Hawthorne, Sunday 6/19
We have been holding off using the air conditioning forever. Before we had it checked, we had not used it for 10 years. But during the renovation of the house for sale we had it checked and to our surprise everything was working just fine. Today the weather channel ap predicts the first day of one of our rare hot spells- with the highs expected to get around 88 for a number of days. It has been gradually getting warmer at night, too; and at bed time the bedroom was a bit too warm for comfort. Going downstairs for some water, I discovered that it was quite a bit fresher down there, and the newly cleared patio even more so. So I had a camp out. The camping gear was stashed in the hall closet, so I inflated a twin-sized air mattress and grabbed my pillow and a light throw and lay down on the bricks in the dark.
It was surprisingly quiet there, just over the wall from my late-drinking neighbors who rent the collection of tiny cottages there- on nights like this or anytime they have guests they flow over to the driveway immediately south of my garden wall, there to drink and tell riotously funny stories in Spanish, which I never can catch, and turn up the stereo in their living room and throw open their windows and doors to enjoy tex-mex music outside where it's cool. I guess the party was at someone else's house last night- neither drinkers nor young kids running amped up on sugar disturbed the night, and from far away I could actually hear a train passing in between the random bangs of premature smuggled fireworks for July 4th, and the evenly spaced pops of someone discharging a whole clip of ammo from their semiautomatic pistol, just for the hell of it, and the occasional siren. I was pretty sure no stray bullets could get through the stucco covered wall, and it was soothing to feel the light cool breeze. So I spent the early hours gazing up at the palm tree in the gloom, and dozing in the cool air, until it cooled off to climb the stairs up to the bedroom where MM slept oblivious to everything, slipped between the sheets and eventually dropped into oblivion myself.
No, it is a disturbing fact of life here. I included it in part as a point of reference. But even the bizarre can become commonplace over time. All the more reason to get on with this move.
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