Love letters to the city you love


I just love my city. I live in Glendale, Arizona, which is a suburb of Phoenix. I've only lived two other places in my life, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, but Phoenix is my home. Palm trees grow, and rents are low... let me tell you all about it! Sit down, I'll be talking quite a bit!

And there you have it. Loving a city means talking about it all of the time, which is what I do IRL (In Real Life) and in cyberspace. And I'm one of the lucky ones who gets to live in a place that they love. Some people aren't so lucky, and they seem to always be thinking of the city that they love. My heart aches for them.

Affection for a city, like any type of love, can be a wonderful thing, or it can be awful. I've known people who seem to think that loving somewhere means hating somewhere else, and that makes me sad. I don't hate Minneapolis, or Los Angeles, or any other place that people love, that just makes no sense to me. I can love without hating.

I have a brother who lives in the Bay Area of San Francisco, and he is head over heels in love. He must be, to pay that much to live there! When we talk on the phone, I ask him to tell me what he's looking at, and it's never a dull description. He may tell me that he's looking at the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland Hills. Love oozes out of every word he says. I like that.

For me, I want to know everything there is to know about the city I love. I want to know its past, present, and future. I call that "history adventuring", and really it's just my way of expressing my love. I can't get enough of it, as friends of mine know. I've seen Camelback Mountain thousands of times, and would love to see it thousands more times!

What I'm discovering in a long life is that love isn't blind, it's just selective. I'm willing to overlook the 100-degree-plus temperatures of Phoenix, and the other things that are just "it is what it is". I'm not willing to accept bad things that can be changed, such as cutting down trees. I'd love to see more trees in the city that I love! Oh yeah, and less red-light-running would be nice.

If you're lucky enough to be living in the city that you love, and it's Phoenix, you understand what I do every day. I write love letters.

Image at the top of this post: Looking north at downtown Phoenix and the Phoenix Mountains from 27th Avenue and Southern in 2018.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

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