Phoenix, Day One

It has been a long time since J. and I traveled anywhere together just to travel and get a change of scenery, so shortly after Christmas I booked two tickets to Phoenix, AZ, our old stomping ground (we had lived there on a couple of occasions, most recently from July 2001 until August 2003). The timing proved to be serendipitous as J. just came back from a three-week business trip to Watertown, NY – a god-forsaken, ice-bound town thirty miles from the Canadian border with nothing but an army base and a couple of old motels that would be infested with bugs if the bugs weren't all in hibernation. So at an ungodly early hour last Friday, we climbed into a cab and rode to National Airport to get on a plane to Phoenix.

There has been no shortage of press coverage for the supposed horrors of contemporary air travel, so in a direct expression of the “time is money” principle, we splurged on a non-stop flight from our luxurious little National that normally caters to lobbyists and consultants. Despite being a 7:00 a.m. non-stop flight, its stated on-time performance was a laughable 50% (is there a law that requires airlines to post this information? I cannot imagine any other business boasting that their performance is satisfactory only half the time), but on that day, reality was in our favor – we left and arrived exactly on time, and the flight was uneventful. I even fell asleep for a while – getting older does have its advantages – and dreamed, I kid you not, of an airplane hitting a building. The building looked like a warehouse, and there was no fire or explosion; the plane simply disappeared into the wall. The two rescue helicopters that showed up a minute later had US Airways logos on them.

Weather in Phoenix was uncharacteristically cloudy when we landed, and by the time we drove out of the monstrous car rental compound that some bozo committee decided to build a full four miles from the nearest terminal, it was drizzling. The car rental experience was the only glitch in our travels, if it can even be called that. Happy that we were getting the class of car that we actually booked (last time, the rental agent was intent on putting me in an eight-cylinder gas guzzler when I booked a compact, and was bewildered when I kept resisting even after she uttered the supposedly magic words “no extra charge”), we arrived at the designated space to find a filthy, mud-splattered Corolla with Louisiana plates and aftermarket hubcaps that looked like it was driven two-thirds of the way across the country five minutes ago. “Oh well, just transportation,” we thought, until we climbed inside and discovered that the entire interior was splattered with sticky stuff that looked like spilled coffee. At least we hoped it was. There was no reason to put up with this when the lot was chock-full of cars, so I headed back to the counter. To their credit, the Hertz agents had us in a brand-new and, more importantly, squeaky-clean Hyundai Sonata in five minutes. Would that all businesses had that kind of customer service.

Since my own car is receding further from modernity every day, this one bears mentioning. It was fantastic. It felt immense – far larger than anything I would want to drive on a daily basis – but it was also luxurious and very refined. Smooth, quiet, with adequate power from what I assume was its four-cylinder engine and a transmission that seemed tuned to get the most from it. I had no trouble finding a comfortable driving position, the visibility was good, and the sunroof would prove to be a welcome bonus once the rain stopped. This Hyundai was a far cry from a high-school friend's first-generation Excel I remember riding in back in the day. I cannot imagine a family of three or four, let alone a childless couple, needing anything larger or better equipped for daily transportation.

Driving around the streets of Phoenix again dredged up memories. As much as I believe that the darker side of human nature is the more fascinating one, even the crankiest among us can be amazingly positive creatures. When you leave a place permanently, you tend to retain the good experiences and confine the negative and the unpleasant to distant corners of your mind's attic, hopefully never to be retrieved again. I hate to say it, but I was feeling nostalgic for the good times and good places that J. and I experienced in Phoenix, even in the darkest hours of our life there. I also couldn't help reflecting, as I frequently have in recent years, how easy it is to blame a place for problems that in reality have nothing to do with it, and how guilty I was of doing that my entire time in Arizona. To be sure, a city can be objectively better or worse than another city. Transportation, weather, availability of activities you enjoy, ease of reaching other places where you want to go. Ultimately, however, a city is passive. It does nothing to you on its own; it requires you to form a relationship to it on your terms. When other important things in your life – social and romantic relationships, job, health, money – are in good working order, you can live almost anywhere, within reason. When they are not, however, it is often easier to move than to confront the problems. You think you're making a change, when in reality you're just running away, away from things than more often than not will catch up with you regardless of where you go. I would be far happier living in Phoenix – the very city I used to despise five years go – today.

By the time we were on the road, it was lunchtime, so we headed to an old favorite -- My Florist Cafe, which we were happy to discover was still in business. It was as good as we remembered it – freshly-made salads and sandwiches centered around the bread made at Willo Bakery next door. Willo bread, back in the day at least, was the best in Phoenix by a long shot, and some of the best I've had anywhere.

After a lunch of salad, antipasto and a glass of white wine to unwind after the flight (Grüner Veltliner for J., Albariño for me), we bought a few pastries to bring as an offering to C.&S., with whom we were staying and, fanning the flames of nostalgia, headed to another old favorite, Lux Coffee Bar on Central Ave. It was a complete anomaly when it first opened – D., visiting from New York in 2004, marveled that it could give SoHo coffeehouses a run for their money. I spent many an afternoon at Lux back in the day, slacking off when I should have been working, reading and chatting with the owner. It was quiet then, the empty lots around it just beginning to be built up with condos, the pawn shop across the side street conspicuously devoid of customers, and I worried that the place wouldn't stay afloat. It did, though the ownership changed and the prices rose a bit, and was now packed with students and hip twenty-somethings. The space was more cramped – the new owner added more furniture to accommodate the crowds, thankfully keeping to the mid-century modernist look of the original – and the local art on the walls, once carefully chosen and arranged, now sprawled from floor to ceiling and varied greatly in quality. It's not that the vibe was fundamentally different than it was five years ago, there was simply more vibe. Our cappuccinos, made by the surliest barista I've ever seen, were as good as we remembered them.

Our next stop was J.'s old office, where she shocked her former colleagues by showing up unannounced and spent some time chatting with a few of them. By then, it was time to head to C.&S.'s house in Chandler, in the extreme south-east of the sprawl that is Greater Phoenix. To give ourselves a tour, we forewent the highway in favor of surface streets. Much has changed. Downtown Tempe acquired some new buildings, but lost some old ones – the local institution Long Wong's, which we knew had closed, and our old favorite Caffe Boa, which we didn't. The park around Tempe Town Lake (a dammed up and artificially filled stretch of Rio Salado) was larger. The most obvious change, however, as we swung east on Apache Blvd., was the light rail line, which looked fully-baked here, with stations already named. More on the light rail later. We arrived at C.&S.'s house around 6:00, just beating C. himself.

We had befriended C.&S. towards the end of our stay in Phoenix in 2003 – J. worked with S. then. We didn't even had time to get to know one another all that well before J. and I moved. C. and I hit it off, however, and kept in touch. When I made a quick trip to Phoenix last year to connect with the artistic director of the Downtown Chamber Series, for whom I do some volunteer work, C. invited me to stay with him and S., and with some reluctance I accepted. I need not have worried – C.&S. are some of the most generous, welcoming and easy-going people we know. I felt instantly at ease at their house last year, and and grew more comfortable as C. and I got to know each other better over that weekend. It was even better now, with J. accompanying me. We caught up a bit, waiting for S. to get home from a meeting across town, then went to have dinner at Pita Jungle, another old favorite. Pita Jungle serves what I've come to think of a “gourmet hippie” food – mostly, but not entirely, vegetarian, some middle-eastern and some Mediterranean overtones, and lots of beans and brown rice. It's a distinctly West Coast cuisine, and it can be repulsive in the wrong hands, but Pita Jungle pulls it off beautifully, helped by a decidedly non-hippie wine and beer list. They also know not to mess with a good thing – the menu was exactly the same as it was five years ago. We loved every bite.

Back at C.&S.'s house, we caught up a bit more over a beer, then turned in, citing jet lag – we had been awake for 23 hours by then.