ellarien | No more fries for me (Reply)

On Phoenix weekends, I've been in the habit of eating lunch at the one outside-security restaurant at Terminal 2. I always had the same thing, a chicken salad sandwich, which came with a side of hot, salty french fries. That was pretty much the only time I ate fries, and I'd started to look forward to them. The last three times I've been up, though, I've been taken out to lunch instead. Today I headed for the restaurant as usual -- and it wasn't there; where it had been was only bland cream-painted hoarding. Something is going on at T2, the oldest and smallest in the perenially-under-construction airport; all the rental car counters have gone, replaced by signs directing people to catch a bus to the 'rental car center', and now this. My only remaining option for lunch was an unexciting packaged salad from the coffee kiosk.

Something else odd and disconcerting happened today. As I was getting off the bus near my apartment, looking up at the fading afterglow of sunset on the Santa Catalina mountains, I said to myself, 'Tucson is home.' That brought me up short, because I don't think I've ever said that to myself before, and I still don't think I mean it in more than one or two of the multiple senses that the word acquires for rootless academics; mainly, at that moment, I just meant that Phoenix isn't.