The Anniversary

We have just completed our first full year in Arizona. WOO HOO! We decided a long time ago that when the time came for us to retire, we would come here. My daughter made it easy for us.

When the kids were little, my wife's mother lived in the Valley of the Sun for health reasons. We came here one summer and fell in love with the place. Where else could you go year round without a coat? Where else, besides some tropical paradise, could you be in the sun about 320 days a year? No more milk drinking! We now got vitamin D straight from the source without going through the cow's mediary. Our reliance on farms would diminish and we would no longer breathe what farmer's called "the smell of money." It took us 30 years to return.

But return we did. After deciding that we had had enough of the rat race of education, we sold everything we could, gave some away, loaded up an ABF truck with the rest and headed west, taking Horace Greeley's advice. So, you ask, how did my daughter make it easy?

I always wanted to come out here. Wanted to do it since I started to go to broadcasting school in Artesia, New Mexico back in the 1973. Could never seem to pull the trigger on leaving Illinois. After all, my brother, my mother were there, and my roots were there. I had lived in Central Illinois all my life except for a stint in Iowa, which might as well be Illinois. My daughter, Debi, took an intern position with the Mesa Police Department in her senior year of college. When she came out here to live with her Aunt Debbie (Our family tends to name kids after other family members...There are over six Jameses in our gene pool, and three Dons), she told me as she was taking me to the airport, "If you ever want to see me again, you will move here. I am not going back to Illinois." And, to my knowledge, she has only been back twice in five years. So the decision was easy. A daddy cannot leave his daughter out in the cold, cruel world alone.

My son, James, with whom I am extremely close, never offered to have me move to California! Never threatened me with withholding his presence! But Debi meant it. So, I went home, told Dorothy, and we began the search for a house. Which, by the way, the Debi's picked out.

The move, so far, has been great. My blood pressure is down, my weight is up, and every day I seem to pooh sunshine. Arizona is the next best place to Paradise. I threw out my winter coat, long pants, and tie shoes. From now on its just flip-flops,shorts and Suntan lotion. How can a place that has 320 days of sunshine, about a thousand golf courses, and a Jack in the Box on every corner be bad?

More tomorrow.

Don Shields