I am moving! That’s right! After living mid-town for many decades, I am giving it up to live in the country. I can no longer take the sound of the planes rattling my windows day and night nor the trains banging and booming at all hours. I am tired of gunshots and sirens. Yep, it is time to leave the city and head to more simple desert living. No longer will Blockbuster, Fry’s, and a variety of food chains be at my back door. I am heading out to live on a piece of land with horses and goats and chicken on the far east side where the beautiful cacti reaches towards to Tucson sky, and desert landscaping envelopes…wait, wait a second, am I describing Tucson, hmmmm this has got me thinking….

 Thirty years ago Houghton Road was a beautiful vista of cactus and stunning fields of desert flowers that lay against the background of beautiful mountains and blue skies. Not a soul in sight except for a few stables.

 As a teen and young adult I used to drive all around that desert. There was nothing around except for a few desert critters and others like myself trying to find some peace and quiet. It was my desert oasis. It was why I loved Tucson so much.

The desert along Houghton as well as going up Irvington was simply Magical. Sadly other people wanted the magic so little by little they plowed down the cacti, destroyed the desert, could have cared less about the critters and complain about them and replaced it all with concrete. The closest thing people have for cactus and desert foliage is what they get at their local nursery or Wal-Mart.

 Assortments of pop-up communities are being built all along Houghton Road. There is not much desert left, just a memory of where I was raised used to be. Irvington has become a trailer park way with rows and rows of prefab homes built atop of an old land field. What once used to be a nice chunk of desert on Irvington is now a golf course. They replaced natural cactus for green grass in the middle of the desert that requires lots of something Tucson no longer has—water.

 I suppose I might sound angry. I am not, just observant. I miss the place I called home once upon a time ago when Tucson was a small town in the middle of a large desert. Today it is a big city simply built in the desert. Us natives I am sure share a sadness of what once was.

 I reflect about the wonderful desert I was raised in, and know one day I will need to leave because Tucson will no longer be a desert at all but simply an industry of concrete buildings. To top it off, I have noticed people are building closer and closer to the mountains. I am sure no doubt our wonderful mountains will be the next to go all in the name of a good view.

 I miss Tucson and am left shaking my head asking myself what happened to my desert. I am glad that where I am heading, is out a ways and I can pretend my desert still surrounds me.

Still sitting or laying around treating a back injury and again trying to avoid wondering too far in my mind, I have been thinking a great deal about being a child and what really stood out for me. Recently I drove past my old elementary school here in Tucson and stared at it for a moment or two. Seeing my old school and being laid up got me thinking….

I went to Dietz elementary school. The date was 1968 and the election was going on. My parents were democrats; very strict democrats. I believe they thought republicans were spawns of Satan. Of course I was way too young to know and quite frankly, I could have cared less until the election of 1968.

I was in fifth grade and we had an assignment to make political posters for the election. Now come on, what an assignment. We were going to make posters based on our parent’s philosophies and beliefs about politics not ours, but that was the assignment. I protested as I protested a great deal as a child-hippy, but my teacher demanded I participate in the assignment or she would have to call my parents and tell them I was not being cooperative. So be it. I knew my parents hated Nixon so I would make pictures of Nixon looking funny. That was easy, he was funny looking anyhow. So I drew pictures of him and used a fire hose for his nose. Underneath the picture made of red construction paper I put “Nixon has a nose like a fire hose.” Come on, I was all of like 10 or 11.

When our project was completed, we were to decorate the hallways with our little posters and told to be sure to take them down on Election Day. I refused. I was unsure what republicans meant or even what a policy was, what I knew was Nixon was probably bad news because I heard so many people say so. Before I knew it, Nixon won the election and my parents grumbled saying he was a crook. Little did I know that he really was a crook.  Sadly America decided to re-elect this man.

So in 1972, Nixon ran for re-election against Democrat George McGovern and swept to victory in a landslide with 60 percent of the popular vote, winning in every state except Massachusetts. I was not forced this time to make a silly poster. I grinned when I heard about the break in that occurred on the night of June 17, 1972, as five burglars entered the Democratic National Committee offices inside the Watergate. As we know the rest is history.

My father was right. Mr. Nixon was indeed a crook. For me, I could have cared less and all would have been fine and dandy except the Watergate Trials were on all the TV stations and it disrupted my days because there was nothing to watch. I guess the American media really wanted us to watch Mr. Nixon go down.

Well the rest as we know is history and Nixon become a national joke. I vowed as a young child hippy to never vote or play a part in this thing we called politics. There will be no posters, or no nothing. All I knew was politics were for bored angry people and I wanted no part of it. I kept to that commitment until Mr. Bush was running for president and I decided to vote and take a political stand as a middle aged adult.

What was amazing was how I made the decision to not be involved based on a drawing on red construction paper as a young fifth grader being forced to do an assignment that I knew nothing about and could have cared less. So I suppose the moral to this story would be people should really keep their political views away from young fifth graders and not force them to participate. I would imagine if that were done today, there would be a stink. As we know there has to be a stink now a days about everything. For goodness sakes, people raised a stink about the Taco Bell dog.

So for me, recalling the Nixon years is about being introduced to political shams and scams, and perhaps a blinded nation, problem is, we never learn from our mistakes and history has a tendency to repeat itself.

What do you recall about the Nixon years?

Having suffered a bad back injury this past week, I have been down flat unable to be at my work, my computer or my life. Laying flat staring at either a ceiling or floor does allow your mind to wonder in the many cracks and crevices that you normally do not go to. Me, I enjoy living in the now but find it rather delightful to stroll gently down memory lane. I suppose what I am missing most laying flat and doing nothing, is my computer. I use it to write with, to communicate with, to listen to music with, to earn my living with and it seems like I have a lifetime invested in this square electronic box, and it got me thinking…

What did we do before we did business online? I know that I recently wrote about social networking online, but I am talking about making your living online. I mean really, I skype and type, twitter and facebook, write articles, see clients, run two businesses all online. So what did we do before the computer age?

 Of course I tend to think there are pros and cons with the computers. Actually they are quite stupid! If you do not do exactly as they say, they send you mean little error messages and in my case, I get the blue screen of death often because I push mine to its limits and beyond.

 Really back in the day, to do business, we actually got dressed and showed up. We wrote letters by hand or typewriter. Now for those of you who are youngsters, the typewriter was a device that when you pressed on the keys much like a keyboard, it put the word characters on paper. You had to pound on it forcefully, well until they came up with the electronic typewriter which became extremely popular by the 70’s because they were more affordable and used a different technology. Still, these snazzy typewriters could not send faxes or emails.

 Of course down the road, word processors were developed which basically allowed you to say bye-bye to typewriter white-out and hello to editing your documents within the systems. Still, it was not a computer so to speak that allowed you to use your web-cam to do meetings, or communicate around the world in seconds, though I do believe these word processors where the stepping stones to modern technology.

 I am sure back then, the typewriter and word processor machines were all that and more because that is all we had. I know for me, I had a typewriter, and electric typewriter, and several word processors before getting my first DOS computer. I loved my typewriters, I could not save my work on internal files, and could only have hard copies, but there was something special about the clicks and clangs of using the typewriter that got my creative juices flowing.

 I recall going from DOS, to Windows 3.0 operating system. It was all that and more to me. Then came Windows 95 and I almost had a gig of space on my computer and bragged how much space I had. Of course Windows 98 made many things easier and there was so much more we could do.

 Now I am in Windows XP (I loath Vista) and have over about 3,500 or so gigs of space and a couple of gigs of ram. Sadly, I am never happy enough with how many gigs  of space I have left, or how much ram I have, or how much more I can fit on my computer. It seems like I have gone from being grateful I had an electronic typewriter to always looking to improve the modern technology.

 I must confess though, I still have my word processor and hold onto it like an old antique waiting to be displayed. There are pros and cons to modern technology and I am glad I can reflect on both the good and the bad.