Arizona

There is no Arizona
No painted desert, no Sedona
If there was a Grand Canyon
She could fill it up with the lies he's told her
But they don't exist, those dreams he sold her
She'll wake up and find
There is no Arizona. -Jamie O'Neal

Actually, there is an Arizona, and parts of it are really beautiful. I've had this song stuck in my head all week. It seems an appropriate song to end this year, which began with such hopes for lasting love. Here's me raising my beer to a fresh start and brighter future.

I used to think that I was a unique and beautiful snowflake, but I'm learning that I'm actually a collage cut and pasted from various family members. It was most apparent on Wednesday night, when I sat around a table drinking coffee with my brother and two cousins. Absent family members haunted our conversation like ghosts (he sounds just like my dad; that one looks just like Uncle Russell) and I can't tell you how many times I've heard "my God, you look/sound exactly like your mother" this week. Other things, too, less noticeable: the way my aunt grips the steering wheel, my uncle's sly humor, the workings of various body parts (even my blood, held hostage by a Mediterranean gene). When they're 1000 miles to the east or the west, it's easy to forget the genetic (and therefore inescapable) link to these people who look and sound and act like me. What better time for a gentle reminder than on Christmas, breaking bread with a table full of recycled children of children, the lights shining in our eerily similar blue-gray eyes?