Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

My husband and I went on a long (around 500 miles) road trip yesterday. We had a good time, as we always do on these long road trips.

We stopped at the Double S Steakhouse in Willcox. It’s the weekend of “Rex Allen Days”, which is the rodeo and town carnival. There were a lot of cowboys and such at the Steakhouse. The iced teas were plentiful.

As we were driving along through rural, southern New Mexico, I kept saying to Earl, “This is what my storm chasing week is like except there’s usually a storm setting we’re headed towards”. We drove from small town to small town and chatted about life like two people do when they’ve been married for 27 years.

I fall in love with him again every day.

We made our way back into Arizona with “the wall” on the horizon for much of the trip along NM Route 9. In Douglas, AZ we got very close to the border on International Street. Nothing bad happened.

We made our way home via Sierra Vista, near Fort Huachuca Army Base, stopping for pizza at a local place where everyone was friendly and apparently the owner is from Buffalo, New York.

A great day!

We did the responsible thing and scheduled our annual appointment at the local Walgreens to get our yearly flu vaccination and the latest COVID booster. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of either, but I do these things because I’m old and intend on getting older, and it helps keep these things under control. Science is there for a reason.

The check-in process was interesting. Back when the COVID vaccines first came out it was a very regimented, structured affair. People were handled with care and the medically inclined staff treated it somberly. These days you go up, people laugh and carry on like you’re about to get a scoop of Ben and Jerry’s shoved in your mouth and everyone takes the science for granted. I guess that’s progress.

Since neither the computer nor the young cashier can apparently do math, after answering questions about my birthdate and my current age, I was ushered into a walled off cubicle to a young guy wearing a face shield who commented on my sneakers. He liked them. Two jabs, one in each arm, and stay in the store for 10 minutes please. My husband followed with the same rigamarole, save for the comments about his sneakers.

As we were strolling around for the 10 minutes, where you get $20 of “Walgreens cash” per vaccination if you spend $1 of actual cash, we noticed our local store now offers wine juice boxes. They had a selection of wines, with dark juice boxes representing red wine and light juice boxes representing white.

I like the science that invented these things.

I’m sitting outside on the gazebo. The air is very still for this time of year. Off to one side the lights of Tucson are twinkling in the distance, off to my right I can see the flashes of an approaching airliner in the sky and the flashing red light atop a tower on Mt. Lemmon. The air is pleasant and I’m finding this experience calming,

This past weekend we attended the 2023 Tucson Pride Parade. This was our first time going to the Pride parade her in the Old Pueblo, and it was an impressive affair. The parade was held Friday night and lasted for about 20 minutes. There were several groups of individuals of all persuasions, interspersed with commercial groups celebrating the diversity of their team members. The crowds along the parade route were small but well established. It was a fun time.

Sitting in the dark and seeing the twinkling lights of the city in the distance, it makes me realize how many folks out there amongst the glow of the streetlamps actually live in the area. At last count, there’s just under 543,000 people living in the city limits; we rank 33rd in city since in the United States.

Tucson is the biggest small town I’ve ever seen.

As the second largest city in Arizona, Tucson’s claim to fame is that we’re not Phoenix. While I grew up in a very small town, lived in cities a varying sizes along the way, and having lived in Chicago before moving to Tucson, there has been a bit of an adjustment for me when it comes to recreational opportunities, the size of the gay community, and the resources available here. Ranking 33rd in the country isn’t shabby, however, what was available 24/7 in Chicago is closed up by 10:00 p.m. here in the desert. I sometimes wonder if the pandemic had something to do with that. When we visit Phoenix (about two hours away) and drive around to find all night diners and the like, things are not as plentiful as Chicago, even though the Phoenix metro area is in the top 10 in the United States.

I like the quiet and stillness of this Wednesday night here in the Old Pueblo. I can’t believe we’ve been here for two and a half years. It seems like just yesterday we had Truman loaded up in the car as we made our way across the country to relocate down here.

I would have never found this quiet and contemplative atmosphere in Chicago.

Perhaps being in a mid-sized city in the United States has everything I need after all.

Years ago my husband and I attended a lecture hosted by our local (at the time) NPR station. The speaker was Diane Rehm, journalist and talk show host. This appearance was about 10 years before her final broadcast of “The Diane Rehm Show”.

One of the topics Ms. Rehm focused on was the importance of listening. Even back in the mid ‘00s, people were getting in the habit of talking a lot but not really listening. Twenty years later, things are worse than ever, but the incessant talking has been replaced by incessant shouting. There’s a lot of shouting these days.

I don’t find it enjoyable.

I will admit that I am a terrible listener. My husband often attributes this trait to the fact that I don’t like “dead air”. As a former radio broadcaster, dead air is deadly, and I can think of less than three occasions where I had dead air during one of my air shifts. He thinks I need to fill the dead air and that’s why I talk when I should be listening.

The truth is, I talk when I listen because it’s my way of understanding the context of what’s being told to me. My memory, which I can confidently say is “above average”, works best when I relate something being told to me to something personal. This usually ends up with me recounting my own personal experience in what I perceive to be a similar situation. It’s my way of saying, “I understand”, but to those who don’t understand the way I process information, it sounds like I’m making the given situation all about me. I am, but for my own purposes, not to one-up or outshine the person speaking to me.

I’m trying hard to find quieter ways of understanding this information.

With all the chaos going on in the U.S. Government these days, and lately it seems to be a lot more than normal even in these elevated times, I can’t help but think we’d all be the better for it if our elected officials just stopped hollering and trying to grab the spotlight by being the most outrageous and just started listening to one another.

If I can try to be a better listener, I certainly expect our elected officials to try to be better listeners as well.

But we know that’s not going to happen.

So when election time comes, I’m going to look for the person that demonstrates they can listen. Because listening can often lead to a civil discussion.

Unless the record has ended before you’ve had the next chance to start the next song on your air shift.