Yuch!! Just back from this morning’s (soggy!) doggy walk. What a horrid morning! Gray, wet…yes, SO wet the air actually does feel soggy.
Feels like Saudi Arabia, by the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we used to live while my father worked for Aramco — the Arabian American Oil Company. HORRIBLE. One of the nastiest places to live that you can imagine.
Ruby is panting frantically as she lounges on the kitchen floor’s cool tile. I’m covered with sticky sweat…thirsty but too tired and sore to get up and lumber into the kitchen after a glass of water.
WhatEVER possessed my father to move us to this ungawdly place when he retired?
Oh, yah: I know. CHEAP.
Del Webb was practically giving away the houses in Sun City — certainly by comparison with California real estate. But Sun City’s BIG appeal to him, IMHO, was NO KIDS.
Truly: he abominated kids. He hated the sound of kids playing outside. And when he heard of a whole housing development where no kids were allowed, he thought he’d found Nirvana.
He made me drop out of high school a year early, so he could send me to the University of Arizona…thereby getting around Del Webb’s rule that no one under some extenuated age could live in Sun City. If your kid was away at college, you were allowed to move in…even if the brat was under 21.
So that fucked up my education. But why should he care? I was just a girl. What did I need a degree for, since all I was gonna do was take dictation and type? And raise kids, of course.
Y’know, if he’d waited just one more year, I would have gotten into UC Berkeley, and there I could have landed a decent degree that would indeed have led to an interesting job or a first-rate graduate program. But nooooooo….we had to move to f*cking Sun City.
What a place!
At any rate, here we are, enjoying a classic Arizona late-summer day. Wet, soggy, dark with overcast…just gross. I hate Arizona (in case you hadn’t noticed…). And really…I will resent him for the rest of my life for f*cking up my educational plans (I was lined up for a Ph.D. from Berkeley or UCLA!) and dragging me out to the middle of the Sonoran Desert.
But…yeah. So what? I was just a girl….