Phoenix is a pleasant place to visit in late October. The sun is refreshingly toasty, the sky is unfailingly vast and blue, and a long-sleeved shirt is enough to keep you warm through the evening. Another thing hard not to notice--the cars are awfully shiny. Every one of them, gleaming and clean like polished nails, little metallic bubbles in the freeway's sun.
Phoenix is also a strange place. I’ve been there at least a half-dozen times now, and every time I visit, the landscape is startlingly bland, the mountains, desert, houses and strip malls all a muted shade of tan. My sister asked as we drove around, "Does any of this look familiar?" And aside from the names of a few roads on highway signs, I couldn’t say yes. It was all familiar and indistinguishable, one stucco housing development after another and one strip mall anchored with chain stores and chain restaurants and parking lots difficult to navigate after another. My sister took me on a tour of the houses she’s lived in during her fifteen or so years she’s lived in Phoenix, and I couldn’t pick any one of them out on a block, couldn’t say with certainty that I’d remember staying in one or another, though in recounting the times I had been there, we figured I’d spent at least a week in each of them. This is the weird blankness I feel in Phoenix.
Though, within a few days, the starkness of the landscape grows on me. Silhouettes of cactus on mountains as the sun goes down are profoundly simple and beautiful. Silhouettes of mountains darkening then fading in the dusk are the same, and they’re everywhere. The desert is not made of sand, but scrub. The mountains are hard, rutted and dotted with desert scrub. The plants are not too green, the flowers futilely bright in a sea of so much brown.
The other weird thing about Phoenix is that it’s a land of coupons. My sister has a folder full of coupons for every store imaginable and before she leaves for the day, she goes through the folder and packs them in her bag. For every ten dollars we spent, we saved at least three. My sister’s wallet is packed with frequent shopper cards for every restaurant, grocery store and mall shop imaginable, and they all pay out in free meals or deep discounts. At the Safeway, my sister saved twenty-eight dollars on a hundred dollar grocery bill. I told my sister we don’t have those kinds of things in New York. "You must," she said. And I thought about the markets where I bought one bag of groceries at a time, if I shouldn’t start using the chain stores instead.
Walking the aisle of the Safeway, shivering even though I’m at least ten aisles away from the meats or frozen section, my sister loading the cart with twenty bottles of Fuze, her favorite drink that happens to be on sale (ten for $10), I’m reminded of the story of the city mouse and the country mouse. I guess it’s all what you’re used to, or what you get used to.
