Time will tell.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Come to think of it, maybe not everything is slower than back East. Seems as though people here – plenty of them anyway – have a slow, deliberate death wish. The people of South Tucson appear drawn to the hard life. If you can smoke it, shoot it, snort it, or drink it, and it alters your state of mind (and your dental work) then you can find it here. I met a man yesterday who runs a nursing home in a nicer part of town. He told me he’s having to deal with employees – young men in their 20s – who are smoking heroin. He was beside himself with disbelief at how they care so little about their lives.

For my part, in the short time I’ve had to observe, it seems often to be the case that despite being in the minority, white people here are often in the worst shape. Baked by the sun (and a few other things) many of them seem to be stumbling about, shriveled and reddened like sun-dried tomatoes, looking, one can only assume, for their teeth. Not a few of them look like they’re more than a little bit crazy. (Can’t help but wonder, all things considered, if I don’t fall into that category myself…)

Last week, we shook most of the last remnants of whatever virus we had picked up en route to Arizona, and with some energy coming back and fevers and unsightly throat lesions fading away, we were able to start getting some things done.

I spent most of the day Friday at the VA hospital with a family member, getting a front-row seat to what government-run health-care will look like. What was supposed to be a routine post-surgical followup turned into a five hour journey through bureaucracy. I kid you not when I tell you that it was nearly a spitting image of your friendly neighborhood DMV. We got sent down for a “stat” (as in, “immediate”) X-Ray (fortunately the nurse practitioner wanted to get out at noon, so she cut some red tape) only to find that in radiology, you were handed a ticket by an old-timer as you walked in the door. The room was filled to overflowing with poor, bedraggled guys who were either on oxygen or clinging to walkers (or both), waiting as the one person in receiving cycled slowly through them. There was a computer display with the standard automated DMV female voiceover, intoning every few minutes over the loudspeaker, “Now serving number two-three-one, at window number three.”

The nurse escorting us asked if we could get in quickly, because of the “stat” order, and the attendant apologetically huffed, “You’re going to have to go down the hall to imaging. I’ve got 16 people ahead of you!” Based on the questions I was hearing, it also seemed likely that these people had had their X-Rays scheduled ahead of time. Perhaps days ahead of time, not just hours. It was hard to be sure.

As we walked down the hall, I looked into various glass-enclosed waiting rooms where the same DMV-style window system was in place, the in-hospital pharmacy among them. In each case, the rooms were beyond capacity, the overflow as too few attendants dealt with too many patients spilling out into the hall. All the while, the disembodied computer voice droned through the ticket numbers as the crowds were whittled down.

Upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs. We went back and forth for this test and that, each time being shoved out without further instructions. Once, we were told to wait in the upstairs lobby, only to find out an hour-and-a-half later that we were supposed to go back downstairs again for another exam. The nurse tried to blame me, but I had asked her – twice – where we were supposed to wait, and followed her instructions precisely. I also checked twice at the desk over the duration of the waiting period when we were supposed to go downstairs again, only to be told that they would call us when we were ready.

The system was anything but efficiency at its finest. There was an overall lack of professionalism, from the nurses in plain clothes (not scrubs) to the fact that in that entire five hours, we never even saw a doctor, only nurses and technicians. Ironically, I’d classify the hospital in question as having fairly nice facilities and kind staff. It wasn’t Walter Reed, it was just riddled with bad procedures. It does not bode well for our future if this is where things are going.

Friday evening we came back to a too-warm house (91 inside instead of 89, dontcha’ know…) and I got my first look inside a swamp cooler. Up on the roof, I saw the system up close, “squirrel cage” a’ spinning as we snaked out the “spider legs” that distribute water into the cooling pads. Still not sure what was blocking them, but there’s a lot of dirt in the system, I can tell you that. (And if you think the components make it sound like it may have been used as a medieval torture device, I’d hazard a guess that you may, in fact, be right.)

The house we’re in belonged to Jamie’s mom before she died, and now belongs to her dad. Her mom was a bit of a pack rat, and consequently, the house has quite an accumulation of stuff – much of it junk – that needs to be dealt with to make it livable. Saturday, we spent the morning cleaning out rooms. I then went out and moved a bunch of furniture from one house to another in the sweltering heat. At about 110 degrees outside, it was not my cup of scalding tea, but you’ve got to get used to it. If you always wait for it to get cooler (which is limited to early mornings and later evenings) you’ll never get anything accomplished.  After the furniture was done, I went through our pods, looking for the items we need in the house while trying to craftily re-pack what we don’t need back into storage.

In a place with no naturally occurring grass, dust and grit are a huge problem. They coat everything if you don’t stay on top of it. We had to get the carpet replaced in one of the bedrooms after we discovered that the old one was so dirty we couldn’t get it clean after multiple shampooings). With that out of the way, we set up the kids’ beds in there – one set of bunks, one twin. All said and done, I didn’t finish up until after dark on Saturday. The next morning,  as I weighed myself, I realized that I’d lost seven pounds since being here. Most of it no doubt due to the heat. I can’t seem to drink enough water to replace what I’ve lost. Bourbon either, for that matter…but that’s another story.

I can’t say I’ve gotten used to being here yet. When I was up on the roof last Friday, just before the setting sun, I had a chance to survey my surroundings. Ever see City of God?  We may not be camped out in the slums of Rio, but there’s enough here to remind me of it. From up high, I could see almost nothing but trailers, many of them owned by my family, stretching off in every direction. Boarded up, torn apart, covered in graffiti – these are the landmarks of  my immediate future.  This was a once-functional facility, but was allowed over time to fall into ruin by Jamie’s mom, who unfortunately just didn’t know how to run it. Now, to rehab or not to rehab, to sell or hope that the Great Tornado in the Sky cometh and taketh away, these are, among others, the questions that face us.

And until we sort them out, every day will be punctuated by the reminders of where we are: the F18s roaring past to land at Douglas AFB, the rooster across the street that crows at all hours, the sub-woofers of the gangbangers, the padlock and chain on the rusted pink gate that guards the entrance to the property, the empty, soulless, smashed-out windows and wind-banged screen doors of the dilapidated dwellings around us.

Thank heaven for the good things: good (and cheap) bourbon at the end of a long day, Chinese dim sum, Mexican street food, piano lessons for Kiana, austere  mountains, billowing clouds, and sunsets that look as though they were painted by God’s own hand. Finding the things that are worth seeing and doing is what will make this work.

And there’s a rumor we may even get air conditioning…

I can’t speak for everyone with an Irish-American mom — not that they’re used to getting a word in edgewise — but I really did grow up thinking that sexual sins weren’t merely the worst forms of evil but, aside from foul language, the only ones. I’ll never forget my mother sitting with her box of Entenmann’s, happily munching away to a video of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 as some psychopath opened a teenager’s head with a coroner’s saw. When the dying teenager spluttered the F-bomb, mom sighed and wondered aloud, “Now why’d they have to ruin a perfectly nice movie with that kind of filth?” This incident made me wonder how many IRA terrorists walked away from their bombs with clear consciences — then trooped off to confession for impure thoughts.

[snip]

I know that I’m not the only person who feels a little . . . squeamish when speakers wax eloquent about the Theology of the Body. I’m perfectly comfortable with the Church’s traditional discussion of Chastity: that it’s part of the virtue of Temperance, designed to restrain a biological drive within the bounds of reason and charity. Couples owe each other a marital “debt,” which if refused can put one or both parties into the occasion of mortal sin. (And the Church managed to say all this long before the invention of the Internet.) The marital act of love is not “merely” the method for generating new human souls, but also the ordinary means of grace within the sacrament; in other words, sexual intercourse is to being married what saying Mass is to being a priest.

In the stricter (“perfect”) form of Chastity, the clergy and religious are called to a sterner discipline, inspired by Christ’s example to wed themselves not to a single person but to Christ and His Church. Hence their calling is in some sense truly higher — and their falls the more abysmal, in case you don’t read the news.

What makes me squirm in my seat is when Catholic writers try to compensate for sexual attitudes like . . . well, those I grew up with by laying really heavy emphasis on the theological realities of marriage — more emphasis than ordinary human experience will bear. It may well be true, as one Theology of the Body writer likes to emphasize, that in some sense marital intercourse helps both partners to enter into the “inner life of the Holy Trinity.” But is that kind of thinking . . . sexy? I’m single, so readers can correct me here, but the last thing I want to hear about on my wedding night is Trinitarian theology. If the Sorrowful Mysteries make lousy foreplay — sorry, Mom — the Joyful ones won’t do much better.

Go here for the rest.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was tired of blogging. I was really enjoying my photography. I was even hoping to make some money at it.

Then, the big changes came. Jamie’s brother died. We realized we needed to move back out West to help out her dad, and for me to get a first-hand lesson in how to run my own business. Suddenly, being an up-and-coming DC photographer was off the table. Just as suddenly, I had new and interesting things to write about.

I originally started to chronicle the journey at a separate blog. The more I thought about that, the less sense it made. I have my own webspace here, why bother with a free account somewhere else? It’s not like I was posting photos regularly, or like I couldn’t host my photos elswhere and link from here.

So tonight, after a couple of Guinnesses (they do have healing properties, right? I mean, I was drinking it solely for medicinal purposes…) I just cleared out the photoblog, punched in the posts from the temp blog, did a quick redesign on the image header, and here we are.

The title of the blog is fairly self-explanatory. We’re back in the desert, and we don’t know for how long. In the Old Testament, it was 40 years. In the new, it was 40 days. I’d prefer the latter to the former, so I chose that period of time as the blog’s namesake. I also thought naming the blog “40 years” would just make people think I was writing about being over the hill. Which I’m not. Yet.

There’s an interesting parallel to the desert theme. Sure, we’re literally in the land of cholla, saguaro, nopales and the oh-so-famous dry heat, but there’s an inescapable sense that our country is wandering in the desert too. Maybe – no, definitely – all of Western Civilization along with it. As I tend to offer commentary on that sort of thing, it seemed appropriate.

The good news is that for the first time in a very long time, I feel as if the Catholic Church, my oft-unfavorite source of inspiration for all things moral, spiritual, and otherwise, is finally heading out of the desert it’s been in. It’s still not quite to the oasis, but you can see the palm trees from here.

I don’t know how to feel about that. If the Church is doing better, and the world is doing worse, something tells me we’re in for one hell of a bumpy ride.

Jamie got it before me, and fortunately she slept a while on our final day of driving. Not as much as she would have liked, but it was something. By Friday night, she was lights out, and I suddenly found myself exhausted, barely able to stand up in the shower before hitting the hay in our hotel.

In the morning, the kids wanted to go swimming, and although I was feeling lousy I took them. They’d suffered four days in the car, it was the least I could do. When I made it to the pool, I knew I was in trouble. I was cold, in Arizona, in August. Granted, that morning it was only about 87 degrees, but still…

We decided to make the drive to Tucson that morning, and so we headed out, loaded up with ibuprofen, and made the last 100-mile trek to our final stop. Jamie had a fever, but the medicine was keeping it in check. I didn’t, but I was starting to feel terrible – everything hurt. By the time we arrived, I was all but ready to crash. The house here in Tucson is hot, though – really hot – as it has only an evaporative cooling system and no A/C.  When my fever finally arrived Saturday night, I was sleeping in a house that has yet to drop below 85 degrees inside. Today, it was 91.

Sunday was pure misery. I could barely move. Getting out of bed was almost impossible. Dizzy, aching in every joint, headache, fever, sore throat, stomach cramps – you name it. I shined a flashlight on my tonsils and saw what looked like the telltale signs of strep throat. The symptoms matched, and since I get REALLY sick with strep, Jamie took me into the urgent care for a checkup. Aside from it being the longest I’ve ever waited to see a doctor (2 hours) while sitting, with a fever, in a cold exam room, barely able to keep my head up, the strep test was negative. Now, that could be because I have such a nasty gag reflex that you can’t swab my throat. I’ve bit through the wooden sticks in the past (I’ve had strep a whole bunch of times) because the minute it touches something in the back of my mouth, there’s an involuntary clampdown in effect.  The nurse offered to have me do it myself. I tried – four times – and failed to really get anywhere. The doctor gave me a prescription anyway, on the condition that I wait to see if things got worse before I filled it.

After an afternoon and evening spent alternating between the chills and overheating from covering myself with a blanket in the sweltering heat, I finally got some sleep last night. This morning, I felt far better than yesterday, but my throat was worse. Jamie, whose throat started hurting after she seemed to be all better, went in to the doctor today. She also got a clean bill – no strep – and she has no problem with the throat culture. But she was given a prescription too, so we filled them. So far, I can’t tell if things are getting better. It’s still hard as hell to swallow, and Jamie just overall feels miserable.

So that’s how we’ve spent our first few days here. I’m really hoping that things get better from now on.  Talk about an inauspicious start…

And tired. So very, very tired.

We headed out to Front Royal to see family and friends. A cookout on Saturday night gave us a chance to see a bunch of people we don’t get to see very often, and we stayed with Paul, one of my best friends from High School, in the old 19th century farmhouse that he completely remodeled last year. It was my first chance to visit the place, and it was absolutely stunning. It was a reminder, once again, of what we love about Virginia. We sat on the stone patio, under the stars, drinking cold beer and talking about our lives, where they’ve taken us and where we think we might be going.

Sunday was Kiana’s birthday, and we didn’t get to do as much for her as we’d have liked. Brunch with family, a late Latin Mass, and some general hanging around delayed our departure to visit more friends in Pennsylvania, just north of Baltimore. We arrived late, and got a tour for the second time in so many days of a new (old) house, with all the potential that lies therein. Two sets of friends, two homes, two families that have finally found a place to call home and not leave again. The sense of permanence and contentment at each place is a little hard for me. I’m jealous. I want a home for my family, and stability for my kids. I want my wife to be able to make that home her own, and fill it with the things that will offer us comfort, familiarity, and a measure of peace.

Instead, we find ourselves nomads again. Detached, drifting, moving somewhere we know will only be temporary, trying to figure out where and when we’ll ever be able to settle down, fit in, and plant some roots.

All the same, I am enjoying the hospitality of our gracious hosts. Today, we got a late start, tired and needing to do laundry from a week living out of suitcases. By the time breakfast was done and I had switched the loads, I laid down and fell quickly asleep. The exhaustion of packing up and moving out in just two and a half weeks has finally caught up to us, I think. It’s nice to take a breath and go slow, even if I feel some pressure to get on the road. We were going to head West today, but we’ve decided to delay it one more day. Instead, it sounds like we’ll be heading out to a lake. The kids could use a real break, and time to play and have fun, rather than be cooped up in the car.

I, on the other hand, could use another cup of coffee.