A Trip Home to Tucson.
Reflections from the desert on history, people and peace
I am leaving the desert today, leaving behind the roadrunners and the safe-harbor of the mountain surround, leaving the lizards and the creosote bushes (hopefully having smelled them, pungent, after the rain.)
“You’re from Tucson,” a Brooklyn neighbor said to me after I’d told him recently where I was headed, where ‘’home’ was. “That’s a very specific place,” he said nodding, thinking I suppose of what he thought that place was.
He’s right, of course. Tucson is a specific place. I realized it when I got off the plane and exited into the airport, when I was greeted by U of A Wildcat apparel, and local Mexican food and people in cowboy hats and boots, when Native American art and artifacts lined the corridor to the rental car spot, before I stepped outside to be greeted by various agave and yucca plants and the hot Arizona sun.
I came to see my Dad, to give my regards to a lovely wild spirited boy I’d known in high school (who joined a slew of other folks we’d graduated with elsewhere, upstairs), and to touch base with my roots, which grew deep here long ago, in this desert basin.
I walked with friends from my childhood up steep mountain roads lined with modern houses whose picture windows took in the city below, through rocky washes that stretched out long between jagged cactus-covered hills, where the purple-hued mountains cast a welcome shadow. I always forget the necessity of a hat and sunscreen when I come from the East.
On a drive with my Dad, I was lured off the highway by the white adobe San Xavier Mission that rises up out of miles of dusty flat scrub like a mirage with the memory of the men and women who sit in huts made of dried ocotillo cactus even in hundred-plus heat to offer up their native culture’s fry bread, savory tacos soggy with beans and red chile cooked over a fire, and the crispy sweet ones, with honey, that I wish now I would have ordered for dessert and for right now, as I write and think of them.
I remember the ski resort I went to growing up, on an Apache reservation called Sunrise, in the White Mountains, how yummy these tacos tasted after a morning on the slopes.
My Dad had come to San Xavier Mission on another day, with an old friend of mine, to paint. They made a video.
On this day that we went together, the mission was a stop on our way to Madera Canyon to see the birds, the massive turkey vultures and the tiny hummingbirds who dance around the many feeders to the delight of onlookers underneath the covered viewing deck.
The gift shops of the Mission and Madera Canyon were filled with beautiful crosses I coveted but didn’t buy.
They reminded me of what I knew well, that the area was a mostly Christian place some Jews like my parents had made their way to, wandering as we are wont to do, in the desert.
Tucson is, as my neighbor rightly said, a very specific place, where new roads are still being blazed, Saguaros marked and moved for the development of hundreds of adobe casitas for people to live in between the many mountain ranges — the Rincons, and the Catalinas, the Santa Rita and the Tucson Mountains.
High schools in town are named for those ranges that rise high above the low brick buildings and their huge well-lit football fields with metal stands I stood in so many Friday nights when I managed to escape going to temple with my parents.
As the sun set pink and purple over the vast blue sky, and those towering lights were switched on with a clang to replace the fiery ball of sun (unfortunately unable to warm one’s hands as well), we cheered on the Sabino Sabercats in their purple and yellow jerseys.
I’d come to celebrate the life of one of those Sabercats after his kind heart gave out too early.
Goodbyes are hard. One never knows when we’ll see something or someone again.
I visited my old house. A new path had been carved out of the rocks in front.
They led up to new doors that replaced the beautiful French ones my mom placed her precious pots of flowers next to, the red geraniums and purple pansies put out after the worst of the summer heat was over, probably around now.
I visited my elementary school, sneaking a peek inside the windows to peer into the gym/cafeteria/auditorium where I’d stood on the stage singing Christmas Carols and narrating some or another school play, where I remember watching some silly Don Knotts movie and eating popcorn on some special day. I went around the side to see the flat patio on top of the hill where the pancakes were served up with a bit of gritty sand during Rodeo Breakfast in February, to take in the courts where I was picked last for Dodgeball and wished I hadn’t had to play at all, to see the trees where I retreated to read when even my best friends were mad at me for being so bad at Dodgeball. I could almost feel the sting of the red rubber ball as it hit hard against my bare windburned skin beneath the shorts I wore defiantly in winter. I hated pants and mostly refused to wear them.
So much is the same. The rose garden, once tended to by a loving bear-hugging custodian is still there, though Mr. Cowgill’s smiling face is replaced by a plaque that remembers him.
The big metal doors just near the once-new library are still there, reminding me of the hours where they were open to serve ice cream sandwiches and other frosty treats. The “portables” are still there, the supposedly temporary classrooms placed in the schoolyard now four decades back. It was in them I learned the box step to Journey’s “Open Arms” in the arms of boys I nervously agreed to dance with, like Jerry Blancas and John Zeitler and Glenn Johnson.
“Feeling your heartbeat with mine” rang suddenly loud and true.
I sit here in a rented casita high above the twinkling lights of Greater Tucson remembering all this, noting how long ago it seems and yet how fresh, realizing with a rush of fear and adrenalin how fast life goes, how lucky we are to take in all its sights and smells and sounds while we still can.
The words said about my former classmate, Carl Hughes, the reminders to go out and love everyone, even strangers, like he did, ring in my ears.
Sometimes it’s hard. People seem different, because of their religion or their race or how they were raised. Even those people I gathered with by the pool to remember Carl, familiar faces and those I found it hard to recall after all this time, were in so many ways different than I am even though we’d shared the same time and space in the 80s. They’d shot guns and drove fast Trans Ams and Camaros blaring Van Halen and joined the military while I read and drove my Dad’s used Cadillac with Julio Iglesias in the tape deck and went to journalism school. Many stayed in Tucson or went somewhere nearby in the West while I’d left long ago, moving to the Midwest then East.
But I came back home to be reminded that none of those differences really mattered so very much. People’s various politics and religions and past seemed not so very important as we came together to remember a beautiful boy, a super social loving lone wolf whose life was an art in itself, whose mere presence was a grace of a benevolent all-loving God who protected his time on Earth far longer than his crazy antics might have seemingly warranted.
When I leave Tucson in a few hours, and return to New York City amidst a global pandemic and the fervor of a heated national election that both seem to be dividing people stem to stern, I will know in my heart that we all wish for our children the same thing: a peaceful place under the sun to grow up, to find joy and pleasures within the pain and sorrow, to connect with other humans.
The vestiges of a simpler time remain in this old pueblo. Adobe chapels erected, open to the sky, still stand as a reminder to praise the heavens and nature all around, to gape and wonder at its glory.
I go to find a poem or quote to punctuate this idea, then realize with sadness that choosing words from an individual in history seems like taking sides as inspirational messages get twisted over time by the damage the messenger or their kin did to others.
And so I’ll say it again, in my own way, in the hope of being heard by all kinds of ears:
Let the drumbeat of our lives drum on
Let us rise to see another beautiful dawn
Together, under one big sky
Let us soar and fly
Like the heron
Heads held high
Accept, love, believe
Hear the rallying cry
Of peace.
The time is nigh.
