Across Twenty-Four Springtimes in Tucson

I'd been to Tucson once before in my life, literally half my lifetime ago, when I was 24 years old.

It was May of 1989. I had just been to the graduate physics program at the University of Texas with a teaching position that I knew would allow me to support myself there. I had driven down from Colorado to Austin in the Renault Fuego, white with black interior, that I owned then, to drop off some possessions at the house of a high school friend who had moved to Austin a couple years before that, and who had graciously allowed to store my stuff in his garage for the summer.

The heat of Texas was overwhelming, and I wanted to be inside the air conditioning all the time, but I was dazzled by being in a completely new and blank-slate place, and to be starting not just another chapter in my life, I thought, but a whole new series of chapters.

I felt free of the past. My undergraduate years in Oregon, and the emotional turmoil of the previous summer, suddenly seemed it had happened a decade before, belonging to chapters now closed and finished.

Ironically I was on my way to Oregon, having driven west from Austin across Texas and southern New Mexico to reach Tucson. I was on my way to Salem for the commencement exercises of my graduation. I had officially graduated the previous semester, but Willamette, being a small college, held the ceremony only once a year in May.

My aunt and uncle were living in a different house then, one that was also set in the rugged hills amidst cacti. Their two children still lived at home with them. I shared a room with my cousin Mark, my junior by eighteen years, who was studying karate and enjoyed practicing it in a very rambunctious manner.

It was still spring but it was hotter than heck in Tucson. My aunt and uncle introduced me to their cooling system---a swamp cooler, that was adapted to desert climates. They suggested I visit the nearby Desert Museum, which I drove to in one afternoon. I walked around for a couple hours then went back to my car, the sun still high in the sky. The black interior of the car had heated up so much that I couldn't touch the steering wheel or the gear shift at all. With no working air conditioning in the vehicle, I thought I was going to have wait until the sun went down, but somehow I used a towel to gingerly start and steer the car until I could stand to grasp the wheel.

I stayed in Tucson a couple nights before heading up to Phoenix to visit my high school friend Randy S. who was studying architectural design at ASU. Then drove out to L.A to visit another friend, then up U.S. 101 through Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo to the Bay Area, to visit my friend David C.

When I got to Oregon it was the mid May, the most beautiful and rich time of the year to be there, one I rarely got to experience much, since I always left at the end of the spring semester. I stayed with a college friend in the Portland suburb of West Linn, only going back to Salem for a couple hours. I went to the library and watched as students walked along the Mill Stream, feeling so much not a part of that place anymore, and knowing it was time to let it all go.

Then I went back to my car, donned my graduation robe and walk over to the football stadium for the ceremony.

I was done with all of that.  I lingered in West Linn a few days then looped up through western Washington and down through Idaho back towards Colorado. I was joyful, and carefree, in the most direct sense of that word. My future was blooming before my eyes.

It would be tempting to say that coming back here has brought back that state of mind, but I know it doesn't work that way. If you've ever tried to recapture a feeling you had in a place by going back there, you will almost always be very disappointed.

I felt then like I was in the springtime of my life. To say that I feel that way now again is not exactly correct. The facts of life are that I am no longer twenty-four years old. Some things are privilege of youth that age cannot retain, no matter how much we wish so such.

Yet something inside me struggles to feel that newness again, or to allow myself to feel that way, against all reason that I shouldn't be able to now. It's so trite to say just go with it, you're as young as you feel, but there are few spectacles more disgusting that watching someone try to falsely preserve or capture an adolescent state of mind.

This is the crux of the struggle, the pain of allowing oneself to tap into what you convince yourself is the fountain of eternal renewal. Let go of the past, others can say to you so blithely and easily, as if all it takes it opening your fingers and releasing the taut line of a kite that is pulling you backwards.

Against this is the craving to give meaning to past pain by lingering on it, as if the only way to justify experience is by brooding over it sufficiently. Is all growth simply a bathing in the waters of memory oblivion?