Arizona Highways
This morning, Sam's friend Bill and I, while waiting for tires to be installed on Sam's Jeep, spent some time in a Borders Books. I got a copy of Al Franken's book, Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them, and Bill was looking for calendars with pictures of Tucson. He no longer lives in Tucson, and he misses it.
And while I was looking through the calendars with him, I found one put out by the magazine Arizona Highways. Back when I was a little kid (age 7, to be exact), my parents found a drawing I had made and decided to see if a locally-well-known artist, Mary Hughes, would consider taking me into her weekly class. She agreed to it.
It started with basic color theory (both of pigment and of light) and then went through various media: watercolors, water- and oil-based pastels, temperas, India Ink, scratchboard, acrylic paints, oil paints.
Oil painting was the end-all-be-all for the class, the big leagues. Once you got there, you were in a different world. It wasn't about being done with learning, it was about being done with learning the basics and moving on to learn about composition and content, about cause and effect. What was actually going on, now that I think about it, was the move from compulsory to freeform, from physical law to Choice.
Often the subject matter would come from the various scenery magazines that Mrs. Hughes had available. The name of the magazine that contained largely still-life and other indoor scenes escapes me at the moment. The one with the desertscapes was called Arizona Highways
It's strange, for all the talk about not having spent any time in Arizona before I met Sam, and then remembering that I'd driven through it with Allen—on our way from Midland, TX to San Francisco when he moved there with me—and having stayed overnight in a featureless hotel in featureless interstate-side Kingman, AZ. Then I'd remembered that I'd flown to Phoenix to meet a then-boyfriend and spent a weekend there. The first can be forgiven because, well, it's Kingman. What's to remember about a Motel 6 in Kingman, except for having smuggled a certain black miniature schnauzer into our hotelroom? The latter, well, I can explain that by way of having stupidly participated in the Undocumented Nature of that boyfriend's life. No anchors, no happenings. No happenings, nothing to apologize for or explain away later, where short-term memories cannot brest the hostile waters into the long-term vault.
But now, Tucson. Ahhhh, Tucson. Did I ever think I'd say that without sarcasm? Where's the damned irony? Yet here I am, taking such a stand. There is a brutality to the beauty of the desert. And there is a beauty to the abject hostility of the environment. Sands, not dust. Rock, not mud. Even the hottest air cannot hold the moisture. The dry heat is a thing that comes from above, whereas humidity—absent in Tucson—would come up from below. Dry heat stops frivolous thought; mugginess stops unnecessary movement.
The Sonoran Desert holds no charm for Sam. I'd be lying if I said it held any particular charm for me, even in light of the above admissions. Sam will be done with it, gone from it, soon enough in a big picture view (and nowhere near soon enough in personal terms).
And honestly, even as a child-artstudent, the stack of Arizona Highways issues were rarely a choice for subject matter, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.
That a place or a person or a thing can seemingly hold so much sway over the selectivity of memory astounds me. I always considered that certain things/places/people could serve as memory prods for this or that, evoking by touch, or sight, or even better, by smell. But it never occurred to me that a place could take such an active role in shuffling and dealing individual memories onto the table of conscious remembrance while keeping others close to the vest.
Frank Herbert called it “adab, the demanding memory”, those which burst into the fore without warning and without choice. He had no word for the opposite, for those memories which refuse to float to the front.
And I suppose there's that irony I was looking for.