Tucson...

I seem to dance around the perimeters without alighting on the core .. perhaps because the outerlying sprawl seems a direct provocation. But Tucson is deserving of its own consideration. To begin with, it is perhaps a lazy excuse for a city, but a city (and an old one) none the less. Perhaps 5,000 years old, all told. There is much that charms about the town, but I am often confused as to why. I can reel off the list of Tucson's impressive features .. the San Xavier mission with its hand-painted frescoes, the extraordinary Deer Dancer, the Spanish Presidio, the mosaic-covered onion dome on city hall, the downtown adobe restorations, Gate's Pass at sunset, the Catalinas, the Rincons, the Tucson Mountains and the Santa Ritas.

Why do I feel an inexplicable happiness when driving down streets with tatty little businesses and hand-painted signs all burnished by a late-day sun? I love too the simplest adobes with their walled gardens and backyard guesthouse. They appear quite humble (the early anglo arrivals described them as primitive mud houses) .. but they are human scaled, the rooms cool on hot days, the light pouring through an overhanging tree into a not huge window somehow enchanting. And really it does seem silly to wax on about a perfect bean burro .. a certain unctuous texture, an impossibly subtle (read unremarkable) flavor .. or a perfect chile relleno.

There are other distinguishing (or perhaps un-distinguishing) features. One fastens on the moment's pause that proceeds each thought before it is spoken and a certain propriety that is attached to weighing all sides. One might say it is a gentley polemicized town (if many acknowledge the divide that exists between East and West .. or even North and South hemispheres). Still it feels more integrated than its northern counterpart. There is also a certain disconcerting fatalism, as the urban arena expands with little imagination. One is not surprised to learn that the University -- in the wake of Tucson's exponential growth -- has seen fit to close its urban planning department. The concept of urban planning would of course betoken faith in humans creating effective all-encompassing systems .. and Tucson is somehow still a frontier town where in the end the huckster will take all.