…To the place
I belong…
Parkmerced. That’s where I belong.
Oh, my: what a lovely development, down near the shore of Lake Merced, on the southerly end of San Francisco.
My mother got us in there when we came back from Arabia: before my father came back to the States. We left the Hell-Hole ahead of him, about three or four months before he retired.
He must have had the sh!t-f!t from Hell when he found out how much those high-rise apartments cost! You don’t even wanna think about it!
After he went back to Ras Tanura, our lease ran out and she got us into one of the garden apartments. They weren’t especially fancy — nothing like the gorgeous spaces in the towers — but they weren’t at all bad. If anything, I think I liked ours better than the tower. It had its own little garden. And some kids lived across the street from us.
Oh, well. There we were.
Walking around the ‘Hood this morning: ohhhhh gawd! HOT! HUMID!! And it’s barely dawn. Can’t say I hate this place…but I sure would rather be in San Francisco!
Passed by the vacant, run-down house once occupied by the couple whose son went to jail. That’ll bankrupt you: be sure of that!
Apparently he fucked some girl who was under the age of consent — and got caught in the act. OFF TO THE SLAM WITH HIM!
This misadventure cost the parents everything they had. They went belly-up. Lost the house.
Who owns it now (if anyone, other than a bank) I do not know. But it is a WRECK.
Ya hafta say this about the ‘Hood, though: Overall it’s well kept up, tidy, tony-looking. A couple of sections are highly up-scale; indeed. the rest of the place is solidly upper-middle-class.
Sooo…. My house should keep its value. If my son inherits it, he’ll have a nice, debt-free place to live or, if he prefers, a salable piece of property that should land half a million bucks in his bank account.
That’s assuming I don’t have to go into the old-folkerie called the Beatitudes, which he has in mind for me. He may not realize: Those places take everything you have. If I can’t stay out of that place, that’s what will happen. Nothing will be left to pass along to my son.
Probably it would be cheaper — and surely more cost-effective — to hire someone to come in to take care of me in my home through the last months or years of my life. I hope he’ll go along with that… Partly for my sake (nothing makes me cringe more than the mere thought of institutional living) and partly for hi$.
At any rate, as this rumination implies: I ain’t a-gunna get home to San Francisco anytime soon. Surely not in this lifetime. Well… unless — Heaven forfend! — something happened to him before it happens to me. If he predeceased me, I probably would move back to the Bay Area. There really isn’t anyplace else I’d rather live.
My cousin found a lovely resort-like old-folkerie in the East Bay, where he deposited his mother for her last years. I’d be lookin’ for something like that.
Meanwhile, with this house paid off and the Cleaning Lady from Heaven in the offing, I probably will stay here as long as I possibly can — with any luck, for the rest of my life. CL from H has worked as a caretaker for the elderly and the infirm, and so maybe she can be hired full-time to baby-sit me during the final leg of my journey to the Next World. But if not, we know there are lots of folks like her, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone to come in to care for me.
I hope.
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about the house my family lived in while I was in high school and college. I can still walk through every inch of that place in my mind’s eye, though I’m sure subsequent owners have put their own stamp on it. And the Yard! I sometimes inagine that if I won the Mega-Millions (unlikely, since I don’t play, but still) I’d make an offer on the place, or ask the owners to contact me if they ever want to sell.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it’s the place or that time of my life I want to go back to. I’ve changed, and I’m sure the house and town have changed, and it probably just wouldn’t be the same.
But still… *sigh* I’d love to give it a try. 🙂
“You Can’t Go Home Again”…so they say.
And there’s a fair amount of truth to that. Things change. People change. Places change. Times change. So…really, when you come right down to it: there’s no home left to go home TO.
How to cope with that lovely li’l reality? I dunno. I guess what you have to do is make wherever you are “home.” And if you can’t do that, for whatever reason, try to move on to some other place.
{sigh} Good luck with that!