s good, no?

Dawn cracked, and I decided to try to find out what could be done about the propane bottle that developed a weird leak after the barbecue cleaning dude reattached it to the system. This was about as fruitful as you might imagine any bureaucratic exercise to be. After jumping through a long and pointless series of phone hoops, I gave up with the city. Called Gerardo, who said he would don his Superman cape and fly over this afternoon. This was another exercise in futility, but as it develops, it’s prob’ly just as well that he didn’t. In fact…very, verrreeee good that he didn’t surface late this afternoon….

But we get ahead of ourself…

First, I go on about my business: traipsing half-way to Timbuktu to visit WonderDermatologist. She agrees that the Thing disfiguring my left-hand finger-flicking finger is yet another precancer and must go. Now.

Does she wonder how I am going to drive with this crucial navigation instrument disabled? Probably just as well that she doesn’t. She practically runs her nitrogen squirt bottle out of juice. This is good. I’m invited to visit her again in two weeks, when we’ll assess how today’s antics worked, and out the door I streak.

Decide to venture across from the 101 on Gangbanger’s Way,  a thoroughfare that runs faster and more smoothly than Main Drag South, which at this time of year is more crowded than Gangbanger’s. Fly low up the freeway, fly low across the city…through the lovely slums that grace the central west side, ahhh yes eventually arriving at the war zone that is the intersection of Gangbanger’s and Conduit of Blight Blvd.

This journey is one endless reminder of Southern California and all that I used to hate about it. The smog. The traffic. The ticky-tacky. The instant-slum tracts. The tired and dreary strip malls. The crowded roads, sun glaring off acres of asphalt. The panhandling derelicts. The exhausted workers navigating the streets on foot. Lordy, but Phoenix is SUCH an ugly city! Just like Long Beach: an ugly place to live.

You know, I do love my neighborhood. It’s a pretty little enclave, gentrifying like mad now that young parents have learned they can put their kids in the Madison schools from here. (Madison is the only decent centrally located public school district.) But driving in from the northwest on Gangbanger’s Way is just deeply depressing…and it gets creepier and creepier as the months pass.. From about 43rd Avenue all the way over to about 23rd Avenue is plain old slum, dirty depressing dangerous and scary. Some of the houses facing Gangbanger’s around 23rd are OK, holding their own; then, eastward-bound, they give way to commercial properties, some of them abandoned.

The city is about to extend the accursed lightrail up to MetroCenter, which is now dead, a ghost mall. Why? It escapes comprehension. The highest and best use of that property would be to turn it into a social service center for the homeless, but the city has big (hallucinatory) plans to revive it as offices and medical centers. Har har harrrrr!!!!!!! So this boondoggle will be yet another fantastical waste of taxpayer money, and the train will continue to transport drug addicts and homeless into our neighborhood.

Catholic Social Services has built a charity home for pore folks on Main Drag South at Conduit of Blight, and an even bigger project has gone up on Main Drag about a half-mile west of that. Alas, while this kind of housing is indeed much needed, projects good neighbors do not make…

So…every now and again I think about whether I should move while I still have the physical strength to do so. And if so, where???? If the church never re-coalesces, there’s really no reason to stay in North Central. Or in Phoenix at all. But where on earth to go???

  • Sun City is a definite NO.
  • Arcadia I cannot afford.
  • Biltmore I cannot afford.
  • The Southern-California style ticky-tacky tracts of the far east and west valley: no, thanks.
  • Payson: eek! no Costco!
  • The south of France I cannot afford.
  • But why not Fountain Hills? Like Sun City, it’s quiet as the tomb, and it’s close to my doctors’ office and close to the kind of shopping I enjoy. Nice view of the mountains, and a straight shot up to Payson, where KJG and Mr. Firefighter hold forth!
  • Oro Valley outside of Tucson is supposed to be very nice, and it’s convenient to Tucson. It is part of Tucson these days, actually.
  • Prescott: a possibility, but further from friends and established huntin’ grounds than I’d like.
  • And of course Patagonia, venue of some lovely country houses just up the road from the border with Mexico…

Depressed after this fine tour of my hometown, I crawl back in the sack for a little nap, hoping to catch up the sleep that ended around 3 this morning.

Soon enough, Ruby jumps to attention. DAWG ON POINT!!!!! 

Something is going wheeeeeeeeeeeee….

What? Rattie’s in the hall? I hear a squeal, and it ain’t the Song, Song of the Rat. No indeed. It’s the serenade of a vehicle that needs a brake job.

WTF? Climb out of the sack, stumble to the front windows, peer out and lo! A cop SUV is idling in the street in front. Two of the biggest rhinoceroses you have EVER seen charge into the front yard (Holy doggerel! Where’s my pistol?). Call the hound to heel…and watch the show.

These vast lumbering critters roust some poor, scrawny little bum out from under the shade trees in front, where he’s been trying to sleep in the gravel.

Yes. That’s on the gravel. Like, little sharp pieces of granite.

Understand: it’s 108 degrees out there. He must weigh all of 130 pounds, he’s filthy, his hair is matted, he doesn’t even have a backpack in tow. They start to rough him up. Amazingly, he manages to slip out of the grip of the guy who’s grabbed him and he takes off down the street. The cops give half-hearted chase but quickly stand down. Doesn’t seem to enter their minds that he could easily hop over the wall into the backyard, just like Matthew the Garage Invader did. Now moderately well armed myself, I watch them give up and drive off. Then I patrol the front and back yards and the alley.

Poor little sh!thead. What do you suppose brings a man to such a pass?

Gerardo did not show up. Good thing! Otherwise he and his suspiciously unilingual cousins would have landed in the middle of this…uhm…manhunt. {sigh} Could be they drove by and saw the game in progress, so decided to move along.

Welp, our visitor having failed to steal today’s Amazon delivery, we also move along: Unwrap the package of tinfoil pie tart pans and combobulate the much-vaunted RAT REPELLANT DEVICES!

The scheme is to punch a hole in a pie tin, run it up the metal rod that holds the bird feeder (endlessly attractive to Rattie), and secure it in place over the existing DYI rat baffle, made of a plastic doodad that has proven too small to discourage our little pal. Fiddle with this briefly, and dayum. I think it’s gonna work. If it doesn’t, at least we had some fun trying it.

The resulting gadgets look weirdly like little flying saucers, come to light on the bird feeders’ hangers. Got them attached fairly firmly (if hilariously) but gave them just enough play to wiggle a bit, should a four-legged critter decide to climb on top of the UFO. Unless Rattie is acrobatic enough to jump down and backward in one motion (from a platform that wiggles), I don’t THINK she can hop from the contraption to the lower end of the hanger. If she can, by golly, she’s earned her share of those bird seeds!

Seriously, I think if she tries to proceed past the tinfoil barrier, she’ll most likely fall on the ground. This will cause an annoyed Rattie but should do no damage to much of anything else.

Cop helicopter shows up a little before 7 p.m. and frantically buzzes the street just to the north, right where my old house resides. They used to materialize every goddamn Friday and Saturday night at 11 p.m. sharp. This is a little early for them…maybe our scrawny guy showed up at someone else’s motel. 😀 Now, shading a little after 7:30, they’ve roared off somewhere else and it’s quiet out there again.

So it goes. That is what we Arizonans call “one helluva day.”

To top it off, WordPress crashed as I was finishing this post, so that helluva day is no longer today but vaguely yesterday. Wouldn’tcha know?

 

Inflation

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So I’m sittin’ around here (actually, slamming around doing some housework and unplugging the kitchen drain) when for unknown reasons the brain decides to reflect on bygone quarrels between my mother and my father over the way she used to spend “his” money.

In those days, it was almost impossible for a woman to get a job that paid more than pocket change. At one point my mother got a real estate license and went to work for a broker who was peddling property at the Salton Sea (we lived in Southern California at the time) — it was quite the little scam, from which she made approximately nothing. Actually, I believe her take was in the negative numbers, by the time you added up the gasoline and the cost of the damage to the car’s paint from sandstorms out on the desert. So in fact, whatever we lived on was what he earned.

My father deeply resented the way she would spend “his” money, although we did not live high off the hog in general. We rented mid- middle-class apartments, drove Fords, never traveled, did not go out to eat, did not gallivant to speak of. But she did like to buy clothes and makeup and she did like to shop in department stores. One time when he was home from the ship he happened upon a bill from a department store, the result of which was quite a sh!tfit, in which he ordered her to “stop spending my money.”

She used to shop in this department store, not far from where we lived…she was a hopeless sucker for the cosmetics salesladies. It was a nice middle-class store, but nothing swell-elegant. It was probably a Broadway: on the order of a Dillard’s. Not I. Magnin or Saks, but not Penney’s either.

She liked to wear lots of makeup and lots of perfume. Because she smoked a LOT, her skin was a mess to begin with and she needed perfume to temper the tobacco stink. And we’d spent 10 years in Saudi Arabia at a time when people imagined that a “healthy tan” was good for you. This meant her face was your basic shoe leather, the result being that every morning she would sit down in front of her dressing table and coat herself in layer after layer of moisturizers, cover-ups, foundation, rouge, and powder. An easy target for a sales pitch, she never understood (or rather, she refused to believe) that there was essentially no difference between a cheap make-up like, say, Coty, Avon, or Revlon and pricey stuff like Estée Lauder, and so she would allow herself to be talked into buying a whole line of spectacularly expensive products.

I can remember standing around a cosmetics counter with her as she browsed and bought and yakked and browsed and bought and yakked and finally we came away with something over $100 in make-up and perfume. This was in Southern California, so I would have been in my first or second year of high school — 1960 or 61.

Know how much a hundred bucks in 1961 is worth in 2020 dollars? Eight hundred sixty-nine dollars and twenty-nine cents! 

Holy sh!t!!

No wonder the poor guy blew a gasket! That would have been as much as he earned in a month — maybe more — going to sea full-time! As a Merchant Marine commander with a license to sail oil tankers of any tonnage on any ocean…

When I went to the University of Arizona in 1962, my father gave me $1000 a year to live on. It was enough to pay my tuition, the dorm rent, books, and food…with a little left over for clothes and incidentals. In 2020 dollars, that would be almost $1,000 a month, though after my freshman year tuition was essentially free. So…just imagine how outrageous spending a month’s worth of that on make-up would’ve been. 😀

Strange, what crosses your mind when the place is quiet and you have nothin’ else to think about but cleaning the kitchen counters…

Changes: After the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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So by now you’ve probably read this morning’s rumination, which reflected on the ambiguities of the drastic changes already foisted on us by the covid-19 pandemic, and the potentially positive changes that seem to be forthcoming. Depending on your point of view.

For each of these possibilities — and make no mistake, the covid epidemic presents as many possibilities as it does roadblocks — there’s a flip side, and that is why it is so important to think through these coming changes carefully.

Among the many disruptions in our economy, our neighborhoods, our families, and our lives, very probably the foremost is the question of what we will do about the continuing education of our young people.

Distance learning is now most popularly effected by a program called Zoom, which allows groups of people to see each other and interact online. Led by a talented and computer-savvy instructor, this approach can certainly be as effective and maybe even superior to face-to-face classroom time. However…

Yes, the ever-present HOWEVER…

I created the first online course in liberal arts at the Great Desert University’s westside campus. I had to build the course’s shell with existing software available online, because of course at that time there were no IT experts in online learning, there was no expensive and elaborate program available to universities, colleges, and high schools, and no one had a clue how to make this stuff work. Or even if it could work. So…I know whereof I speak.

Here is the issue — the big Roof Rat in the Room — when it comes to presenting content and organizing participation in online teaching for public schools: inequity.

Social and economic inequity. Not all kids have access to the same electronic assets.

Some have none at all. Some can access them only through their schools, or at a friend’s house, or at a local library. Not all kids have access to a library, or would know what to do there during the relatively few hours that Phoenix-area libraries are open.

To use a coffee shop’s wireless access, a kid would need to have a portable computer. And if you are a poor kid, yeah, you might have a cheap cell phone…but you’re unlikely to have the kind of hardware and software needed to work effectively on classroom learning. The kid would also have to be able to buy a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of soda to persuade the proprietor to allow an hour or two of yakking on the computer in the coffee shop. Restaurant owners are, after all, not in the charity business.

Even if a grade-school or high-school kid can obtain access to the hardware and connectivity needed to accomplish a day’s worth of schoolwork, she or he may not know how to make that happen. The kid needs to have not only the gadgetry but also the know-how and sophistication to use it. As we old folks know, this is not so hard for young pups who can get their own computers. But if a kid does not have access to a computer and online connectivity — and have it for several hours a day — that kid’s online education isn’t going far.

It’s easy for us to say that the taxpayer will magically make computers available to hordes of hungry little kids (and many of them are hungry: in the Phoenix area large numbers of grade-school kids get their only full meal of the day at their public school). But how do we propose to do that? Where?

If we give each of them  a notebook or a laptop to take home…well.

Have you spent any time in some of lovely Phoenix’s finest slums? A kid who took a computer to an apartment across Conduit of Blight, right next to the ‘Hood, would see that thing gone in a matter of days: stolen by neighbors, family members, or random thieves either for their own use or sold to support drug habits. A child whose parents earn minimum wage (or less, often enough) cannot trot over to the nearest Best Buy or Apple store and pick up another computer.

The only workable solution to that would be to bring low-income kids together in computer classrooms. And that obviates the whole point of keeping the schools closed until a vaccine can be developed and mandated for school-aged kids.

What moving education online will do is further fracture America’s economy and society along racial and income faults. Parents of poor kids will not be able to afford to band together to hire a licensed freelance teacher to coach their children through each day’s schoolwork. In the US, a hefty portion of children living in poverty are minority children: African American and Latina/o. This means the pandemic will push these children even further into disadvantage than they already are…which is quite far enough.

I’m not suggesting here that the changes I described in my earlier post will not happen, or even that they should not happen. Nor am I suggesting that such changes, if implemented well, could not be highly successful.

What I am suggesting is that if we don’t want to set off a social time bomb, every kid will need to have access to the technology, know how to use it, AND be physically safe in using it.

And that, my friends, will be a far bigger order than just sending a building full of kids home to do their schoolwork online.

Probably the pandemic has already set in motion changes that cannot be reversed. If it goes on much longer, that almost certainly will be so. Some of these will be constructive changes, some not.

Some covid changes will be good for certain people but decidedly bad for others. If we don’t want to see the social unrest that will result from that plain fact, we need to address it now, before it happens. Not later.

 

There’ll be some changes made…

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TODAYYYY….and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…  So many changes are emitting from the covid-19 crisis, we can’t keep track of them. We can’t even keep count of the ones we already know about or anticipate.

This morning the pooch and I passed one of the affable gay gents who live at the corner of Feeder Street EW and Feeder NW, also walking his dogs. Small talk was exchanged, largely about the startling switch in weather, which dropped in a day from the 100s to the 80s. I remarked that people are already putting up their Hallowe’en decorations — and that Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday.

“Mine, too,” said he. But…as though we were on the same record groove, we just about sang in unison, “But I don’t think we’ll be participating this year.”

“Nope,” he added, “we’re not opening the door to whatever anyone on the other side is carrying.”

Hallowe’en devolves into a gigantic block party here. Everybody in the more threadbare neighborhoods surrounding the gentrifying ‘Hood trucks in their kids (no kidding: trucks, busses, vans, pickups!) and swoops up and down the streets, while the locals greet them from tables set up in the driveways. A great deal of eating, drinking, and costume-admiring takes place, and much fun is had by all.

If any of that happens this year, though, pretty clearly it won’t be much…

There’s been some talk around the’Hood about setting up tables in the park and just letting people come and take whatever they want. Not, possibly, the greatest idea…and it’s hard to see how that would eliminate the possibility of spreading the disease around.

So I think we’re all afraid that Hallowe’en, a cherished tradition, is about to be a thing of the past.

All across the country, people remark on how little traffic they see on the roads, even during rush hour.

Yesterday morning there were more drivers on the road than the last time I was out at that hour, but for 8:30 or so, it was far from normal rush-hour traffic. Inside the parking garage for the high-rise where the dentist resides, there were no more than half a dozen cars on the first floor. The place was effectively empty, most office types presumably working from home.

Then we have the disappearing restaurants…

Most restaurants that have managed to cling to life here are fast-food joints (where people drive through to pick up food) and places that have converted their sit-down business to pick-up or delivery. Many popular joints have just shut down. The venerable Carlos O’Brien’s, a favorite dispenser of gringo-Mexican chow (it’s white folks’ food — not the real stuff), is now a bull-dozed plot of dirt. We’re told a damnable QT will be stuck on that lot. QT’s, if you haven’t had the delight to find them in your parts, are like 7-11’s on steroids: overpriced gas pumps, junk food, and a corporate tradition of hosting every vagrant for miles around.

The loss of Carlos O’Brien’s is a huge setback for light commerce in the North Central area, where it has long been a favorite for business lunches and tourist dinners. Replacing it with a grungy QT is a disaster. LOL! Count up another 2 dozen families in the vicinity of that intersection, moving to Scottsdale! Or lovely Gilbert.

Assuming any of them can get jobs that pay enough to allow them to move someplace else…

In a more constructive vein, though, the whole Amazon/pick-up at the store parking lot/Instacart phenomenon sure changes my thinking about shopping. Why trudge to a series of grocery stores, burning gas every inch along the way, when you can post a list and have some marginally employed wretch deliver the stuff right to your door? The sole drawback to delivery services is that most Americans don’t eat fresh produce, so the poor flunkies who hire out for $7/hour + tips have NO clue how to pick out fresh vegetables, salad makin’s, and fruit.

That issue is solved, however, with a Sprouts right around the corner. If it were safe to do so, I could walk to that store. But even so…I’ve refilled the car’s gas tank a grand total of three times since the covid fiasco launched on April 1, and just now the tank is still half-full. At two bucks a gallon, by limiting grocery trips to fresh produce, I can order an awful lot of Instacart deliveries for the $90 a month I was shelling out B.F. (Before Fiasco).

Considering that my time, when I’m actually working, is worth $60 to $120/hour, why on earth would I want to spend that time driving around the city to Safeway, Costco, AJ’s, Sprouts, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, and the various other grungy venues? I mean, c’mon: ONE HOUR of converting Chinese math to English will pay for a month’s worth foisting the grocery shopping onto Instacart shoppers.

We’re going to see major changes in the way people live: not just in the way they work but also in their home lives, shopping habits, and family planning. Yesterday the dentist’s excellent young hygienist and I were chatting. By coincidence, she happens to live here in the ’Hood, making her one of the Gentrifiers. She and her husband have a couple of young kids. They’ve teamed up with other parents to hire someone to come in and supervise a half-a-dozen kids in online learning. You know…if this works and middle-class working parents discover that it can work…well…why would you send your kids to a public school when for a fraction of the cost you can get all the advantages of a private school and none of the frightful disadvantages of public schools???? 

Some of these young parents are gonna figure that out, and when they do, the discovery will spread. Public schools will become more frankly what they already are: day-care centers. But when middle- and upper-income parents tumble to the fact that they can get far better, private school-level education by homeschooling under the supervision of a certified teacher, whatever remains of the public schools will become more frankly what those schools already, de facto, are: day-care for the working poor. And the nonworking poor.

Cost to parents? Well, consider. Hereabouts a public school teacher earns around 40 grand a year — or less, if we’re talking about the lower grades. Let’s say we have three sets of parents, who band together to hire someone tutor a total of five kids for nine months, shepherding them through the online learning process. If each family paid a hired teacher $10,000 per child, that’s a WHOLE lot less than they would pay, per kid, for private or parochial school, and the teacher would be paid more than s/he would earn in private or public schools. Children could get socialization through community athletic teams, churches, clubs, music lessons, art classes, drama clubs, Scouting, volunteer activities of all kinds. How would this be worse than warehousing them in a prison-like school all day? Might it not be significantly better? And, when you take into account the cost of clothing, school supplies, transportation, meals, and all the other expenses incidental on public education — including the breathtaking property taxes on your home, which in these parts go mostly to support public schools — would it really cost that much more?

Another change: thinking once, twice, three times about whether you really need to do X, Y, or Z. Do you have to run that errand now — seriously? — or can you fold it in with another trip and do them both tomorrow? And can you manage your time better by limiting the number of shopping junkets and errands, by making them all happen together, by organizing time and tasks at home and at the office before venturing forth?

Case in point: It’s time, at last, to pull out the heat-fricasseed, dead potted plants, run up to Lowe’s or HD, and get some new seeds and plants to spiff up the gardens. So there I am along about 9 a.m., about to get up from the computer and thinking, reflex-style: “I need to go to Home Depot.”

But then another thought strikes: Do I?

Do I really need to jump in the car, burn a gallon of gas to schlep to Home Depot, Lowe’s, and waypoints…right now? Suppose  instead I were to pull out the dead foliage, sweep up the dead leaves and debris, and haul all that stuff out to the trash or the compost heap now?

If I put off the Home Depot trip for another day, could I combine that junket with a trip to the Walmart supermarket that’s on the way toward the HD? That way I get to tedious errands out of the way in one foray through the traffic. The yard and plants are already cleaned up and ready to receive their new plants. And I have a whole extra day in which to think about lay out the new plants and pots. You know…actually plan? What a unique idea!

Planning: for trips, for shopping expeditions, for projects that require retail purchases… It’ll be good for you and me, but not so great for our retail friends. By noon I got one helluvalot more done around the yard than I would have if I’d charged out of the house and made for Home Depot and Lowe’s, and tomorrow the shopping trip to one or both of those fine emporia will be far more organized, far less catch-as-catch-can than it would’ve been today.

What it means is that I’ll buy a whole lot less on that gardening expedition than I would have today, because now I know how much space is really available for new plantings, how much of the existing plants I may be able to revive, and even — lo! — which pots I’m tired of and will put away until next year.

Meanwhile, we have the work environment, fast merging with the residential environment:

My son is now pretty certain that his employer will NOT reopen its fancy new digs in Tempe, but will continue to do business in the work-from-home mode. They are, however, keeping him on as a manager. This means that he has to ride herd on the underlings, some of whom are about as bright as freshman comp students, and he has to do it remotely. If that doesn’t sound like a bitch of a job, I don’t know what does. Frankly, riding herd on a bunch of Herefords would be a lot less mind-numbing and infinitely less annoying.

I tried to elicit some hint as to whether this means he will consider moving to his dream Tiny House in the middle of 60 acres in southeastern Utah…didn’t get far with that. He probably suspects (rightly) that if he sets up an outpost in the boondocks, his mutther won’t be far behind: a prospect guaranteed to induce cardiac arrest in an adult man.

If M’hijito decamps to Utah or some such, why in the name of God would I stay here in the unholy, crime-ridden realms of L.A. East? Why would anyone do so, if they could carry on their jobs online from some scenic plateau in Colorado, and if they could educate their children from home?

Think of the sheer number of the changes we’re looking at here, to say nothing of the seismic social alterations they imply.

Anyone who can do any job that does not require them to be at a worksite five to seven days a week could, in theory, live wherever they please. How many of us regard “wherever we please” as an eave-to-eave tract of stick-and-styrofoam shacks with a fine commute in to a miserable office? As a far-flung suburb where we must live to put our kids in a decent public school, with an hour-long commute to and from the office? As a crowded city where the kids can’t be allowed to play in the front yard without a housekeeper or a parent watching over their shoulder every moment, lest they be approached by a child molester? Where everyone has a big dog not because they so love German shepherds and pit bulls but because they need an animated, fully armed burglar alarm to alert them to intruders?

Consider what life would be like if…

  • You could do your job and do it well wherever you happened to be, with no need to visit the home office more than once every two weeks to a month…
  • You could get about everything you need to carry on a comfortable life delivered to your home via Amazon, Instacart, USPS, FedEx, and UPS…
  • You could provide your children with the kind of education they would get from an upper-middle-class public school or a fancy private school for a fraction of the cost, anywhere you choose to live…
  • You could do those things from any venue that you desire: an elegant San Francisco-style city, a homey small town, a desert island, the back of an RV, a sailboat tricked out as a yacht, a ranch in the middle of nowhere, a perennial college campus…as you wish, with few or no restrictions on where you choose to live…

Think of how much less gasoline you’d use…just you alone, to say nothing of entire nations of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans…and whatnot.

You would have a choice over how your child is educated, and you could oversee the quality of their education.

Your kids could spend their days in a quiet small town, suburb, or countryside.

Bullying would not be a daily issue that they would have to learn to cope with.

Neither would widespread use of drugs.

Neither would easy-come, easy-go sex.

Because you would spend so much less on gasoline, so much less on real estate, so much less on local and county taxes, so much less on work and school clothes, so much less on cars to accommodate at least two working family members, so much less on impulse buying, you could live a whole lot better on a whole lot less money. You could travel more and save more for retirement. You could save up enough to send your kids through college, without saddling them with a lifetime of debt.

Mmm hmmm…. There’ll be some changes coming from the covid disaster, that’s for sure. But…what if they’re not all as bad as we fear?