Why Not Phoenix?

I’m in Phoenix. There’s a pigeon at my feet at the Starbucks table, a waning moon has paused between twin towers across the street, and my US News and World Report hasn’t told me anything my teenager did not presciently discuss with me on the day before I left. Panhandling and mandated health insurance have one thing in common: They’re both controversial. One of them is very pressing right now—I keep getting harassed for money by panhandlers—feels much like Chapel Hill.

Phoenix was a fork in the road for me in 1997. The song that was on the radio in my rental car was the Gin Blossoms “Follow You Down.” I was offered a job at Good Samaritan Hospital and belabored the decision. I recall that they did a fairly good job of courting me. The very friendly Mass General trained female in the group took me in her Land Rover on a tour of expensive digs that looked like adobes. We cruised past the Scottsdale Neimans (I was in a blue pinstripe suit from the Houston Galleria Neimans). She gave me the word on the guys in the group and told me that being single was no problem: She met her surgeon husband in the doctor’s lounge at Good Sam. (I bit back the “been there, done that.”) They could have enticed me with a hike on Camelback (well, I hiked it anyway by myself) or pictures of the head partner’s cabin in the mountains that was only discussed in the context of his car when we went to dinner. “He drives an economy car because he sinks his money into his weekend retreat.”

In the end there was my darling Ella, a daycare child, who would be in a very hot climate (as if Houston wasn’t hot enough) and there was a grad student at Baylor, who struck me as a fun guy. Now there is a son, Samuel; a husband; Beckley, the Baylor grad; and Ella with a recently diagnosed proclivity for making preneoplastic moles. Forget the Arizona sun; the moon across the street tells me I made the right decision. Now the only phoenix in my life is the one on my husband's tattoo.