“It’s a hundred and eight degrees at the top of the hour in the Old Pueblo, and here are the Buckinghams with ‘Kind of a Drag.’”

Heat rises, so I was taught. But in Tucson, where I have spent the last few days, the heat presses down. My shoulders become slack, my spine bends, my feet become heavy. It is no wonder that every corner here seems to boast a podiatrist and a chiropractor. I move slower and I begin to realize that the slight and annoying odor that seems to be everywhere is really the smell of my own mucus membranes drying out.

I left Tucson three years ago and I have to admit that the way things change concerns me. I don’t resent change itself, but I am moved to melancholy sometimes by its direction. Case in point: The façade of the El Con Mall. The El Con mall was built in the 1960’s, a study in that sort of desert mid-century modernism that was half Palm Springs and half Brasilia. It replaced the old El Conquistador hotel, a 1920’s Spanish Style behemoth where my mother spent her high school graduation dinner ogling Peter Lawford from across the hotel dining room. The cycle of life continues as the El Con Mall, like the El Conquistador hotel before it, is surpassed by trendier competitors.

Now, tacked onto the modern front entry of the El Con Mall there are a pair of awkward stucco-over-wire Mission-style towers and a Spanish arch. Perhaps someone thinks giving this mall a mission will draw in customers. It is an apt metaphor for an age in which false traditional virtues hide a decaying modernity, a modernity which itself held out the promise of breaking free from ossified traditions.

I’m not sure I would have noticed this kind of discord if it had crept up on me. But coming back to town, I notice such things. When I go to visit my old neighbors I receive another surprise. I remember the couple across the street from me as a model of happiness: friendly, funny, hospitable, smart, sincere, beautiful people, with a child I actually found bearable. Now they’re separated. All around me relationships are burning away like wildfires in the mountains above Tucson, and nothing seems to flame up faster than dried-out love.

The heat pushes down. The air above the desert writhes trying to escape the sun. The rippling atmosphere blurs the vision. Missions, modernity, marriage; they drift incorporeal like a mirage.