Writer Cord Jefferson reflects on growing up in Tucson and what leaving his hometown taught him
In three decades as a person for whom tears come easy, the hardest I’ve ever wept
is the day I moved away from Tucson. I’ve lived through heartbreaks, layoffs, deaths,
my parents’ divorce, a couple of thrashings, an arrest in Mexico and sundry other traumas
and disappointments. Yet none of the crying bouts stemming from those incidents have
come close to the hiccupy heaving that ensued on the bright Saturday I hugged my mom,
boarded a flight at Tucson International Airport and flew to Virginia to go to college.
In the years since, I've been back to visit many times, but I've never again returned to replant
the roots I tore out more than a decade ago. That morning, as I stared out the plane window
and watched the dirt and saguaros and triangle-leaf bursage shrink amid the hot, black roads below,
I couldn't shake the feeling that I was experiencing the death of something important.
Now, I can only summon my years as a Tucson resident in chunks of eroding memories, and
what's left of those is all mixed up. At a certain point in my life, recollections of my youth went
from being chronological, manifold things to a fused jumble I've filed away as "My Childhood." When
I was a kid the difference between fifth grade and seventh grade felt like ages, and conceiving of
the experiences that composed those years in rectilinear fashion was simple. Twenty years on,
it's become just as simple to imagine all of prepubescence as being nothing more than one shitty day.
I now see my formative years in Tucson in only indistinct patches, like I'm looking at them with
glaucoma. Yet I still feel them near my bones, as elements in me that sit dormant until the strangest
of times. In one moment I'm washing out my French press in Los Angeles, and in the next I'm recalling
the anticipation of rain in Tucson, and the smell of that rain when it finally fell. To this day a rain
shower doesn't feel complete to me unless it's bookended by the lingering odor of creosote bushes.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/cities-and-homes/Content?oid=4101748