The day I came home to Phoenix, in 1989

Actually, I don't remember the exact day that I came home to Phoenix. It was 1989, and it must have been July or August because it was ridiculously hot. I had been living in California for many years and I had forgotten that the temperature can be in the nineties, in the middle of the night.

Now hold on there, I grew up in Minneapolis, and moved to Phoenix when I was 19, so "coming home" should have been Minneapolis, right? But Phoenix was, and is, my home, and in this post I'll see if I can explain my feelings.

I moved to Phoenix when I was 19, in 1977, and after seven years finished my four-year degree at ASU, and then decided to move to The Big City. To me, there are only two Big Cities in the United States, New York and Los Angeles (sorry, Chicago!), and since I was in Phoenix, and had no intention of ever seeing snow and cold again, I moved to California.

I was thirty-one, and working at a great corporate job in LA, when one day my entire department was laid off. And for a few months I wandered around, looking for work, and collecting Unemployment. It was depressing to say the least, so I called an old friend in Phoenix  to ask if I could visit, and sleep on the floor. He was happy to say yes, and I did just that. Getting out of town would feel great, I thought, get my mind off of worrying about the resumes that I'd sent out, and was waiting to get an answer to. And of course, see some old friends, good for the soul. I really had no intention of moving back to Phoenix, but then I fell in love.

Yes, this is a love story, I'll admit that. But there's no woman to blame, it was Phoenix. She embraced me in a way that made me feel that I'd come home. The skies were so blue! There were no lines at gas stations! And the cost of living was much lower! I wrote a letter to Sacramento asking if it were possible to mail my Unemployment check out of state, and they appeared happy to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I loved my time in Southern California and went back many times to visit friends. But I had found my home. There came a day when I stood on a golf course in Phoenix, leaning on my driver, when I quoted the words of Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments"; "I shall dwell here!"

I wish that I could explain how wonderful everything looked when I came home to Phoenix. Whether it was true or not, the people seemed to be more friendly, they seemed genuinely glad to see me. And all I needed was a job, and a gorgeous girlfriend, and my new life would be perfect. It was. I started working for Valley Bank.

People around every corner,
They seem to smile and say,
We don't care what your name is, boy,
We'll never turn you away.
So I'll continue to say.
Here I always will stay.

Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on Buy me a coffee, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to:

  Buy Me A Coffee

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 2, 2022 at 12:56 PM

    does anyone remember Chaparral raceway (where you paid by the lap like Malibu grand prix) in Tempe, in about 1989 or so? If so what was the address and what happen to it?

    ReplyDelete

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