Tucson

Tucson is a strange city.  In the winter it fills up full of seniors who seem to spend a lot of time playing miniature golf as the town is loaded with these micro-links.  Judy and I were too busy to play as LoriAnne, her husband, and Delda were all there.  We crowded into an RV park a few miles from the kids and spent our days that Christmas season visiting and exploring the local attractions with one or more of them.  While attractions like the Air Force graveyard and Air Museum and a National Park dedicated to cactus were well worth the visit, the one that stuck to my ribs was the 17th century Spanish mission San Zavier del Bac.  

From the outside the mission is imposing, earning its nickname as the “White Dove of the Desert”.  The sanctuary was definitely not what I expected.  It was definitely not opulent; I might even call it gaudy and poor.  In retrospect, considering that the mission is located on part of the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation and has served this demographic for centuries, I should not have been so surprised.  There was even a badly worn and poorly done wooden statue of Saint Francis laying in a coffin-like repose and all decorated up with chintzy Christmas tinsel that looked like it had been purchased at a garage sale several years before.   I am certainly not meaning this to be disrespectful.  I have been in lots of churches from Catholic to Pentecostal over the years, but this is the only one where I have actually felt a presence and it was not just me. Judy and the rest of our group all fell silent.  We took no pictures, talked little and then only in whispers.  I am not sure that what I felt was God as it was also not what I expected to feel in his presence as it was sad and old and almost malevolent.  I felt like an interloper sitting in those humble pews which had been used for three hundred years as a place of worship and hope by poor Hispanics and Native Americans.  I didn’t belong there and the ghosts of the tens of thousands that lived and died with this church as the central structure in their lives were telling me so.  Whatever the reason, we were soon back outside in the December sun of a fine Arizona day feeling like a weight had been lifted from us. Before we left, we all had a wonderful lunch of Indian fry bread and beans from one of the kiosks around the parking lot of the mission where locals eke out a living selling food and native art to tourists.  That evening we all came down with stomach cramps and a bad case of the Hershey Squirts.  I did not complain about it too much as the food was good and it might have been part of the whole cleansing process, a colonic for the soul.

An interesting and inexpensive attraction in Tucson is the International Wildlife Museum. 
Even though they have over 400 species on display its only about a $10 for an adult and $5 for kids. The reason why it is so cheap is that the critters are all stuffed, dead, pining for the fjords demised.  I thought it was going to be creepy as I never understood why anyone other than a fucked-up Texan would put the heads of dead animals on the interior walls of their homes.  But somehow in this place it worked.  I had no idea how many species of antelopes there were. Did you know that the White Rhino is not really white?  White is a bad English translation of the Dutch word wijd, which means wide, referring the size of the beast’s mouth.  Makes one wonder why the English got to name the beast and why the Dutch got to name it before them.  My guess is that the original Zulu name was penis nose, so I am happy with White.

If Tucson is strange in December it is downright miserable in June, made barely tolerable by the act of sipping a Corona under the RV awning.  We were staying in a nice RV park with a swimming pool which we made use of every day we were there.  It felt great in the pool, but I am not sure that it was worth it as the sun hurt you on the two-minute walk to the pool and then punished you on the same walk back.

In May of that year LoriAnne had separated from her husband of eight years. Their marriage had turned almost from the start, but Judy and I took a while to notice.  He was a giant of a man who had nearly gown up in our house as he was best friends with Marty.  When Marty joined the Navy, he still hung out at our house and began dating LoriAnne while she was still in HS.  The warning signs were there, we just never saw them or were blind to them.  Delda saw them.  Gail who eventually married Wes saw them.  They both tried to warn us, but we didn’t hear or did not want to hear.  We knew that he had grown up in a dysfunctional family but that was them, not him.  But it was hard not to see his true colors after they had been married for a few years.  LoriAnne had supported him through college, moving from Corvallis, to Klamath Falls where he finally got a degree in engineering.  He couldn’t seem to get a job right away, so they moved back to Waldport for a bit.  He had a part-time coaching job with the high school, and she commuted back and forth to Corvallis over one of the worst roads in the state as she needed to earn enough to support them.  He finally landed a good job in Tucson and they moved there, where the shit he was dishing out to her became so obvious that no one, not even Judy and I could miss it. 

When we were there for Christmas Judy and I could sense the tension and saw firsthand some of what he was putting her though.  It was years later that I learned more of the details.  LoriAnne was wise to hide them from me as even though it has now been several years, the anger wells up within me whenever I think of him.  

There is true evil in this world, and he was and still is part of it, made all the worse by his professed Christianity.  I expect a lot from someone who proclaims their Christianity.   Professing your belief in a loving God and accepting Jesus as your personal savior is a commitment which means something.  It is an important and solemn commitment to do good in the world, to love and care for your family, to stand up for what is right and tell the truth no matter what the consequences. 

It is not easy to do this.  Sin is easy and I fail in this regard more than I care to mention. But what kind of Christian hits his wife in the stomach so the bruises don’t show?  What kind of Christian cheats on her with a best friend and again with the marriage counselor they were going to?  What kind of Christian keeps his wife’s doll collection, which was given to her by her mother, one every Christmas since she was eight?  He’s no Christian.  He’s a monster.  For several years I fantasized about sneaking out of Waldport, taking the red eye to Tucson, then sneaking up behind him with a baseball bat and breaking his spine, then slipping back to Waldport before Judy wakes up and finds me missing.  Now there’s a big-time sin and sort of impractical.  I have also seen myself putting my arm gently around his shoulders to give him this sage advice,

“Do yourself a favor son, kill yourself before you pollute the next generation like your father did yours”. 

But it’s too late for that now; he’s spawned with his second ex-wife.  Yes, I want revenge.  I want to rub his nose in his vileness, make him suffer, as he not only abused and betrayed my daughter, but he also abused and betrayed Judy and I as we once viewed him as a son.  But then what kind of Christian would I be?     

In May of the year, when LoriAnne had finally had enough of his abuse, she moved in with Delda who was renting a house in Tucson.  The house was owned by one of Delda’s coworkers in the Badlands National Park.  When Delda was laid off during the winter she had moved to Tucson and took a job as a waitress rather than bartend at the rough and dangerous cowboy bar in Interior, South Dakota.  The house was large with a back yard complete with a covered patio.  After Delda left for her job in the Badlands, LoriAnne had the house to herself, where her workday morning ritual was to take her cup of coffee out to the patio and have a smoke before the day got too hot to be outside.  One morning as she was about to do her usual, she noticed she had an unwelcome visitor in the form of a four-foot rattlesnake just outside the sliding glass door.  In Tucson, snakes are protected.  If you have a problem with a snake, the city will come and get it and move it for you.  But LoriAnne needed her coffee and smoke right then and there so she decided to handle the situation on her own.  On her way out the front door she grabbed a broom, and an empty plastic garbage can and slipped into the back yard by the side gate.  She then laid the can on its side and managed to direct the snake into the can using the broom.  Quickly up righting the can she carried the now incarcerated reptile to the fence dumping it into her neighbor’s yard for them to deal with while saving the taxpayers of Tucson a few dollars in their snake relocation budget.  The snake did not seem to be bothered by this procedure.  It was used to it. 

Like I said, Tucson is a strange city.  I don’t particularly care for it and never intend to go back.