So Ruby and I are just back from the morning traipse around the’ Hood. Actually. we’re running a little late: it’s 8:30 already.
But the lovely serenade from Luke Air Force Base, twenty miles to the west of us, is still echoing through the atmosphere. WHAT a gawdawful racket!!
My mother used to love to sit on the back porch of their little Sun City house — practically under the flight path of those damn planes — to have coffee and read the paper. She claimed, if you can imagine, to love the roar of jet planes taking off and landing for the morning maneuevers at Luke.
“It’s the sound of fweedom,” she would coo, proudly patriotic.
Nooo, muther. It’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.
Never happier than movin’ out of merry Sun City….
She absolutely LOVED living there, though. As Whitey-White as you can get, tomb-quiet, politically situated in John Birch territory.
Soon as I graduated from college, I got a job in downtown Phoenix and rented an apartment in the central part of the city. It was on Thomas Road, one of the mainest of the city’s main drags. Traffic noise was bracing…but it was nothing like the roar of those planes coming out of Luke.
They still roar in and out of the base. We’re a good 20 miles away, but every morning we can hear the serenade of jet airplanes straining every mechanical gut to get off the ground and charge back and forth.
*****
And now here we are in a bland waiting room at the Mayo Clinic. Ohhhhh goodie! Apparently they want to do some sort of neurological tests on me. This has been said to M’hijito…wouldn’t it be nice if they’d tell me about it!