Let me tell you what beauty is. It’s April rains and May flowers. It’s a song on the radio that brings back wonderful memories. It’s in the pages of well-worn books. It’s the dawn of a new day. It’s a blue sky in summer. It’s the girl with the curly hair and dimples. Beauty is what (or that which) brings a smile to your face. Beauty is nothing less than looking into the face of God.
When I was twelve years old, I saw God.
At twelve I spent a month with my grandparents at their home in Green Valley, Arizona, about a twenty-minute drive from Tucson. My mother’s parents had moved out there in 1978 and here it was now, a decade later.
My plane landed in Phoenix early evening on Saturday August 6, 1988, one day after my birthday. Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction was the number one album in America while Tom Clancy topped the New York Times’ Bestseller list with The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I had never been away from home so long and over the next few weeks I would see much that was beautiful, and experience more new things than I ever could have imagined.
I was born in Illinois and except for a previous trip to Arizona in 1986 and one to South Carolina the summer before that for my father’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I had never left the state. And I had never flown on an airplane. Weeks leading up to the trip, I was more than a little nervous about flying on a plane.
On the plane, I sat between a young mother and her infant daughter on my right and an older woman on my left. I remember peering out the window, white knuckled grip clamped on the armrests, as the plane lifted off the runway at O’Hare. As the plane headed skyward, I was scared but also amazed as buildings became miniatures beneath us before vanishing below the clouds. In moments the world had gone from big to small and even at twelve, I wondered why people could not get along on this blue marble we call Earth.
I spent the next several hours of the flight reading my recently purchased copy of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield, listening to Van Halen’s OU812 on the Walkman I got for my birthday and frequently getting up to go to the bathroom to pee, just a tad bit anxious that the plane would crash. It did not help that the movie being shown on the flight was La Bamba, the story of the plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper. What did help was the in-flight meal delivered by a lovely young stewardess who looked more than a little like Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles. Anyway, I made it to Arizona in one piece. A boy my age and I were even shown the cockpit of the plane by the pilot after we landed. The plane did not crash, it was not intercepted by aliens, I did not see a gremlin on the wing like William Shatner in that Twilight Zone episode, nor did we even encounter bad weather. The most eventful thing that happened that day was the two-hour drive from Phoenix to Green Valley, where I had more urges to pee than I did on the plane!
I awoke before my grandparents the next morning, due in no small part to my being two hours ahead of them on Illinois time. I grabbed my book and began reading how Star Trek became a television show but was soon overcome with a sense of homesickness. I had never been away from my family and would now be away for an entire month. I wanted nothing more than to call my mom and dad.
I climbed out of bed and looked out the window. It was like staring out onto an alien landscape. A cactus was three feet from my window and where there should have been grass there were rocks. What had happened here? As I slept was I transported to some alien world, light years across the Milky Way? Or had the plane been intercepted by little grey dudes after all?
Maybe this trip was a bad idea.
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I was still feeling homesick when my grandmother and I walked down to the pool that afternoon. My grandfather stayed behind to watch an old western on television, what he called a “horse opera”. A term, according to Grampa Joe, coined by one William Hart, the star of silent era Westerns. Okay, yeah, I did not know who he was either. At twelve, I had also never seen a silent movie.
It was a short walk. My grandparents resided in a retirement community, the pool and clubhouse only two streets from where they lived. I loved seeing the backdrop of mountains beyond the valley, an entirely different landscape from Illinois.
Despite being known for hot weather, the temperature in Arizona in August of 1988 was quite comfortable. Hot, yes, but without the scorching humidity that had taken over the Midwest, the result of a drought that lasted from May until October that year. Mowing the lawn felt like going to the spa.
It was so humid in Illinois that the teenage girl, Jamie, who lived in the house behind us would climb out of a second story window and sunbath on the rooftop in a two-piece bikini-minus the top, listening to Prince cassettes or reading Seventeen. This was the first time I had seen a girl’s breasts not in a movie and I liked what I saw. The curls of her permed hair hung over her chest, like her breasts were teasing me.
So, having spent June and July in a furnace, Arizona was a nice change.
I was not the only kid visiting his grandparents that summer. At the pool I met two other Midwestern kids. Scott was twelve years old like me, while his older sister, Erica, was fourteen, and a month away from starting high school. Erica had curly hair and dimples and I liked her a lot. Liking a girl at twelve years old is interesting because you’re feeling something that you do not entirely understand. I would hang out with Erica and Scott at the pool several times a week and I had this feeling, like a hunger pain, in the pit of my stomach whenever she spoke to me. I also found myself thinking about her a lot. When I listened to “When It’s Love” on my cassette player, I thought of Erica, even though I had no clue what-so-ever what real love was. Scott was crushing on Alyssa Milano a teen actress who appeared on the sitcom Who’s the Boss, and he talked about her all the time.
Lunch was always after Grandma Helen, and I returned from the pool and my grandfather finished watching his noontime “horse opera”. My grandmother was a remarkable cook. She could make a delicious meal out of cold cuts and bread. Her spaghetti was out of this world, with giant meatballs, and sauce to die for. I gained nearly ten pounds during my month in Arizona and my clothes barely fit when I returned to Illinois.
That night as my grandparents watched the geriatric Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote followed by a Perry Mason movie in the sunroom (essentially a family room, but with more windows), I read the latest issue of Starlog magazine, with a cover story on the movie Willow, in the living room. With no interest in Willow, I went through that issue in one sitting, then watched the Bond movie Moonraker on the ABC Sunday Night Movie. Thirty-five years later, I still love 007 but Moonraker is my least favorite entry in the series. One of the cool things about being twelve is getting enjoyment from a movie not realizing how god awful it truly is. To a twelve-year-old in 1988, Police Academy was a comic masterpiece.
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It was my second morning in Arizona when I saw my first road runner. Again, I had woken up before my grandparents, was in bed reading Whitfield’s Star Trek book, when I took a break to look out the window. I saw what looked like a bird with a long tail scurry past. Being from Illinois, it could have been some creature from a Ray Bradbury novel, for all I knew. When I told my grandfather about it later that day, he said I had seen a road runner. Arizona is also known for coyotes, though I never saw one, neither Wile E. Coyote, Peter Coyote or any other coyote for that matter.
We were to leave for California Wednesday to visit Disneyland, Sea World in San Diego, and Knott’s Berry Farm. My grandparents also planned to visit old friends as well as my grandmother’s older brother, Jim. My grandmother needed some clothes for the trip, so I accompanied her to the Tucson Mall. My grandfather didn’t much care for malls. He told me once that unless he needed to buy something, he saw no point in going to a mall.
My grandfather did go to Tucson every Saturday to grocery shop, often making the twenty-minute trip to save fifty cents on a loaf of bread. I did not understand this at the time but came to realize that my grandfather’s behavior was a result of growing up during the Great Depression. When you have little, you must find ways of making it last, while also spending as little as possible. My grandfather did not understand that the money he spent on gas driving twenty minutes both ways each Saturday cost more than the bread at full price. He would take me to lunch on each trip, so I’m not complaining.
My grandfather, the son of a train conductor, had been born in Illinois and lived there until 1978 when he and my grandmother moved to Arizona. My grandmother was born in Scotland, her family moving to the United States when she was very young. My grandfather had been a police officer, while also working in construction. He built the home my mother grew up in. My grandmother had been a grade school crossing guard for twenty years.
The more time I spent with my grandfather, the more I realized us eighties kids had it rather easy. My grandparents lived through one of the worst economic crises in recent history, then, like many men of his generation, my grandfather went off to war. He spent a good percentage of his time overseas in Foggia, Italy, as well as Northern Africa. We kids in 1988 were more concerned about whether Gina and Tommy were still a couple or if Johnny really hated jazz. Okay, we were not quite that shallow. After all, there was the AIDS epidemic to bring you back to the cold harsh reality of life during the final part of the 20th century. And let’s be honest here, being a kid is not always easy regardless of when you are growing up.
Unlike my father who did not often speak of his time in Vietnam during the late sixties, having been drafted in 1967, my grandfather frequently told stories of his time overseas, many of which he would tell me over the next month. By the end of my trip, I had really come to admire my grandfather.
While my grandmother did her shopping at Marshall Field’s, I went up to Waldenbooks and picked up the new Star Trek novel The Three Minute Universe, then quickly made my way to Musicland, where I bought a cassette of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. I had been wanting to buy the album, since “Sweet Child o’ Mine” hit the radio a few weeks earlier. I expected that because of the parental advisory sticker, I would have to get the edited version, but the teenage girl with the frizzy perm who handled my sale let it pass. I placed the Musicland bag into the Walden bag and headed towards Marshall Field’s.
I found my grandmother on the second floor near the back of the store, looking at clothes in what she called “the old bat’s section”, which earned grandma a nasty look from another older woman shopping in that section.
After paying for her clothes, we drove back to Green Valley.
When I went to bed that evening, I realized I was enjoying myself. Maybe this would be a good trip, after all.
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When people talk about California, they usually speak of San Francisco or Los Angeles. When we crossed the border into California, I thought of Los Angeles and Hollywood and that I was in the same state as William Shatner! I’ve never been to Los Angeles but vacationed with two friends in San Francisco in 1999. The city on the bay is without doubt stunningly beautiful, yet so is San Diego. I drank in the beauty of San Diego as we drove to the motel we would spend the next few nights at.
Later that evening, as my grandparents watched Jake and the Fatman, I took a walk around the exterior of the Motel 6, fascinated with the mountains in the distance, which drew me in. We were in a room in the back on the first floor, and I went up to the second floor to get a better look. The flowing hills and towering mountains, some of which seemed to reach into the clouds, were breathtaking. I took several pictures with my camera.
By the late eighties the landscape of America was changing. The wilderness was being destroyed as forests and fields were leveled to make room for track houses and strip malls. Since you can’t remove a mountain to build a subdivision, I was looking at something that would never change. The mountains were here before mankind and would be here long after we were gone.
At twelve years old, I spent little time thinking of events that transpired before I was born. For me, my birth was when the world started. The mountains and my grandfather’s war stories changed that. There had been a world before me. A world that as I grew older began to fascinate me.
Sea World was a fun experience. I especially enjoyed the dolphin show. In the gift shop, I bought a plush dolphin that sits on top of a bookshelf to this very day, as well as a book, Island of the Blue Dolphin by Scott O’Dell.
The next day we visited my grandma’s older brother, Jim. Despite being my mother’s uncle, I had never heard of this man. I thought it was only my grandmother and her younger sister, Caroline. Jim lived in the biggest house I have ever been in, all alone as he had never married and had children. Oak doors in the living room slid open into a connecting room with the largest television that I had ever seen, and top-notch stereo equipment. Def Leppard would sound great on that! Jim took us to dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants I’d ever been to. Jim came across as friendly, if a little distant. When he laughed, he sounded like Flipper, which was amusing. After that evening, I would never hear Jim’s name mentioned again, until 1998 when my mom told me her uncle had died on his boat of a massive heart attack. He had actually fallen over the side of the boat in the midst of the heart attack, so it’s possible his death was equally a result of drowning.
The next night we had dinner with my grandparents friends, Murray, and Claudia. I’ve never been quite sure how my grandparents met the couple as they lived in California their entire lives, while my grandparents had lived in Illinois and Arizona. Well into their seventies, Murray and Claudia’s home seemed to me like a monument of relics from a different age. They even had a black and white television. Claudia was a great cook, having prepared a delicious pot roast in a crockpot with potatoes, onions, and carrots.
Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm were fun, but I liked Sea World the best. I liked seeing the different types of fish and, most of all, the dolphin show.
Early the next week, we drove back to Tucson. The following week, my grandfather and I drove across the state to see the Grand Canyon. It was during this long drive that Grandpa Joe told me some of his war stories. It’s a joke in my family that with my grandfather’s endless war stories that everyone between Illinois and Arizona had been on the front line. Having never heard these stories before, I was fascinated by them. At the time, I knew very little of World War II. It rained heavily the day we visited the Grand Canyon, but it was a fun trip, nonetheless.
The last week of August, we packed up the car and began the three-day drive to Illinois. I would start sixth grade in a week.
We spent the first night in New Mexico at a Motel 6 room that came with a tarantula. A member of the hotel staff came and took away the furry little beast, but I had a bit of trouble sleeping that night, out of fear that another tarantula might be hiding in the room.
We left at daybreak the next morning. As my grandfather pulled onto the highway, I watched the sun coming up over the mountains in the distance. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I was lost in the moment. It was like looking into the face of God.