Just this minute: back in the door from a 90-minute Dawg Walk. At 9:15 ayem, it’s not exactly hot out there. But it’s warm. And it’s stuffy. Jet engines roar from the precincts of Luke Air Force Base. {chortle!} If you think that racket is annoying, you ain’t heard nothin’ and you don’t live in Sun City, right beneath the jets’ take-off pattern.
We ran late enough to miss the thickest swarms of morning Dawg Walkers. So: no near-dogfights, no zig-zagging back and forth across the streets to avoid the neighbors’ affectionate (heh!!) fur-babies. That was good.
We made it all the way up to Main Drag North, a path that takes us past the former home of a dear old Arizona Highways colleague, now long gone and much missed. Jerry Jacka, his name was. What a marvelous man he was!
So much missed, indeed… those wonderful Highways days! Wonderful people, fun work, great adventures.
But…nothing lasts forever, eh?
Jerry’s house — former house, I guess: someone else has the place now — is just a couple of acre-size lots south of Main Drag North. A perfectly horrible conduit of traffic and racket now…in the good ole’ days when Jerry and Lois built up there, it was out in the country. Serious country: mostly cotton fields and citrus orchards.
I used to drive past it (little knowing then about its occupant!) on the way from my parents’ house in Sun City (waaayyy out in the country then!) to my law-office job in downtown Phoenix. This was soooo long ago that it was before my job at Arizona Highways, which itself came after the bachelor’s degree and the stint at a major law firm. 😀
Who’d’ve thunk it, eh?