Fairy and I have a friend in Tucson whose home backs up to a shopping center with a restaurant/sports bar. We sometimes stay with her when business takes us to the Old Pueblo, as Arizona's second-largest city is lovingly called.
Well, you're thinking wrong if you think that if the mood behooves us some evening we can saunter over to that eatery behind her house for an Italian sausage sandwich, garlic fries and cold brew.
Her residential neighborhood, you see, is walled off from the business side of life. The two don't seem to co-mingle in modern America. While it's technically possible for us to make the trek from one to the other, it's sure as hell not feasible.
One route, I figure, would take us down winding dark alleys, strewn with garbage cans and lord knows what else lurking in the shadows.
There's another way, out along the traffic-choked six-lane roads (eight if you count the turn-lanes). It's probably safer in the alleys.
So, let's drive. Oh, boy! For starters, you have to go in the wrong direction to get there. The residential streets wind and divert into cul de sacs. Those that don't divert, wind some more, and eventually you find your way to a through-street, approximately three-quarters of a mile from where you want to go, which is only a few dozen yards from where you started.
City planners and politicians are responsible for this idiocy. In many places, such as Tucson, they have shredded the fabric of America.
Neighborhood grocery stores and watering holes and small eating places have no business nowadays being located where people actually live and can comfortably walk to. They MUST be in commercial zones out along the highways and byways. Far, far away. And with proper “signage.” It is decreed.
Poppycock. Want to fight drunk driving, for instance? Bring the bars to the people, I say.
I'm getting to a point here. Pant! Pant! Let me catch my breath.
When Fairy and I lived in a small town in the mountains, we had, among other things, a small antique store and art gallery. We walked to “work” – across the driveway. We loved it.
Now that we're down in “civilization,” we'd like to do that again. Problem is, we'd have to put it in one of those sterile storefronts in a shopping center where people rush in to buy a few groceries or take home some fast food or gas up the car and make a deposit at the drive-through window at the bank.
We'd like to put it where people might just stroll by and drop in. There used to be a place like that about 10 miles from us, but no one is strolling there nowadays. Local politics helped chase away the little grocery store, drugstore, neighborhood bar, cafe, gallery.
It would be nice to place our new gallery in a little row of inviting shops lining one side or two of a community plaza in the midst of where people live. A neighborhood gathering spot.
That would make life in our “active” adult retirement community more tolerable, more profitable, more fun. More, ahem, active.
The local politicians and planners will have none of that.
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