Coffee heat rising

What NOT to Do in Old Age…

by

Gorgeous, cool morning. Few people and fewer dogs out and about. Ruby and I have a great (and peaceful) doggywalk. As we stroll through a fog of boredom, I consider…horrors abundant:

* My father having to care for my mother in her last, agonizing days and weeks.

* She dies and he moves into an old-folkerie, a venue I regard with horror.

* But he likes it, because after a lifetime at sea, he’s accustomed to institutional living.

* What he isn’t accustomed to is Helen, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West.

* Marrying Helen botches up the rest of his life.

Seriously: the last years of his life were ruined, not just because of my mother’s illness and death but because he naively married the dragon-lady. Apparently he didn’t understand that there was no real substitute for my mother, the love of his life. Did he imagine that one woman would be much the same as the next?

What have I learned from my father’s late-life experiences?

* Stay out of institutions as you age, if at all possible. Doesn’t cost any more to hire someone to come into your home to clean and drive you to the grocer and whatnot than it does to live in one of those places.

* Do not imagine one spouse is a carbon copy of the next. Do not figure you can replace a late spouse with someone new.

He would have been OK if he hadn’t married Helen. He wouldn’t have been happy, but he would have been contented enough by himself in a pleasant apartment at Orangewood, the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died. And over time he would have adjusted to the loss of my mother.

* Find new things to do w/ your life. A new hobby? Travel? Raising poodles??? Something that’s different and reasonably fun, or at least interesting.

I want to say that marrying Helen wrecked his life. But no: My mother dying is what wrecked his life. And she died prematurely because of her smoking habit.

So: Don’t smoke! Don’t take a partner who smokes, either.

He did smoke, but he had quit well before the time my mother started to get sick from the cancer. Get rid of that habit NOW: don’t wait until it’s too late.

* But remarrying wasn’t a solution, either. I’d suggest you NOT remarry after you lose a spouse. Or, if you must, don’t do so until you’ve known the new partner at least a year. Give yourself an out, and keep that door unlocked for as long as possible.

* It made sense for him to move into Orangewood.
* It made sense for him to take up a friendship and then a romance with Helen.
* What didn’t make sense was to remarry. And if he’d waited, they might not have done so.
* Once they had entered their marriage, they were both legally trapped in an official agreement. Getting out of it would have cost each one a ton of money, and a whole lot of bad feelings.
* Staying independent — staying free from the git-go — would have given each of them and both of them the leeway to choose how they wanted to live. Once they’d married, they both felt stuck in the partnership: a partnership they each came to realize was a mistake.

Better to live in sin, my friends, than to live in misery. Seriously: they would have been so much better off if they’d never married, even if they had chosen to move in together.

Still a GORGEOUS Monday

by

Yep…we’re on the third blog post of the day. Tis true! and the truth is: telephone scammers notwithstanding, worries about old-age incarceration notwithstanding: this is an OBSCENELY GORGEOUS day.

  • Beautiful sunlight.
  • Beautiful mild temperatures.
  • Beautiful clean air.
  • Beautiful spectacular blue skies.
  • Beautiful little dog.
  • Beautiful glass of beer.
  • Beautiful beyond anything you can think of.

Beyond gorgeous.

Yes, you bet! I’m still damn scared of what the future holds. But when the present is this lovely, you can afford to divert your attention from tomorrow.

***

Ruby has waddled off to her favorite locale under the master bathroom toilet. Truth to tell, it’s the middle of the afternoon and we have yet to do our daily dog-&-human walk. And that is solely the fault of the lazy, easily distracted human.

Distracted today by memories of a beloved old boyfriend, a man I came within inches of marrying. 

Ohhhhh how my parents hated the man!!!

Ohhhhh how I loved the man!!!

In my then yet-to-be misspent youth, I assumed they hated him because he was The Other. Not American, hevvin help us. Worse yet: Eastern European. 

Paul was Bohemian. Real Bohemian, as in the nationality — not metaphorically so. Why they hated him, I failed to grasp during my naive youth. But now in my Old Age, I see…yeah.

As an example: Paul thought it was OK — just brilliant, actually — for his best buddy to be diddling a barmaid he’d picked up during a night on the town. Because, after all, his wife was eight or nine months advanced in pregnancy, and so  she couldn’t “give him any.”

Back in the Day, when I was madly in love, I thought my parents’ distaste for Paul was based in their distaste for other-than-Yankee roots. They must hate him because his parents were not 100% Yankee. Right?

Well.

No.

Actually, they hated him because he was a jerk. And because they could see, clear as day, that marrying the jerk would wreck my life.

Luckily for me, he made an ass of himself one time too many. And so I wandered away from him.

Sometimes God actually is on our side. Right?

What finally brought God’s Word — or at least, Her Thinking — to my attention was the time that Paul observed how VERY right his best buddy was in picking up a chippy in a bar and f*cking her…BECAUSE his wife was too advanced in pregnancy to accommodate his dong.

No kidding.

He thought his wife’s pregnancy with HIS child was an acceptable excuse to diddle whatever li’l darlin’ he came across in a bar.

No. I really DO kid you not. 

Dumb as I was, even I could see what was wrong with that picture.

Soooo…out he went, pore ole’ Paul. And good riddance to him. Since then, I’ve managed to scrape up a LITTLE more discrimination, when it comes to men.

How long that will last remains to be seen…

Never-Ending…scams

by

Brought back to the current stream of FaM posts by this morning’s scam phone call. Seriously: EVERY DAY here’s another goddamn scammer on the phone, trying to trick me into this or trick me into that.

Yes, usually I do hang up on them before they get very far into their pitch. But truth to tell, some of them have surprisingly persuasive intros…so you never know whether you’re hanging up on someone who matters, or hanging up on yet another crook.

Don’t get old, whatever ya do!  

Seriously, that has become a kind of jokey by-word for me..but truth to tell, it gets more and more to the point as the days go by.

And also seriously: as I do get older, day by day, I wonder more and more how much longer I’m going to be able to hold the mob of crooks at arm’s length.

Some of these crooks have information about you — whether it’s recorded fact or something they’ve gleaned by observation — that makes their pitches sound surprisingly convincing. They DO sound like they know who you are and what you do in your business and shopping activities.

And they DO know when you’re older. The assumption is that elderly folks are easy marks. There actually are nuisance phone-calling lists organized by the marks’ ages. That’s why you get more and more of this sh!t as the years pass.

I may reach the point where I’m simply going to have to sign off the telephone service. But…I NEED a phone for emergencies, and I use my phone for all sorts of personal and business purposes. So…how the f**k would I manage canceling my phone service?

Really, that’s hard for me to imagine. Because every strategy I think of either has serious drawbacks or has work-arounds that will be easy for the crooks to engage.

Hang up on them all?

That means I hang up on legitimate callers with legitimate reasons for calling. Some of those are financial reasons. Some are personal reasons. Either way, I get screwed when I slam the phone down.

And if I’m gonna hang up on every incoming phone call, why have a phone at all? I have to pay for this damn phone. Monthly! So now I have to disgorge a monthly payment for…NOTHING? For a service that cuts off friends and business acquaintances, because I have to disconnect every chucklehead who calls my number?

Don’t answer the phone until you know who’s really on the other end? That entails having to sit there listening to yakety yak yak until you can identify the caller; then if it’s someone you want to speak with, grabbing the phone before they hang up. Since a good 50% to 75% of incoming calls are time-wasters, this means a LOT of your time will go down the drain while you try to identify who’s calling.

One thought I’ve had: forward my phone number to an answering service, where their operator can determine who is calling and why; if they decide it’s a legitimate call, they either forward the call to me or simply email with the call-back information.

This sounds like an expensive work-around, to say nothing of a nuisance. Also, I have no idea whether there even are such answering services. To my mind, an answering service is for businesses and professionals who need to catch important incoming calls. Not for some little old lady who wants to circumvent the scammers….

Well…hmmmmm…..  There may be a simpler way:

Just stop answering the phone. 

ALWAYS let it ring through to the answering machine (or, if I decide to hire one, to the answering service operator). If I hear a pitch come in on the machine, pick up the receiver and hang up. Or better yet: BLAST a police whistle into the phone and hope it scorches the inside of the bastard caller’s ear.

That poses its obvious risks, though: Think of the possibilities for revenge! 😀

But seriously:  I suspect it indeed may be time to stop answering phone calls. 

Do you have a better strategy?

 

 

Late October in the Desert

by

Incredibly gorgeous morning! Clear, cool but not cold, not even crisp. People out pushing their baby strollers, walking their dogs. My mind wanders…

…to the horror of potential incarceration at the Beatitudes, a venerable Phoenix old-folkerie. Honestly: I’d rather be dead than locked up in an institution. Must figure out potential alternatives…

* Hire someone to come to the house and care for me? Apparently Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) used to do this.

* Stay someplace overnight, but keep the house and return here during the day?

* Buy an apartment in someplace like The Terraces? (The Terraces is an old-folkerie.)

* Allow self to be forced to buy a place at the Beatitudes (an old-folkerie on the gawdawful level), but after the dust settles, go out and rent an apartment someplace else, keeping it secret?

* Buy a house in M’hijito’s neighborhood, so he feels better about being closer to me? Hire someone to help care for it?

Looks like #1 is probably the only truly viable choice. That or 1 & 5.

Right now, I don’t need #1. I have no problem caring for myself:

* Fixing meals
* Shopping for groceries
* Cooking gourmet(!) meals
* Bathing, grooming
* Tending the pool
* Riding herd on the hired help
* Caring for the dog

The big issue, really, is the purloined car: not being able to get from Point A to Point B without hiring a driver. But is that really a very big deal?

* A guy across the street drives for Uber and is usually available.
* Otherwise, Uber does its own roaring business in this neighborhood: no problem calling for a driver.
* When my son’s nose is not on the grindstone, he probably can schlep me to most routine destinations (grocery stores for example).
* But that may not be necessary: we have not one, not two, but three major grocery retailers and two drugstores within easy walking distance. And two computer stores. And a veterinarian. And a hair stylist. And a nail salon. And…hmmmm…Is anything NOT within walking distance???

My Aunt Gertrude was a very practical woman…so, my guess is that she moved from her sweet Berkeley bungalow into a fancy old-folkerie because her son forced her to move, not because she felt any urgency to do so. She could have gotten by in that house indefinitely, with hired help to come in and handle the cleaning, the shopping, and the errands/appointments. And what an asset to have handed down to her son: it’s now worth over $1.2 MILLION!

Such are the ravages of time, eh?

Truth to tell, I suspect that over the time left to me, this house’s value also will explode…right along the lines of Gertrude’s house. And how would I love to be able to pass along something over a million bucks to my son? Zowie!!

Glorioski Morning

by

Truly: a genuinely beautiful day has dawned. Ruby and I loaf in the west side yard, having traipsed all over the neighborhood.

Dodged Mr. Coyote while on that junket. Fortunately, the coyotes here are more scared of the humans than the humans are scared are of them…and that is irrationally scared. So our wild doggy friend melted away into the landscaping as we strolled past.

LOL! I do carry a walking stick on these doggy-treks. Not to help with walking on the utterly flat roads here. But to serve as a shillelagh if one is ever needed.

Gorgeous day or no gorgeous day, chances are the Dawg and I will head back to the sack in fairly short order. For reasons unknown, I’m feeling unduly sleepy.

In these parts, you’re more likely to need a shillelagh to defend against a human predator than to beat back a coyote. But this morning, not even one of the two-legged critters was in evidence. So, it was a nice day for a doggy-walk.

And right now, it being Sunday morning, the ‘Hood loafs in the Silence of the Tomb. It’s very, very quiet out here, except for the annoying roar of yet another jet plane. We’re far enough from the commercial airport AND far enough from Luke Air Force Base that the planes are well overhead by the time they get this far. But…not far enough overhead to completely silence the things.

One of my mother’s oddities was that she actually LIKED the sound of fighter jets charging around overhead. “It’s the sound of freedom,” she would simper.

Nothing like another World War to bring you a spate of freedom, eh?

Ethnic Hatred

by

They did hate him. Yes, indeed. WHY, I never fully understood, except that he was THEM and we were US.

My parents were born & bred to think of themselves as Yankees: specifically, as Whitey-White natural-born Americans.

This, despite the fact that my father was at least a quarter Choctaw Indian. More like half, far as I could tell. But he believed himself to be all Honkey.

Anyone who was different from them, my parents hated. With élan, we might add.

Welp, my boyfriend Paul was no American Indian. He was Eastern European, as a matter of fact. Far as I could tell, his people were mostly Bohemian.

Whatever, they apparently didn’t come up to my parents’ standard of whitey-whiteness…though to my eye, Paul was as white as or whiter than me.

Paul was the first love of my life. And oh, my: I was in love with the man.

We met in my sophomore year at the University of Arizona. Got a-goin’ and kept on goin’ until I was in the middle of senior year, when my parents finally succeeded in breaking us up.

There was a point at which, though, I realized that if I married Paul, I would never see my parents again. That’s how much they hated him. And I was very close to my parents: especially to my mother.

And “never see my mother again” was not, to tell the truth, what I wanted for my future. So, at the point where I realized that probably would be the outcome of any serious affair or marriage with Paul, I gave him the heave-ho.

He was shattered. I was deeply unhappy, too. But alas, I was not willing and ready to break up my family for a man.

So, that was that.

Every now and again, I think of Paul — as I was doing this afternoon while traipsing around the neighborhood on foot.

Would my birth family really have been permanently shattered if I’d married Paul?

Well. One never knows. But I suspect the answer is “yes.” That is how much they hated the guy. If I went with him, it would be at the cost of leaving them behind.

And that seemed…ungrateful, hm?

Would Paul and I still be married if I’d thrown over the family traces and gone off with him?” 

Very probably not. And here’s why:

One afternoon we were loafing in bed when he started to tell me what his best buddy was up to.

Buddy was a married man. Had been for at least a year or more. At the time, his wife was advanced — very advanced — in pregnancy. As Paul and I lay in bed chatting, he remarked, with sincere approval, that his buddy had picked up a chippy in a bar and was f*cking her merrily. Having a great time! Paul approved of this heartily; because, after all, the buddy’s wife “couldn’t give him any.”

Got that?

She’s so bloated in pregnancy that she can’t accommodate his dong, so it’s OK for him to pick up a barmaid and jump into the sack with her.

Right…Then…And…There: That was the end of my interest in Paul.

If he thought it was OK for his buddy to f**k a chippy while the wife was too bloated to entertain him, then Paul would figure it was OK for him to do the same. WOW!! What a guy, eh?

So, it was out the door with me, that very night.

I’m sure he wondered what got into me. Altogether too much of him, we might say…  {chortle!} WhatEVER: I threw him out of my life that week. The proposed marriage never happened. The grand life together never happened. The great careers together never happened.

Thank goodness, eh?