Life is good. #BLE
30 March 2017
17 March 2017
Equinoctes
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archival footage
I walked to school as a child, it was the simple and sensible thing to do, a few blocks north from our house in Scottsdale's Arcadia neighborhood, to Kaibab Elementary School. Now razed to the ground, the school was shuttered long ago due to declining enrollment which naturally occurred when the children of the breeders in the neighborhood grew up and moved away, leaving their aging parents behind, well-rooted in their mid-century ranch-style homes, safely ensconced beneath a canopy of big old and forevermore unclimbed grapefruit trees.
Like all public schools, despite the extent to which the neighborhoods that surround them might be more or less gentrified, Kaibab was a mixed bag of students. Admittedly, in my case, all of us were white, all of us were by all appearances able-bodied, and all of us were the offspring of privileged parents to one degree or another. And yet some of us quite obviously were nevertheless battling the largely undiagnosed demons of OCD, ADD, ADHD, depression, suicidal ideation, and a host of other social, emotional and learning disorders, just like any other school.
Our homes were all built on large well-shaded lots, carved out of what had once been a massive citrus orchard. Each had ample square footage to house nuclear-sized families of five or six members and, without exception, each had a swimming pool. Moms rarely worked. Dads were gone long hours doing whatever they were called to do: lawyering, engineering, doctoring, professional things like that. And we had lots of friends, for blocks and blocks in every direction, most of whom were pretty normal. I had many an outdoor birthday party, all of which ended in a brawl or fight, or an overt theft of candy or party favors, or with one of the guests dropping trou and pissing into the oleander hedges, or worse, dropping a big stinky brown turd to the ground while perched, ass hanging out into space, from high above on one of the upper levels of my treefort.
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| The pool in our backyard |
Our homes were all built on large well-shaded lots, carved out of what had once been a massive citrus orchard. Each had ample square footage to house nuclear-sized families of five or six members and, without exception, each had a swimming pool. Moms rarely worked. Dads were gone long hours doing whatever they were called to do: lawyering, engineering, doctoring, professional things like that. And we had lots of friends, for blocks and blocks in every direction, most of whom were pretty normal. I had many an outdoor birthday party, all of which ended in a brawl or fight, or an overt theft of candy or party favors, or with one of the guests dropping trou and pissing into the oleander hedges, or worse, dropping a big stinky brown turd to the ground while perched, ass hanging out into space, from high above on one of the upper levels of my treefort.
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