Tag Archives: Tucson

Why Did You Marry Me?

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That day had been the perfect spring Sunday for Ethan and Rhonda Hedgerton. Jonathan, their son, and Evie, his wife, had come for the afternoon with the twins. They made it a point to get together one Sunday every month to catch up on family events and activities. Jon and Evie lived about an hour away. On warmer days, they were at Ethan and Rhonda’s so the kids could swim in the pool. During cooler months, they met at Jonathan and Evie’s. Holidays were always at Evie’s and included her parents…she insisted.

The boys played in the pool as the adults watched from the patio with drinks. Ethan had Guinness, room temp, Evie had iced tea, Jonathan and Rhonda had G&Ts.  Later, Ethan barbequed steaks for the grownups and hamburgers for the eight-year-old boys. Rhonda served a medley of oven-roasted veggies and, for dessert, special cream cheese-filled chocolate cupcakes that always made the boys squeal with delight. After the kids left, Ethan and Rhonda cleaned up the kitchen and patio. They settled in for the evening.

Ethan sat in his leather recliner with the footrest up and his stocking feet dangling over the end. He was reading the Times sports section. Other sections were scattered on the floor by his chair. Rhonda sat on the couch across from him, her bare feet tucked under her dress, and the cat curled up in the crook of her knees. She was reading the sixth novel in a series of Gilded Age Mysteries by her favorite mystery author, Rosemary Simpson. She found herself reading the same page over and over. Finally, she plunked down the book without putting her bookmark in it. Rhonda scratched Simone’s silky caramel head, eliciting a rumbling purr.

“Ethan…,” she paused to see if he was listening.

“Huh?” He answered from behind the paper.

“Why did you marry me?”

“I donknow.”

“Really, Ethan. Why did you ask me to marry you?”

“What’s going on?” Ethan lowered the paper a bit to look over the top at Rhonda.

“I want to know why you asked me to marry you.”

“It just slipped out.”

“You mean you had no thought? No intention? I could have said no, and things would have just gone on?”

“Ronnie, what do you want from me. It was forty years ago. I don’t remember what I was thinking.”

“You hadn’t agonized over popping the question?”

“I don’t remember. It seemed to be the right thing, the right time, I guess. What brought this on?” His paper was crumpled in his lap.

“Today, when the kids were here, Jon mentioned he and Evie were going to Hawaii for their tenth anniversary, taking the kids with. You said, ‘Hey boy, you just might get stuck for forty years like me’.”

“So?”

“Well, I saw a look pass between Evie and Jon. I felt like you had thrown cold water in my face. Stuck, you said, stuck.”

“Oh, get over it, Ronnie.” A peevish tone entered his voice.

“I can’t get OVER it. I want to know why you married me?”

“Look, I’m here, aren’t I. No visible chains. You’re making something out of nothing.”

“It’s not nothing if Jon and Evie noticed it. You must have had some thought about us being us.”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“That’s not good enough.”

With a sigh, Ethan responded, “I married you because of your soft brown eyes. I liked the idea of having sex with you, morning, noon, and night, without worrying about your roommate coming home.”

“That’s it…sex?”

“Pretty much.” Ethan paused. “Okay then, Miss Third Degree, why did you say yes? Why did you marry me?”

“Because I thought you loved me. I thought we had the same idea about family and our future.”

“I don’t recall ever talking about a future OR a family. I wasn’t really keen on the idea of kids back then.”

“So, we didn’t have the same goals?”

“Goals are something I do to advance my career, not live with my wife.”

“You go your way, I go mine. You work all week. You play golf every weekend and poker once a week. You go out with your college friends for dinner. We don’t do anything as a couple.” Ronda was getting visibly upset.

“I relax with my buddies, put work stuff out of my mind. I enjoy golf. It’s my excuse for exercise. I knew Skip and Tim before I met you. Skip is a bachelor, so there’s no couple to go with. The last time I invited Tim and Kim over for dinner, you told me you didn’t like her. After all these years, you said she was boring, opinionated, and talked too much. I don’t connect with your friends’ husbands. We don’t have anything in common. When I go out with Tim, Kim joins us sometimes, even Skip, and it is easy. Kim’s a kick and blends right in with the guys. For a couple of hours, we all have a good time.”

“You mean you go with them, and I’m not invited?”

“You’re invited, but I tell them you have mahjong that night or are babysitting the twins or something because you made it clear how much you disliked being around Kim. I think they get the picture. If you want to join us and listen to old college reminiscences, you can anytime.”

“We’re living here together for no reason. We’re like roommates.”

“Roommates with privileges,” Ethan quipped.

“Not so much anymore. You barely touch me. Our lovemaking is perfunctory. Like you just want sex but no commitment.”

“I barely touch you because after you started menopause, you said your skin hurt. You flinched every time I tried to hold you. You said you felt sweaty all the time.  Over the years, I got used to keeping my distance. I felt like I was invading hostile territory. I don’t want to impose on you. I feel left out when I see you hug your girlfriends, even the guys in your book club, and our grandkids.”

Rhonda opened her mouth to respond, but shrugged her shoulders sadly.

“Hey, I haven’t noticed you being lonesome. You have your mahjong group, your tennis friends, your book club, and you go to dinner with your girlfriends for birthdays and such,” Ethan said.

“We used to go to concerts, plays, and movies, sometimes just us, but lots of times with friends. We used to go dancing and listen to live music around town. Now we just sit here and watch TV. You’re going to retire next year, and we’ll be stuck here looking at each other, wondering why. Why are we together? We have nothing in common except Jonathan and his family. Marj and Colin are planning a cruise the first year he retires, but you don’t like to travel. Bev and Spike are getting a divorce after thirty-six years together. What are we going to be doing?”

“There’s that word stuck again. I get seasick. I don’t like to travel because I like the food I eat here, the bed I sleep in here, and having everything I like, just where I like it…including you. I don’t want to worry about foreign money, foreign language, foreign food, and people I don’t know and don’t want to know.”

“Travel doesn’t have to be foreign. We could travel in the US. There’s a Denny’s or Applebee’s everywhere.”

“But you know how hard it is for me to sleep in a strange bed. My back aches if the mattress isn’t firm enough.  I get cramps. My stomach gets upset easily with weird food.”

Rhonda shook her head and looked down at Simone, tears threatened to breach the edges of her eyes.

Ethan got up and walked over to Rhonda. Taking her hands in his, he pulled her to her feet, dumping Simone onto the floor.  He put his arms around her carefully, then feeling no resistance, tightened his hug; his chin nestled on the top of her head.

“I’m winding up my last project at work. Next year, when I retire, we will plan things together again, maybe even a car trip. I’ve been so busy I didn’t realize we weren’t.”

He bent a little to whisper in her ear. “As far as stuck, I’ll borrow from Elvis, ‘I’m stuck on you’ and that’s a good thing. I married you because I thought you were sexy, and you laugh at my lame jokes. Your laugh, that starts deep inside you, fills the room and warms my heart.”

Rhonda hugged back, her head against his chest.

Neither said, I love you.

Home

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Last week our writing group had a discussion about place. Where do you consider your home?

I identify as a Kansan even though I haven’t lived there for over sixty-five years. It still feels like home. I have family in several towns across the state from Missouri to Colorado. Whenever I am in Kansas, I am home. I grew up with a large extended family around. Some were city folks, some farm folks. The common meeting place was my great-grandparents’ house where generations gathered for Sunday dinners or family celebrations. My widowed grandmother lived with and took care of her parents in their declining years. After my great-grandparents died, two of her sisters, one a divorcee and one a widow, moved in with her. Then their brother who was also widowed joined them. It remained THE family home for many more years. Oh, the stories that house on High Street could tell. It will always be home even though it passed from family ownership decades ago. There is something that is intrinsically Midwest in my bones.

I spent many summers of my youth with my grandparents in a small town in Colorado. No parents – just doting grandparents. My grandfather was a trainman on the Union Pacific Railroad and was out of town overnight sometimes on runs to Green River, Wyoming. I got to sleep in his bed when he was gone. They had twin beds in their bedroom and I had a big double bed in my room. I loved the cozy twin next to my grandmother. Grandma had a vegetable garden and canned her summer harvest. She had a flower garden that filled my senses with colors and smells. I sat under the weeping willow in the front yard to play with a neighbor girl. Summer at the base of the Rockies was glorious. We fished at Estes Park (Grandpa baited the hook). We always caught enough to cook and eat there with some left to take home for breakfast. The wriggly rainbow trout were put in his woven basket that hung in the water at the edge of the river letting cool water flow through so they were fresh when he cooked them on the portable gas grill. Grandma packed potato salad, buttermilk biscuits, fresh fruit, and cookies for our riverside picnics. Back in their neighborhood, I took long walks with Grandpa, stopping at the ice cream shop for candy cane ice cream. We took trips to the big city of Denver to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins. Grandma and Grandpa listened to baseball every night on the radio. It was a great place to visit, but it wasn’t home.

Seattle in clouds

The bulk of my adult life, over forty years, was spent in the Pacific Northwest where I remained a stranger, an outsider.  Even though it was there that I met my beloved, created a family, and had a boatload of friends, it was never home. I love the city of Seattle because of the variety of world cultures that settled and thrive there. You are never far from a festival, an event to celebrate people from far-flung lands. I love my many Seattle area friends. I loved being able to snow ski Mount Rainier and sail Puget Sound, horseback ride and play tennis, most of the year in mild temperatures. Wonderful ethnic food, an enormous variety of world-class arts –  museums, theater, music – play a big part in Seattle’s identity. I once wrote a twenty-page paper on the City I Love to Hate – extolling its history and all its virtues and why I suffered in its bounty. I was claustrophobic, confined, imprisoned by the environment. A blue sky is sporadic, appearing a few times a month (occasionally never making an appearance for weeks) and rarely bringing warmth. Clouds hung like Damocles’ sword, low overhead, threatening gloom. My feet never felt dry, my hands never warm. A pervasive smell of mold clung to everything. Trees obscured the horizon and all potential vistas of mountains and lakes. People were closed as tightly as their coats and sweaters, bundled for safety, cliquish.

Santa Catalina Mountains

During our adventure traveling through the contiguous forty-eight states for fourteen months in 1984-1985, we found a place that felt like it could be another home. Tucson. It is ringed by five mountain ranges, not snowy like the Rockies, but rugged and beautiful, rising from the Sonoran Desert. The Santa Catalinas, the Tortolitas, the Rincons, the Santa Rita, and Tucson ranges. These mountains display a mind-blowing range of color at sunrise, sunset, and when clouds filter the desert light. I have photos of them dressed in reds, oranges, blues, purples, and golds. During monsoon season they flaunt a verdant green as vegetation awakens in the nearly tropical heat and humidity. But we still had a life (family and work) in Bellevue, Washington; but when the kids were raised and it was time for retirement we headed south. I am grateful every morning I wake up to the sunshine. I even learned, after many years, to treasure rain again. It was such a curse in Seattle. Anxiety no longer attacks me when dark rain clouds appear on the horizon. They are temporary. I know they will make the cacti and fruit trees blossom, wildflowers erupt into blankets of color and sate thirsty desert critters. I welcome monsoon season like a native. My feet are firmly planted in this place. Breathing clear air, embracing dark skies at night with diamond-bright galaxies shifting overhead, walking trails and communing with desert animals that cross our path or visit our yard, make this place home.

This poem is about the four places that influenced me from childhood until now. Home is more than just an address, a dot on a map. It is a place where your soul can breathe.

Where I Am From

I am from the traveling wind, deep roots,
Wide blue skies, far horizons, and waving wheat,
Great-grandma’s raw onions by her supper plate,
Great-grandpa’s spittoon beside his rocker,
Refrigerator on the back porch and dirt fruit cellar,
Fireflies on summer nights.

I am from deep dark earth and snowy mountain highs
Grandpa’s railroad uniform smelling of wool and tobacco
Fishing at Estes Park, summer night baseball,
Honeysuckle, snapdragons, and putting up the beans
A ringer on the washing machine
Cold fried chicken, white bread with butter and sugar

I am from endless gray skies, armies of black-green sentinel fir trees
Reaching to the smothering clouds
A city where art and music blend past and present
A thousand cultures mingle like flavors in a stew
The drizzle of cold, the smell of mold
Wind in the sails, islands in the fog

I am from the knife-edged peaks with mysterious crevices
Rising from the desert floor.
Dark starry nights, quiet as serenity
Deer, coyote, and javelina share their space.
The soul-filling scent of the creosote bush after a summer monsoon.
The endless blue of sky and translucent flower of prickly pear.

Autumn – a seasonal complaint

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I am the ONLY person I know who does not sing the praises of Autumn. All my friends look forward to the cessation of our desert heat when the humidity drops to single digits. They express endless gratitude for the crisp cool air and colors of fall. Me – not so much. Each season does have good points, but for me the darkening of days, the cooling air, the descent into winter does not herald a positive trend.

Along with this is the churning of time. I don’t mean the minutes that ebb from my life, a steady drip into the bucket of forever. I’m talking about the changing of clocks. One reason I love Arizona is that this state did not get sucked into the folly of daylight “savings” time. Our clocks remain the same through all the months of the year. However, because everyone else in the U.S. changes time, I must remember which time zone they have switched to. Annoying. I’m sure someone sometime had a savvy presentation with charts and graphs to justify the idea. But as a wise old Native American was once credited with saying: “Only a white man would cut two inches off the bottom of his blanket and sew it to the top and think the blanket is longer”. That sums up the ridiculousness of daylight-saving time. What are we saving? Which bank is it in? Can we spend it when we really need it? Daylight is one of nature’s gifts and follows the tilt of the sun and earth according to seasons, not a man-made device. No matter how you slice it we have the same amount of daylight. It is shorter in the winter in the northern hemisphere and longer in the summer, but the number of hours can’t be expanded by moving the hands of a clock.

I am a warm-weather sunshine person. My husband agreed to move to Tucson so I could warm up after living forty years in the Pacific Northwest in a constant state of chill and I don’t mean the trendy kind. We’ve lived here twenty-seven years so I’m beginning to thaw. However, when temperatures dip below 80°, I put on long underwear. No kidding, even in Tucson – you can ask my husband. I get frosty to the bone very easily. No, it is not a medical condition, it is a mental condition. Thankfully the sun shines here most of the time in all seasons thus providing us, the cold-blooded creatures, with a modicum of warmth during each day. Darkness does not overtake us as it did in Seattle.

In the Pacific Northwest, fall and winter are not only colder and wetter than summer, they are also darker. Daylight is barely nine hours. We got up in the dark and came home from work in the dark. Dull skies muffled in blankets of gray clouds during what was said to be daylight hours did not allow a smidge of sun to peek through. Sunshine was as rare as a Corbin Carroll home run in the 2023 World Series. Depression – your name is Seattle winter.  

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday so that is the plus for Autumn.  In Tucson, we serve our big Thanksgiving meal about 4:00 on the patio. We usually have twelve or more family and friends join us. The doors stay open and people go in and out. Turkey is cooked on the barbeque and all the trimmings are set out on the counter so the hungry can help themselves. They choose to sit inside in the dining room or out on the patio tables. Most often outside is favored. After dinner (when the sun retires leaving a beautiful sunset) we put on a sweater or light jacket to sit outside with a glass of wine and good conversation and watch the stars blink on. We build a fire in the chimenea for atmosphere. It is a beautiful celebration with friends. The weather doesn’t cooperate one out of four years. Then we serve dinner inside just like those unfortunate people who don’t live in the Sonoran Desert.

They’re Back – The Boys of Summer

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

Baseball is back. The opening weekend of Spring Training for the Cactus League is finally here. Tucson once hosted Cleveland Indians now Guardians, Chicago White Sox, Arizona Diamondbacks, and Colorado Rockies. Now all have gone north to be in the greater Phoenix area, a larger spectator base and less travel time between each of the fifteen Cactus League teams. The weather has been a little iffy.

Friday was in the 40s with clouds, Saturday climbed into the 60s with clouds and Sunday started with rain showers and overcast skies in the 50s for the day. That may not sound cold to those in the midwest or on the east coast who are experiencing freezes now but to a Tucsonan like me, being below 80 is considered a freeze.

Our daughter and grandson braved the frigid temps to attend a Cubs vs Dodgers game on Sunday – Dodgers won 9-4. The Dodgers this year are so weighted with talent, they may be a bit top heavy. On paper they are a slam dunk (basketball) – a monster outta-the-park grand slam cinch to be in the World Series; but time and the baseball gods can make those paper predictions just so much shredded confetti. The rules are different this year, one I applaud – the limited field shifts (that was out of control); two I’m skeptical of – the 15-second pitch clock and bigger bases. We’ll see if they improve a nearly perfect game.

Since my favorite players have done the musical bases game and switched teams over and over, I now have no favorite teams. I just root for my players. The big advantage to that is I am rarely disappointed in the outcome of a game because somebody I like is nearly always on the winning side.

Besides the opening of baseball in Arizona, Tucson hosted La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros this week, a nine-day celebration of everything cowboy. It started as a three-day competition back in 1925 so we are in year 98 of the Festival. It is a big deal in Tucson. The kids are out of school on Thursday and Friday for rodeo week. Historically the Festival attracts cowboys, Indians, calvary, horses, steers, and bulls from all over the country. Each year there is a parade on Thursday. It is the longest non-mechanized parade in the country, 2.5 miles with over 200 entries. Sunday was the culmination of the competitions. Cowboys and cowgirls of all ages enter. Muttin’ Bustin’ and Junior Rodeo are for those 5 to 13. The reigning rodeo king, Trevor Brazile who has won eight All-Around Titles and numerous championships was here. He didn’t do so well this time around. The official results were not announced at the time of this post. Prizes amount to over $300,000. The Tucson rodeo was featured in several movies including, The Lusty Men, 8 Seconds, and Ruby Jean and Joe.

As a side note Tiger Woods was here in Tucson for a Match Play game this week and the Encantada Gem show, a part of our Gem and Mineral extravaganza, was this week. The G&M Show starts the first week of February and this was the final weekend. Buyers and dealers from all over the world gather to compare rocks.

This week my co-authors and I will participate in the Festival of Books on the campus of the University of Arizona, Saturday, March 4th from 10 am to 1 pm in the Indie Author Tent.  It is the third largest book festival in the U.S.  We have book signings at both Barnes and Noble stores, Broadway on March 3rd, 1 pm – 3 pm, and Foothills Mall on March 5th, 1 pm-3 pm.

Tucson is a Happenin’ Place.