Bedouins and Gods

I have always felt sorry for people who grew up in Tucson. So many of them have an attitude that I find inexplicable. They think Tucson is boring and uncool. They can't wait to get out of this cow town.

Having lived in several cities and small towns, and traveled extensively, I know with certainty that I am happiest when in Tucson. I can't think of any place I'd rather live.

One discontent Tucson native named Cord Jefferson wrote the feature article in last week's Tucson Weekly.  He has moved from one coast to the other in his young life, and while he has a new perspective on his hometown, he still sees it through the eyes of someone who once felt disdain for the city I love the most.

 He did say something I liked though: Though I've always been frightened of snakes and spiders and the like, it nonetheless made me feel special and flinty to grow up in the midst of creatures that bit, scratched and pinched. The sun beat down on us relentlessly in Tucson. The flora was thorny and the fauna was unsociable. And yet there we lived and thrived, going about our days in the hard-baked rocky desert, laughing about the triple-digit heat. In a scene in Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Dryden tells Lawrence, "Only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert: Bedouins and gods." We were not Bedouins in Tucson, and so we must have been the latter.