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I know this space has been quiet for a very long time. Life has been…challenging, and I’m rarely near a computer while in a writing state of mind. Hopefully all the things that are storing up in my head will ferment into something worthwhile when I am ready to hit the keyboard again.

Time will tell.

Some places, moreso than others, seem to be full of hard luck and heartbreak. Without question, Tucson is one of those towns.

This morning, I prayed as I mopped up a large puddle of water from a leaking toilet in one of our vacant rentals. Recognizing through my recent experiences that I need to turn to Him more, I found myself asking God to help me to sublimate my labor and turn it into prayer. To let it, as the psalmist wrote, “be directed as incense in thy sight; the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.” As I attempted my own version of ora et labora, an old, withered-up husk of a man hobbled in the open door, helped along by a beat-up cane. He smelled of alcohol, long before noon, and his pale blue eyes were glassy, pupils dilated wide. He was dressed simply, and stood almost two feet shorter than I. His faded red baseball cap read, “Marine Recon” with additional designations specific to his unit.

“Doin’ double duty?” he asked, his voice carrying a trace of the prevalent Mexican accent in this area.

“Yeah.” I replied, hoisting my mop into the bucket. “Someone I can help you find?”

“I was looking for Mr. Wong,” he said, looking around. I didn’t correct him aloud on the last name, but I couldn’t help thinking it: Gong, not Wong. “I need a place to rent. I live in the apartments down here and my wife just passed away and….I need to get the heck out of dodge.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I responded, feeling sympathy for this stranger. “Unfortunately we’ve got people coming to sign a lease on this one today, and I don’t have anything else but a three bedroom – probably more than you’d want for just yourself.”

“Too goddang big!” He spat, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I just can’t stay where I am anymore. Too many memories…” When he said “memories,” it came out more as a sob than a word, and his hard eyes filled with tears. “Twenty five years together. I did two tours in Vietnam, no, three tours,” he looked into my eyes, searching, remembering. “I met her in 1983. She was…” he trailed off. “Anyway.” This last was meant as a statement of finality. These were private memories and he was going to keep them that way.

“I’m really sorry. I know it must be very hard. I’m married with four kids, and I can only imagine.” I managed.

“I have six!” he said. “Five with her…they live in California. Those assholes, they didn’t even come to her services. My dad die”my dad died when I was in vietnam. They sent me home. I came half way around the world to go to his funeral and they can’t come right here in Tucson? What a crock of shit!” The tears were back, and I could feel the pain coming off the man. He calmed himself again. “Ah, shit happens. Life is hard.”

“It is. That doesn’t make it any easier.” I wanted him to know I didn’t think less of him for letting me, a stranger, see his pain.

“No,” his voice quivered, “it doesn’t.” The tears were back, and his mouth was contorted into a sad grimace. “I just have to give it to the Lord,” he sighed, looking away. “I could get mad, but what’s that going to change? It’s only going to kill me. And I do get mad….” He looked back at me, a grim, crooked smile creeping onto his face. “Well, I need to go to the bank and take out money for rent, and to go buy some beer. What else can you do?”

I smiled back, and watched him as he turned and shuffled out. What else can you do?

Two weeks ago, I started writing a post about how I woke up one morning dreaming of snow, and missed home for the first time. It was trivial and trite, but I was going to use it as a launching point for some introspective piece of writing exploring what I’ve learned since coming here and what I’ve come to appreciate more about where I’ve been.

A few days later, I was gearing up to write about how a man who lives in our Mobile Home Park and has done a lot of work for us, absolutely snapped. Claiming a long career as a Navy S.E.A.L., I watched as a kind and gentle man who has been loyal to my father-in-law for years and kind to my family since we arrived turned on us, expressing his explosive anger over an imagined slight by demolishing much of what he owned with sledgehammers and axes while I worked just ten feet away. or screaming profanities and accusations at my wife in front of our children. For days, I lived with the fear that some latent mental imbalance in a man who was already known to be intimately acquainted with violence had finally broken loose, and we had to worry about a trained killer with a vendetta who had his own set of keys to our gate and familiarity with our guard dog. I slept uneasily every night, until days later he finally came back around, made an apology, and acted like nothing had changed. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid of what he might do, and the fact that I practice my second amendment rights was only slight consolation.

But it was this morning that I learned what fear is. Jamie was in the kitchen with Kiana, baking pumpkin bread, and the toddlers (Ivan and Sophie) were in the living room, watching Mickey Mouse. I went to lay Alex down before heading out to work on a broken water line, and when I came out, Ivan is missing.

At first, I expect to find him in the bathroom, playing with water, or somewhere else, getting into trouble with something he isn’t supposed to be playing with. But as I check room after room, closet after closet, he wasn’t showing up. The faucets were off, there were no unexpected messes, and he was nowhere to be found. I look under the bed. I look in the dryer (hey – who knows?). I look behind couches and chairs, under desks, on top bunks and in spare rooms. Nothing.

I start to get worried. Realizing something is wrong, Jamie joins in the search. We walk the yard, look out by the swings, check all the usual spots. All is quiet, but the front gate is open. Jamie goes out and looks down the street. No Ivan. Jamie calls her dad, working on the other side of the block in the trailer court. No Ivan there. It is at this moment that I am seized with bone-chilling dread. My son has been taken, I think. We live in a place with one of the highest incidences of kidnapping in the world, and my poor little two-year-old boy has been grabbed.

We start yelling his name, and searching more frantically. Jamie called the police, and there was a despair in her voice I’ve never heard. We’re always warning the kids to stay away from the street, that there are bad people here who take children. Without asking her, I know that we’re both thinking the same thing. I see two little boys playing behind the back gate, and in my panic think maybe one of them is my son. My hope fades when I get to the gate and find it securely locked, with almost no chance Ivan could have made it to the other side.  Unwilling to let got of possibility, however unlikely, I unlock the gate and rush through the other side. The children I saw belong to someone working on one of the trailers, and I ask him if he’s seen my boy. He says no, but he got in his truck and goes looking as well. We’re enlisting the help of neighbors, the police, anyone, and all the while I am begging God for help. Not my son I plead as I walk around the block, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Not my sweet, innocent little boy. Please protect him. Please don’t let anyone hurt him. In my mind, I can’t stop seeing him in the back of someone’s van, terrified, his little heart pounding in his chest. I want to protect him but I can’t, because I never saw him go. I feel powerless and desperate, and I call my parents and ask them to pray, hearing the horror in their voice as I tell them what’s happened.

Jamie is standing at the gate as I round the corner and I call to her, but she’s heard nothing. I walk into the front yard and, thinking of the struggles I’ve had in my faith over the past year, I nonetheless beseech God for assistance. I know that I haven’t been on the best terms with you lately, but I need your help. If you’re there, and you really love me, help me to find my son. I will do anything!

I go back inside, and begin retracing my earlier searches. Maybe he got knocked unconscious somewhere, I think, or has fallen asleep. I flip on the light in the dark room the kids sleep in and lay on the floor. I look under one bed, then the other, then for some reason, back under the first. There isn’t much under the bed, but against the wall, where I see some clothes that have fallen beneath, I catch the glimmer of light reflecting from two small eyes. As my own eyes adjust, I see his whole face, and it’s smiling, but silent. I reach out to him, tears in my eyes, unable to believe that he’s really in front of me, some forty minutes after I first discovered he was gone. “Please come to me Ivan. I’ll give you anything you want. Just come out.” He begins to cry, and finally scoots my way. As I lift him into my arms, I feel that his pants are wet, and I realize he was afraid that we would discover his mistake in the midst of his potty training. I ask him why he was hiding, and he says he is scared, but not of what. I realize also that I have been calling him loudly, yelling his name in desperation that could be construed by a small child as anger. I go outside, holding him tight, and place him in his mother’s arms, and I proceed to walk around the side of the house, where I fall into a chair and break down, the sobs coming as waves of relief and fear wash over me.

I have never been so terrified. I walk inside just as the police arrive and check in with us, to make sure Ivan is really back and we’re okay. We are okay but we’re also not, the adrenaline only now beginning to leave our systems.

Two nights ago, as we got the call that another water main had broken, I was annoyed. Yesterday, as I spent the day digging 75 feet of trench and helping to repair the damaged pipe, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to be alive. This morning, with the son I thought I had lost safely at home, I found the continuation of the hard labor of digging through the unforgiving Arizona dirt all but harmless. I didn’t let the choking wind-blown dust upset me or shirk away from being face-down in the mud, and I more comfortably settled into my routine of cobbled Spanglish conversation with my Mexican co-workers as we tried to solve the pipe puzzle. When the man who had gone postal just a week ago came by, acting normal, to see how things were going and talk to us about the upcoming operation on his hand, he seemed smaller and less significant than he had before.

This place is teaching me things – valuable things – and if they are things I didn’t expect, all the better. This is a day I will never forget. The kind of day that changes you. I hope that today, and tomorrow, and every day thereafter, I will be more conscious of the need to be a better father, a better husband, a better man. To complain less, to work more, to put my many worries and fears into perspective. Most importantly of all, the son I thought I’d lost has been found. I have so much to be thankful for.

Yes, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. Yes, people are kvetching about it in the commbox. (Since I have only two readers, I suppose I really should go out of my way to please them.)

Life here is kinetic, if not entirely productive. There’s always something going on, a new activity perpetually being layered upon and impeding the completion of another, a constant succession of unfinished business that never seems to abate.

I do not spend much time in front of my computer these days. During the time I do spend, I’m not usually in a writing state of mind. Always thinking about it, never getting there, the words almost liminal but never quite breaking the surface of the brain/keyboard barrier.

I suppose part of it is that it’s hard to write about drudgery. Do you want to hear about the Arizona weather again? I thought not. How about the latest trip I made to go paint or clean something, or haul trash out of a yard, or dig a ditch? No? Would you care to see some of the beauty that surrounds me? Ok, here it is – and mind you, this is just a taste of the treasures that await us here:

There’s a lot more where that came from. Almost a whole city block. Somewhere in the ballpark of 40-50 trailers, most of them abandoned, and several single-family homes, all in substantial disrepair. We had renters for two of the homes vanish on us at the end of August, so we have two glaring vacancies that can’t be filled until we make the places nice again. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, is like polishing turds. (It can be done, I know. I saw that episode of Mythbusters too. It’s harder, though, when the person controlling the purse strings thinks that the turds don’t need polishing…)

The scale of the project is daunting. There is little in the way of investment capital (and by little I mean hardly more than lunch-money) and an enormous, gaping cash-maw in the way of making the place decent that simply can’t be satiated by anyone who doesn’t periodically make a cameo in the pages of Forbes. In our five acres of paradise, Crime is a problem. Graffiti is a problem. Drugs are a problem. Drunkenness is a problem. Trash is a problem. Code violations are a problem. Non-payment by the tenants we DO have is a problem.

And now, for extra, um, turds and giggles, Arson is a problem. Yes, arson. For those not following my brief updates on Twitter or Facebook, we woke up last week at about quarter-to-two in the morning to a major conflagration in our back yard. Somebody decided to torch the abandoned trailer closest to our house, and man can those suckers burn. One was completely destroyed, and two others were seriously damaged. Well, more damaged than they already were. They were abandoned for a reason, after all.

According to the local news,

Tucson police are investigating an arson fire that destroyed one mobile home and partially damaged two others early Wednesday morning, officials said.

The Tucson Fire Department received a 911 call at 1:18 a.m. about a trailer on fire in a mobile home community at 6150 S. Park Ave., department spokeswoman Tricia Tracy said.

When firefighters arrived they found one trailer fully engulfed in flames and trailers on either side partially on fire, Tracy said. The fire was put out by 1:43 a.m. she said, with the trailers on the side each suffering about 25 percent damage.

Fire investigators determined the middle trailer was intentionally set on fire, but no origin was found, Tracy said.

None of the trailers were occupied, Tracy said. The estimated damage for all three structures was about $20,000, she said..

This is a strange place. I can’t get the hang of it. As I drove downtown today for confession, past the bums, deadbeats, and dealers lining 6th Avenue, I took in row upon row of buildings that would fit in perfectly in a two-bit border town, every sign looking like a thumbnail from a lomography gallery. I’ve spent enough time in the Southwest and Mexico to know that towns looking like that – fluorescent light spilling out of the iron-barred windows of block buildings lost beneath dirty coats of pastel paint – are not meant to stay in. You do your business and go home, or pass on through.

Speaking of confession, I must now confess to my heathen ways. In a rush to make the scheduled time at the cathedral, I left wearing what I had on – including shorts and a pair of dusty Crocs – the first time in years I’ve darkened the doorstep of a church in anything less than pants.

Then again, I was informed in the confessional that I’m committing sins because I’m tired and need a vacation, so maybe I was attired appropriately after all.

Sick again, and it’s getting old. My suspicion is either heat exhaustion, dehydration, sun poisoning, or flu – perhaps even some combination of all of the above. For the past few days, I’ve alternated between fever and chills with absolutely splitting headaches, only to go back to feeling fairly normal, if unusually tired.  Poor little Alex has come down with a nasty cough, and I think I’ve also picked up some of what he’s got. I have the creeping sensation of respiratory fun on the horizon.  Luckily, I still have a stash of that evil Zicam.

The heat exhaustion, if that’s what it is, is no doubt the result of long days working in the heat, much of it out in the sun. I don’t have a schedule, per se, so while I feel more relaxed in my labors, I’m working a lot harder than I thought I would be. Most of our efforts at the moment have been focused on getting the house in decent condition for our family. Tearing out and replacing carpets, moving or replacing furniture, cleaning out clutter and trash, fixing swamp cooler pumps, unloading our things from storage (and unpacking them) and so on. Bit by bit, we’re making this place feel like a home. We’re even supposed to get air conditioning installed, but since the installer knows my father in law and is doing it as a favor, it seems we’re on the low end of the priority scale. It was supposed to happen Saturday, then again this morning, but it keeps getting put off. Luckily, a pounding rain last night cooled things down a bit.

Last week, we went in search of a piano for Kiana, who finally began taking lessons again. We have an electronic piano, but I’ve been told this is a poor substitute for the feel and resonance of the real thing. We found someone who had a British upright piano from the 1850s in storage and just wanted it gone, so we drove way out to the middle of nowhere and picked it up. Once we got it situated in the house, we had a piano restorer come out to give it a tune-up and got a bad prognosis – the inner mechanics were damaged beyond repair. Now we’ve got to get it back out of here and find another free one, if possible. Hopefully next time we’ll get our hands on one that works.

Kiana also started school last week, in an unexpected turn of events. A member of the local Latin Mass community told us that they had just found out that there was a charter school in the city that, while not Catholic, was run by some of the parishioners there.  We called, and despite being told there was a waiting list, mentioning that we were also Latin Massers seemed to unlock a door, because we got a call back within the hour saying that there was room for Kiana to enter the 7th & 8th grade class. Because it’s a charter school, it doesn’t cost us anything, and Jamie tells me the curriculum is very similar to the one she was going to be using anyway. Better yet, we’ve discovered that other parishioners send their kids to the school, so Kiana has, for the first time in many years, a chance to make friends who believe in the same things she does. After just a few days in class, she seems ecstatic about the change, and the change is good for us as well. Although we miss her help around the house, we’re happy to see her so happy, and not having to teach her this year frees us up to do all the work that we’re beginning to take on here in the family businesses.

We made the drive up to Phoenix yesterday, and while there, I tagged along on a visit to a Chinese herbalist. Never having been to one before, I was struck immediately by the pungent, aromatic scent hanging heavily on the air as we entered the office. The clink and clank of metal lids on glass jars punctuated the quiet as various herbs and natural remedies were transferred from one container to another. I sat and listened in to a conversation that spun out in Cantonese, unintelligible to me, and watched as the herbalist – a serious-looking man with a mouth full of crooked, yellow teeth – grunted his understanding of what he was being told before silently making copious notes in Chinese with a ball-point pen. An hour later, after we headed out for a late lunch, we returned to the office to be handed three brown paper bags filled with the musty, spiced ingredients for a cocktail that was custom-tuned to the patient. The whole experience was fascinating in its contrast to a normal doctor visit. There was something peaceful about it, and I found myself wondering if these ancient natural medicines might hold secrets that modern pharmaceuticals and debt-ridden med school grads have no understanding of.

And that’s all I’ve got. Another busy week, and every day brings new adventures. With any luck, things will normalize enough that I can blog more often than once a week, and on more topics than just the goings on around the new abode. Soon. Hopefully, soon.