It's another Pleasant Valley Sunday, but what goes on outside the gleaming box? Only the shadows of the city know...
***
Friday morning I ventured out of my hut and into downtown Phoenix. Phoenix is aptly named, as it rises out of the desert floor and sparkles with it's own fire in the sunlight.
From the shiny dome of the State Capitol to the towering bank buildings, it reminds me in some ways of Coruscant. And in other areas, the old buildings with their brown and tan bricks remind me of Mos Espa.
I went to a business on the edge of an old neighborhood. The building was obviously an old house, which always bothers me. To think it was once someone's home, perhaps their pride and joy.
Back in the 1930s, before the invention of air conditioning, people in Phoenix used to wrap themselves in wet sheets and sleep in their backyards during the summer months. (This led to the invention of the evaporative cooler, but that's another story.)
And there I was, parked in someone's old backyard, perhaps right on the spot where someone camped out to cool off 70 years ago. Or maybe there's a swimming pool buried beneath the asphalt, where kids splashed and played in the 1950s.
Then I drove through down Third Avenue, right through the heart of the Roosevelt Historic District... Palm tree lined streets, 1930s and 40s style houses with big porches, surrounded by trees and greenery to keep them cool.
Scottsdale is a much younger city, not formed until 1950. The city wants to make my neighborhood a Historic Area. It was built in 1958, for cryin' out loud. "It's an excellent example of post-war construction," they say. It's a damn subdivision, I say.
The suburbia they made fun of in the 1960s. It's Pleasant Valley Sunday, and in fact there's a neighborhood area not far from here called Peaceful Valley (it's neither). (There's also a town called Paradise Valley, which is neither, but that is also a story for another time.)
On Coruscant, the historic areas are buried beneath the gleaming, modern skyscrapers that cover the entire planet. They didn't preserve their history, or preserve anything for the future, thinking only about today. There are legends of people born in the depths of the planet's streets that have never seen the sunlight.
In southern Arizona, we have people like me who rarely stray outside during the daylight hours, preferring the cover of darkness, even to swim. Pale ghosts in the Valley of the Sun.
Air conditioning is a wonderful thing. People on Coruscant locked themselves away into shiny metal and glass boxes and never ventured down to street level. I wonder if they knew what went on in the lower levels while they go about their lives in their clean, air conditioned world. I wonder what goes on outside my doors in the heat of the day.
I'd ask my cat, Obi-Wan Katnobi, but he's asleep on the cool tiles right under the air conditioning vent.
