Family: The Only Valid Reason to Visit Arizona in June

Cause there really is no reason to visit Arizona in June, you see; it's 105 outside, with the assurance that it's only gonna get hotter. "You think this is hot," the fam says, "Just wait till it's 120!" "I'd prefer not," I say in my Bartelbian way, "With all due respect, I prefer 105 as the limits of my endurance." I wondered out loud at who on earth would settle such a forsaken desert, especially in the days before AC. "I believe," said one relative, "That's why it's called settling." *rimshot*

When I got back from Spain and France, I mused that perhaps Europe is where you go to encounter history, America is where you go to escape it. I may have to adjust that a little, at least in my case.

I mean, certainly I was awash in history overseas--to wander the castles of kings and counts, to see the sites of treaties, wars, and revolutions, to stand on the Arc that Napoleon and Nazis marched under--these are perspectives unreproducible in these United States; and certainly Arizona is in many ways as wild, unbroken, and open as it was even just a century ago.

But as for my personal history--Arizona is where I encounter that. An encounter with European history is an escape from my own; Arizona is no escape from myself. I've never lived there, which is part of what makes it so uncanny--it's the land of my mother, of my grandparents, of my earliest childhood memories away from home. Most of my Mom's fam still lives there--it was naturally where they held the reunion. I've realized I've been traveling to places that don't know me, that don't know my Mom, that are filled with history that cleanses away my own--Arizona, for all its harsh terrain, for however much its unremitting heat clears all memory and history... Arizona still knows me as I am known.

It's...familiar, in ways even my native Washington doesn't quite do to me anymore, perhaps precisely because I'm not from there; Arizona somehow imprints my memory into the forgetful desert, precisely because its imprinted into the forgetfulness itself.

Side note: At least several relatives--all female--claimed I looked like my father (not my mother, curiously). This apparently lends credence to the theory that all women instinctively wish to reassure the male of paternity (since there's never any doubt of maternity).

Also, I was asked by only 3 different relatives when I was getting married. That was actually my low estimate.