Ted DeGrazia once took a pile of his paintings up a mountain near Tucson. Then he burned them because he thought taxes were unfair. That’s a Western thing — to not much love the government.

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Once a tour guide said big horn sheep have suckers on the bottoms of their feet, which is why they can climb straight up rocks. I believed him. Because it looks like they have suckers on the bottom of their feet –or at least some kind of moon-walker thing—when you watch big horn sheep climb up the side of a mountain. They look cool when they’re up so high.

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Sometimes you can see flames, especially at night. The fire fills the mountains’ canyons and crevices with smoke like giant witches’ cauldrons. Sometimes the smoke goes straight up in the air. Other times it goes up in little puffs on top of one another, like a series of ruffles. But sometimes it’s just one big blue fog. The air smells like a burnt-out fireplace, while all the smoke makes it hard to breathe, especially with a mask on.

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“I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods,” Truman Capote once wrote. Tucson Barrio is a special neighborhood with special houses, and it’s what you remember about the city once you’ve seen it.

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The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has a Southern mansion from 1860 where Scarlett first encounters her Rhett. A Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A tenement building from the 1940s with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweet heart. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s. There are 500 of them,

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Saguaros stand as steadfast tin soldiers placed there in eternity by some gargantuan commander. They stand in their perfect postures in their squadrons of perfect formation, always at attention, never seeming at ease .. And your eyes can follow the great battalions of them as they go marching up the mountainsides.

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What I really like is when a work of art just pops up when you least expect it. If I stare down from a parking lot at work, I see a beautiful Tucson mural that just lights up the city scape.

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E; Tiradito is unique to Tucson. It is a wishing place over 140 years old where people who have loved and lost go to mend their broken hearts. People light candles there, and leave little notes in its walls. El Tiradito is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson would have liked Tohono Chul Park because he loved gardens. He once said he would rather walk around gardens and nurseries than among the Pyramids.

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Fourth Avenue in Tucson is the groovy neighborhood full of bookstores, coffee houses, and shops where you buy art, marijuana, tattoos, vintage clothing, and tarot readings. You see people who got left behind there and who are still living in the 1960’s. And you see people who got left completely behind and who are living in stairwells and on park benches. But you’ll also see writers, artists, students, musicians, revolutionaries, and philosopher-kings living there as well.

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