Being young and alone at Christmastime in Phoenix in the 1970s


It was my choice to leave Minnesota and travel out west when I was 19. I disliked being cold, and I'd had enough of it. I often tell people that when I turned 18, I bought a car, and it took a year for me to figure out which way was west, and then I moved to Arizona.

If you grew up where it's miserable, icy, and cold in the winter I don't have to describe how it felt seeing my first Christmas in Phoenix. I'm still amazed that such a wonderful place exists. At Christmastime I just wander around, lost in amazement, even after all of these years.

But even though it's what I wanted, being alone at Christmastime is hard. People would ask me if I was going home for Christmas, and I'd say no. I had just left snow and cold, I really had no interest even visiting it. I didn't have the money for a plane ticket, anyway, and I didn't have the money for long-distance calls. So I wrote letters to my friends back home, hundreds of them.

In the last few years some of my friends have showed me the letters that they had kept for all of these years, and they're just nonsense. Wonderful nonsense. I would write about everything I could think of, draw cartoons with references to things my friends remembered from high school, and it made me feel better. I wrote to the Girl I Had Just Met, and she wrote back. Heck, I even wrote to my mom - and she mailed me "care packages", usually with my favorite brand of beans.

I did go back to Minneapolis for Christmas a couple of times, and it was miserable. And maybe it was a reminder why I left. I don't like cold, and snow! My parents flew me back after I graduated from ASU, and then I think I went one other time, I really don't recall.

Christmastime is a sentimental time, and I have fond memories of Christmas as a kid in Minneapolis. My parents were usually very frugal, but at Christmas, they were lavish with gifts. Of course I still had to walk for miles in the snow uphill, both ways, to get to school, and I don't miss that! Cars would get stuck in snowbanks and my friends and I would happily push them out. We always had a white Christmas in Minneapolis - it snows a lot there!

But Arizona is my home, and has been for a long time now, and hopefully always will be. This is where I want to be. So I say that "I'll be home for Christmas", and it will be Glendale, Arizona.

Image at the top of this post: Me at the Saguaro Apartments in 1978, 4201 N. 9th Street, Phoenix, Arizona.
History Adventuring on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more