The Amber Lining
This last visit, having regrettably ended on Sunday evening, made me feel more at home both with the boyfriend and with Tucson in general. While it may not sound so terribly romantic nor exciting to talk about settling-in and being-comfortable with one's romantic partner, you're just going to have to trust me that it is. Trust. All those exciting, nasty, whispered, furtive, dirrrrdy things that one comes to expect in the beginnings of a relationship actually take on a further intensity when trust and love and a dowdy, nesting behavior have also taken hold. "Dirrrrdy" takes more chances, takes different chances, with paradoxically less of the icky kinds of emotional risk. [Ok, stopping now....am in a public place....going to work in a few.]
Settling into Tucson comes as just as much a surprise to me as it probably does to those of you who've read me and/or who know me. But it has it going on in some interesting ways.
Reasons Tucson Kicks My Ass
- The Boyfriend
- Mt Lemmon and the Catalina Mountain Range
- Working in the same place with the unfeignedly brill Panchesco.
- Coyotes
- Compass-point mountain ranges which tell stories
- The Big Sky
- Sunsets
- Mexican food that borders on Religious Experience
- Bentley's Coffeehouse
Tucson is a funky big-little-town, and I mean that in lots of good ways. It has its problems, like a huge politico-economic issue—undocumented peoples—that appears to the outside as unvarnished racism, the cultural influence of a large military base, the cultural influence of a large state university, but it has its thing going on, something that defines it and prevents it from being swallowed whole by outside influences.
If you ever find yourself down there, stop in at Bentley's and say hi to Richard, at least.