January 9, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 1

January 9, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past - The Return Day 1

At about half past ten on Tuesday December 27th, my wife IM and I said our farewell to my mother and father. Dad and EV, my parents' long-standing caregiver, open the gate to the chain link fence and as I backed the rented Chevy Trailblazer out of the driveway. As we were about to take off EV came up to my window and looked earnestly into my eyes and said "don't worry, Mr. Jonah, I'll take good care of your parents." It helped ease the guilt I felt leaving my parents and returning to our home in California. My peers in the community of Filipino families I grew up with in El Paso are similar to me in many ways. The older males left home for lucrative jobs in larger cities, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, leaving their parents to the care of younger female siblings. In our family the youngest and the oldest left the care of our parents to the two middle children and youngest grand daughter. While EV has been given the task of providing day-to-day care, my two sisters handle the health care issues and other responsibilities.

As we make our way along Highway 54 heading south to Interstate 10, the exhilaration of heading west replaces the lingering sense of guilt I felt leaving my parents behind. We're bound for Sedona, Arizona, where we'll spend a couple of nights before moving on to the Central Coast of California to catch a sunset over the Pacific before returning to San Jose for the New Year weekend. Our journey thus far has been an awakening to the world outside our own. Living in Northern California were are sequestered in a cocoon of liberal ideas and a high tech vision of the world that a good part of the world we've traversed thus far have no appreciation for, nor cognizance of. I recall being in Las Vegas and asking another visitor if they were part of the Comdex Conference that was in town in early November. His response was a puzzled question of "what's a Comdex?" I explained that it was a computer dealer's exposition in which the major PC manufacturers showed their wares, companies like Hewlett Packard, Compaq, Dell, Intel, etc. He replied that he had never heard of any of those companies. I felt like a visitor to a foreign country in which everything that I took for granted was foreign to most of the locals I encountered and only meaningful to other visitors like me.

We all live within cocoons of our own making, the product of our daily routines. The doctor has his own language that he uses with colleagues and friends, most of who are in the same profession. The vast majority of those living in the Santa Clara Valley—the official name for Silicon Valley—all speak a language peppered with acronyms that some of the rest of the world has had to learn, but is foreign to everyone else—the janitors who clean the buildings in the valley, the service station employees, most workers in restaurants and hotels, grocery stores, department stores, shopping malls… What part of life am I missing not knowing about their lives? About the places where they live? About what makes them worry, happy, depressed, angry…?

We stop for gas at Chevron Station off the Main Street exit of Interstate 10 in Lordsburg, New Mexico. Anyone that regularly travels I-10 knows this New Mexico town. In the 1960s I-10 went through the center of the town, right down East Motel Drive, which turns into West Motel Drive, where Highway 70 “T”s into the street. The Southern Pacific Railroad created the town of Lordsburg in 1880 and today Southern Pacific tracks run along side Motel Drive making the city a way station by rail and by car. All along I-10 going into and out of the town, you can see ling lengths of train that two or more locomotives are straining to move. The small town, county seat of semi-desert Hidalgo County, has its claim to fame. In the early 1920's Lordsburg was where the first airport in New Mexico was built. The field hosted the likes of Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, Tom Mix and other celebrities. The Chevron station was busy and there were no automated pumps—you had to take your credit card to an attendant in a enclosed kiosk between the two rows of two pumps each. I plunked down my AMEX, set the pump to fill the Trailblazer and took a comfort break while the tank filled.

Back on the road we head for Tucson. It’s 1:00 PM and we have 350 miles to cover. At 70 MPH, we’ll arrive right around 6:00 PM just as the sun is going down; the prospect of a Sedona sunset tonight is doubtful. We make Tucson after 3:00 and get to the Interstate 17 junction with Interstate 10 in Phoenix right around 5:00. We’re in the carpool lane and manage to keep at the speed limit through the lighter-than-normal commute traffic on this Tuesday after Christmas. Once clear of the suburban sprawl creeping north out of Phoenix, the traffic on I-17 begins to move at 80 and 85 MPH as the highway begins to climb from sea level toward the 4500 foot elevation of the area around Sedona. We finally arrive at the Hilton Sedona Resort & Spa at 6:20 PM. The hotel is actually in the Sedona suburb of Oak Creek within a quarter mile of three golf courses; lakes of lush green turf in the high desert—the hotel has notices for all its guest rooms that water is precious and to please conserve.

IM and I order a dinner of burgers and fries from room service and a bottle of Champagne to toast our return to Sedona, which we first visited in the late 1980s with IM’s brother and sister-in-law from Scotland. They had come to attend the wedding of our eldest daughter ME and we decided to tour the 4-corners states of the Southwest. The red rock of Sedona has a magical affect on everyone who visits and this has probably been true since man first stumbled upon this high desert paradise. Sedona is a feminine place. Its population is 53 percent female and 57 percent male, which is 88 percent white non-Hispanic, less than 1 percent Native American. It’s a mystic, new age place, reputed to have fifteen vortex sites within a ten mile radius of the city. These sites are claimed to have masculine and feminine energy and the city’s tour guides make a booming business taking visitors to all fifteen—some guides offering a geographic tour others adding a spiritual element to the tour to help you sense the energy. The four of us passed on the first trip through and IM and I decide to do the same this time around. Somehow, tours of mystical sites have the same connotation as tours of churches—you don’t get a lot of time to pray.