Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Happy birthday mama Maxwell

In the middle of a vast and sprawling desert there sits a vast and sprawling city. Truth be told, Phoenix oozes more than it sits.

In the middle of a vast and sprawling desert there sits a vast and sprawling city. Truth be told, Phoenix oozes more than it sits. Its edges, amorphous in places but abrupt against natural barriers in others, crawl across the Sonora desert at, in places, a pace that would leave a snail winded and gasping for air. Vast tracts of what were once stinkin’ desert that bloomed with agriculture thanks to the virtual destruction of the Colorado River are now stinkin’ subdivisions where transplants from across North America sun their bums in air conditioned pickup trucks.

The perfect months to visit Phoenix are any ending in "ary", of which this is one. During those months, Phoenix provides a warm oasis for winter-weary snowbirds, of which I am not one. But a respite from Whistler’s deep freeze was a welcome idea and I jumped at the chance. Having committed the sin of envy, I arrived in Phoenix to find temps roughly the mirror opposite of Whistler – +18°C instead of -18°C – and, ironically, about the same amount of snow I left. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There’s more snow. At least in the mountains just north of the city.

Unaccustomed to such icy temperatures, except in their deeply repressed memories of former lives in Illinois and Minnesota, Phoenicians(?) are mostly bundled up in down jackets, fur coats, fleece and heavy boots. Except for the ones wearing shorts and T-shirts. The scene is reminiscent of a vast masquerade party where the entire populace has raided their tickle trunk. Everywhere is the faint but unmistakable scent of moth balls.

It is also raining. Rain in the desert is both an unaccustomed and generally unwelcome intrusion. Even among those who acknowledge the area’s great need for rain – Phoenix and environs being well ahead in the race to become the first greater metropolitan region to die of thirst – grow uncomfortable after the first few drops. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that everything in the desert is so used to being thoroughly desiccated it reacts in one of two ways to the first drops of water. If it’s flora, it blooms. If it’s manmade, it leaks. Houses, cars, long-abandoned raincoats, umbrellas, shoes and those fringed tops on golf carts everyone drives around the planned retirement community where my parents live, all leak prodigiously at the first sign of rain.

And, about the time everyone gets used to a little leakage, come the flash flood warnings, followed more or less immediately by the flash floods themselves. Flash floods are the desert’s version of tsunamis. Because the catchment area is huge, the waterways deeply eroded, and the soil incapable of holding more than a cow can drool while chewing a cud of stinkweed, it doesn’t take much rain for surf to be up ‘round these parts. And because the population grows constantly, there is always some former easterner, who thought it would be cool to catch the wave on his boogie board, swept away by the flash flood. Generally, all they find is very clean, very polished bones since the wall of water in a flash flood carries enough grit to make it as abrasive as rough sandpaper and moves with speed to tumble the poor sap around like a stone in a polisher. Cowabunga, dude.

But foul weather never lasts long in Phoenix... unless you count summer which lasts from late March through Christmas. And so, this morning – Wednesday – things are back to normal. The sky is an impossible shade of blue, vast, cloudless and filled with a sun almost white in its purity. It won’t last. By the time rush hour is half way through, much of the lower half of the sky will take on a shade of brown known all too well to anyone who has ever owned a puppy who ate something that violently disagreed with him, which is to say everyone who’s ever owned a puppy.

Yesterday’s scudding clouds have been replaced in the sky by today’s roaring jets. They seem to fly constantly across the sky directly above where I’m staying. They are unmistakably military jets and equally unmistakably, they seem to be using this neighbourhood to test their afterburners. No one seems to mind, or even notice, the roar. It is comforting in a way only a country once again smitten by all things military finds comforting.

Despite the noise from the sky, all seems tranquil in this little corner of an otherwise troubled planet. The trees surrounding my parent’s slice of retirement heaven in Sun City are laden with grapefruit, oranges and maybe lemons. The grass is green, thanks to the rain, the golfers are golfing and it is my mother’s birthday. Being a birthday embroidered with a significant, symbolic and much larger number than I imagine she’d be comfortable seeing in print, I’ll just leave it at that.

My sibs and I have endured the personal intrusions and discomfort of air travel to all be in the same place at the same time. There is a party planned this evening for the birthday girl and more of her close friends than most of us can get our minds around. There will be liquor, food, a whole lot of introductions, and that discomforting feeling only a grown child thrown into a mosh pit of his parent’s friends can truly understand as he looks into inquiring eyes and wonders exactly what his parents have been telling their friends about him. "Oh so you’re the son who’s wasting his education and being a ski bum in Canada. You’re mother’s so proud of you."

I’m a little scared by the thought of a couple of dozen frolicking septua and octogenarians getting down, shaking their booty and making merry. Perhaps it’s the look into my own future that’s scary. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that I’ve got to get up and speak – my brother and sisters believing being able to speak to a group of strange strangers isn’t much different than writing for strangers – to them that’s the scary part.

I mean, whatdaya say about your mom? What can you possibly say about the person who made it all possible, without whose labour you wouldn’t even be here? It’s not like I even know much about the first 26 years of her life. And let’s face it, for the next 18, I was mostly trying to figure out my own. After that, I was pretty much gone.

But something will come to me in the next few hours. And if it doesn’t, I’ll just tell ’em how grateful I am to have gotten the hand chance dealt me. And whatever lies their children tell them, I got the best mom ever.

Happy Birthday.