Tucson - Out and About

Basketball and Other Happenings
I see my nephews once a year, if that.  I've watched them grow up in intermittent flashes, kinda like a PowerPoint presentation. Slide 1: Caleb is 2 feet tall, Slide 2: Caleb is 4 feet tall, Slide 3: Caleb has a girlfriend, Slide 4: Here he is with me on a dusty basketball court in the desert asking "One more game, Uncle J?"  After he soundly beat me again he went on to beat his older brother.  Made me smile, but only on the inside.  The old lion kept his game face as he was pushed out of the pride.

My sister is a homebody, most of my memories of her are at home.  I close my eyes and see her laying on the couch, reading or watching television, maybe nursing a sick cricket back to health.  It's like the outside world and the people found there aren't to be trusted.  Getting her out of the house usually requires a crowbar or sorcery.  So, seeing her table-side at an Ethiopian restaurant was transcendent.  It was like seeing Jesus at Denny's.  "What do they serve?  Dog?" she asked me, half-joking, half-serious.  She ordered the most anodyne item on the menu - spinach - and delicately teased out a leaf at a time like it were booby trapped with explosives.  One-hundred and eight degrees away was my Dad, in heaven, eating one of his favorite foods.  He chewed with his lips in a smile and tilted his head rapturously as if listening to a symphony. Every now and then he'd break out of his trance and say "hey, am I the only one eating?"

I wondered how my sister would've handled the pineapple-basil gelato we had at shop near the University of Arizona campus.  It doesn't sound like a good combination but it was surprisingly refreshing.

The University of Arizona has a museum that specializes in the native Americans of the southwest.  Dad, Dodo and I made a visit.  It was very informative and did a good job explaining the cultural differences among the tribes.  While looking at  a map I got a pop-culture flashback.  I imagined a grizzled cowboy telling a family of homesteaders "I wouldn't go that way, that there's Apache territory."  Of course, they didn't listen to the grizzled cowboy, they never do.....