A Murder of Cows

Both of my parents turned 80 this year. It’s hard to get my head around that.

My mother has taken good care of herself, hasn’t aged visibly since her fifties, and has no serious health problems, so it’s hard to think of her as 80. My father is more physically infirmed, but that traces back to severe injuries suffered in a car accident that occurred on my 16th birthday in 1983, when the rear axle of his car simply broke, causing it to go off the road and roll, all while he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He nearly died, and spent years rehabilitating. Most of his lifelong disabilities would have been avoided if he’d been wearing it, so remember that next time you get into a car. In recent years, age has caught up with him. He used to get out and play golf; a few years ago, he stopped, and he’s aged noticeably. He’s had a few scary falls, and some scary brushes with the Reaper, but he keeps on as best he can. Despite impairment of his fine motor skills, he does what he can with a computer, communicating with his extended family and some old friends. Mom, on the other hand, won’t use a computer at all.

Some years ago, my parents moved from the outskirts of the Bay Area to Henderson, Nevada. Like many Californians, they discovered they could own a nice new house in the Las Vegas area for the cost of a hovel in California, with the added bonus that Nevada has no state income tax. They share their house with my mom’s younger sister, which is good for Mom, since Dad hasn’t been much of a conversationalist since the accident.

Mom works part-time at an outlet shoe store near the Las Vegas Strip. She doesn’t need the money, but it gets her out of the house, and the store attracts shoppers from all over the world, so she gets to interact with a wide variety of people. She fibbed about her age to get the job—something she could do convincingly because she looks vastly younger than she is—but when word got out she was turning 80, all was forgotten or forgiven, and the company did a writeup on her in their newsletter, announcing proudly that she’s the company’s oldest employee, patting themselves on the back for employing the elderly.

I don’t visit my parents nearly enough to meet minimum filial obligations. As they’ve grown older, I’ve felt guilty about that, and lately I’ve tried to be better about that. My favorite domestic airline flies nonstop between San Francisco and Las Vegas, so I have no excuse for being a crappy son. I’ve visited my parents twice in 2009. Yep, I suck as a child, especially an only child, but I’m trying to be better.

Airports look pretty much alike, but when you step off the jetway in Vegas, you’re immediately reminded where you are:

Most of the ads in the airport are for attractions in Las Vegas, but this one caught my attention for both for its inspired placement (where better to find Canadian gamblers than the Vegas airport?) and its egregious use of egregious quotation marks:

My parents live in Henderson, a city just south of Las Vegas which is (or was, as of a year or two ago) the fastest-growing city in the US. Until the housing bust, new construction was going on everywhere. On my last visit to Henderson, I passed a number of schools congratulating their first-ever graduating classes. My cousin, a teacher in Southern California, moved to Henderson, both to be closer to her mother, and because teachers could easily choose where to teach; schools were competing for teachers, not vice versa. An ad in the airport reminds everyone of Henderson’s growth-mindedness:

Henderson itself is a city of stucco houses, most of them built in the recent past. The real estate bust is in full force; there are several “For Sale” signs on every block:

My parents’ house has declined in value by about 40% since they bought it. On one hand, this is a bad thing; on the other, they have no plans to leave Henderson, so if they wanted to move, other houses have come down in price by similar amounts, so it doesn’t change the size or quality of house they can afford.

Lawns are forbidden by law; water conservation laws mandate “desert landscaping,” but don’t prohibit, uh, swimming pools. There are parks and schools with grass fields, but even bits of grass in street medians are being pulled out and replaced with desert rock and plants. My parents’ backyard is typical of those in Henderson:

On the ridge behind my parents’ house is a gated community of McMansions, seven-figure houses that are now six-figure houses.

Having a nice house with lots of space appeals to me, on some level, but I need a sense of place. I need a neighborhood where you can walk down to the corner and get lunch or coffee, or pick up your dry cleaning, or buy a greeting card for the parents you don’t visit often enough. Much of America is like Henderson, but colder and wetter, but I can’t live in a place without character, distinctiveness, and life. There are smaller towns where I could imagine living, but stucco suburbs punctuated by malls and strip malls would drive me to an early grave.

Henderson meets all my parents’ desires and needs, and I don’t begrudge them that at all. Despite the best efforts of the my college’s Department of City and Regional Planning, I’m don’t think that all other people can be fulfilled only to the degree they adopt my aesthetic preferences. But I need a place, and Henderson isn’t one.

Where I do want to live is a tougher question, something my partner and I are thinking about very seriously these days; this will be the subject of a future entry, maybe even quite a few entries.