Arizona

Our friend Emily M. got married. It was a Fulbright marriage, and we were so happy to follow the whole courtship that started in Budapest and found legal consummation in a strip mall in Phoenix. The wedding was set for the day after the kids' last day of school, and so my last hours in the classroom involved two finals, a set of essays to grade, sweeping up final assignments and my room, and marking final grades. I checked out, zipped home, gathered kids, and then we took a bus to light rail to the airport to a plane to a rented car and closed the doors of our hotel room in Phoenix just after midnight.

During the wedding, I was so busy dancing, I didn't have the conversations Stephanie had, and I ended up feeling a little empty for it. Several from our Hungarian year were there -- Kent, Georgi, Katherine -- and I should have talked to them more. But Amelia and Maisie kept me on the dance floor, which was more or less unpopulated except for Emily's one-year-old nephew, who bounced to rap and funk and disco, his arms waving before him like a G.

A Phoenix-Hungarian officiant presided over the wedding, pronouncing rites in both English and Hungarian, a unifying of these geographies that will attach them forever. István's family was largely absent, but his brother and niece were there, and a good friend named Tibor who surprised us with a very-not-Hungarian accent and easy English: it turns out he was Dutch and just learning his family Hungarian himself. Emily, meanwhile, besides drawing people like us from all over the country, was flanked by her good friend from Germany. Theirs is an international marriage, and it is good to see the worldwide love.

We spent most of our trip, though, with the best man from my own wedding -- Tyler. Oh, Tyler. Tyler who I followed home from my first day of high school because I liked how he spoke in complete sentences. He moved to Arizona a dozen years ago, became a doctor, grew a family, married and divorced, and I never went to visit him once. 

His visits to Seattle were likewise infrequent. So it was funny how this last month worked: He brought Ava and Danny to Seattle, and his new partner, Angela, and her two year old, Joulliette, for a week's stay, and only another week would pass before we joined them again on their home turf.

The Seattle reunion included a whirlwind visit from our dear friends Rachel and Isabelle and their kids, and even, as luck would have it, Paisley, another mutual friend, who'd ended up teaching creative writing in Utah. This was a terrific weekend, now a bit of a blur, that included a walk in Discovery Park, whose two favorite features on this day were the beach and a big field by the parking lot.

Before we saw Tyler again, our girls thrilled in swimming and exploring the five identical halls in our hotel. I went out into the over 110 degree heat to get close to the Mariners' Spring training complex, an attraction Stephanie found hilarious in me. But what else was there? After getting to know the neighborhood and dining at the fine available restaurants like Red Robin and admiring the stone horses in front of P.F. Chiang's, I spent the morning wondering where Ichiro would go for dinner. Would he go to Red Robin? Would he eat at P.F. Chiang's? Does he spend the month eating suburban mall food? I was making Stephanie laugh, but I really wanted to know. Where would Ichiro go? We travelled around the outlying areas of Phoenix, and everything seemed to be a P.F. Chiang's or a Red Robin, a Target or a Walmart; the colors of buildings and houses were identical, which provided an aesthetic purity that appealed and toned down the commercialism of the chains around us, but still, the whole place seemed like Lynnwood in a frying pan.

Speaking of Red Robin, the one next to our La Quinta Inn had this sign on the door (picture at right). That was the other thing about Arizona: They're allowed to pack heat anywhere unless a business says don't bring it in. Also, Arizona passed a law to make it criminally punishable for illegal immigrants to have a job. And legal immigrants or anyone accented or swarthy have to carry papers everywhere. And police have to stop and demand the papers to make sure someone's not deportable. Also, Ethnic Study classes and books are banned from school. And while the Supreme Court said no to a little of this while we were there last week, it doesn't change the fact that there was a sign on our Red Robin that says Do not bring your pistol in to this place where little girls are eating milkshakes and grilled cheese.

But we didn't remain in suburban Phoenix. Before long, Tyler and Angela took us to a cabin on a peak outside Prescott, with an accompanying temperature and population drop. Suddenly Arizona was beautiful. Some of that beautiful Arizona tore our tire to shreds on the way up the four mile drive to the cabin.

While I was worried about how Maisie would handle Angela's dog (and it's true, Maisie ran around the cabin slamming doors and slamming Tyler's head in a door and screaming and howling as the dog wagged his tail and chased after), Maisie eventually put cautious hands out to pet Taz and settled in; more importantly, I was excited for Sophie and Ava to spend more time together. This has not been a good year for Sophie, socially speaking: she was inserted into the second year of middle school without the orientations and convergings of the first, and she has never been one to introduce herself or appear in any way available to reindeer games. Serious Sophie, meet serious Ava. 

Back in Seattle, I'd heard that Ava wrote short stories. Writing? A 12 year old who likes to write? I know one of those! When I suggested that they might have a writing group in Arizona, Sophie was excited and immediately started gathering possible things to share. She had apparently been jealous when Stephanie and I went to a coffee shop with my former student, Evan, for our third writing group, and so this was a natural extension of an interest I strangely hadn't much noticed. 

The first thing the girls did up in the cabin was get out their writing and sit down, with Amelia -- I don't know what Amelia was doing -- and gave each other feedback on their stories. I was giddy for it, running from Stephanie to Tyler to Stephanie, announcing that Sophie seemed happy. 

All three girls ended up doing more writing, the four of them actually, writing a paragraph each towards a narrative that flowed surprisingly well, given their mix of ages; and the three older girls did more writing before bed. To Danny's disgust.

Danny was very happy to be the boy around them, farting, throwing watermelon rinds off the balcony, bringing them bugs. Danny was an interesting kid to me, in part because he seemed like such a normal boy with many of Tyler's naturalist impulses -- examining plants, insects, owl vomit, constellations in the sky -- but without Tyler's reserve, and all of the boyish manhandling of the world. He was curious, charming, affectionate, and a little lonely too, I suspect.

But when I said out loud that Maisie and Danny seemed to be getting along well, Maisie heard and objected, because Danny spent a lot of his time being a pest to the girls' quieter activities. Still, take a look at these pictures and judge for yourself:

At night we watched the stars come out for hours, clear and wide. The sky stretched and stretched in the still, cooling air. When Stephanie asked about a constellation to our left, Tyler said he had an app for that and pulled out his iPhone and pointed it at the sky. When a large, bright satellite passed the sky on our right, Stephanie wondered if it were the international space station and Tyler said he had an app for that too, and looked to NASA to discover that it was indeed the space station. We sat in the still and the dark, talking -- or letting Danny talk, because he slept alone in the living room just inside and was possibly a little scared to be by himself.

We also went on one hike to a nearby fire tower. It wasn't the nine mile hike Tyler and Angela originally pursued, but a single mile walk had its advantages. And the fire tower, close as it was, perched over stunning views in all directions.

I was so glad to have such close quarters with Tyler's life again, and Angela and Joulliette are bringing him so much joy.

After leaving the cabin, we drove past the 158 curves in 12 miles around Mingus Mountain to get to Jerome, by which time Maisie was sucking on a plastic puke bag and Amelia was holding her stomach and I was driving myself dizzy. The highlight of the Jerome stop was the bored and friendly fire chief who brought us in to his garage and let the kids run wild.

Outside Sedona, we prepared to swim in the river, gawking at the red rock country and changing our clothes in cars or weeds.

We ended up moving downstream where rangers weren't yelling at people to stay away from bacteria blooms. Our last hour together was lush and green and not dry and red.

But on the road again, it was a beauty like nowhere else.